Level up your tech career

You need to focus on a different set of skills besides just coding to level up in your tech career. Many engineers never realize this and spend years spinning their wheels trying to get promoted.

👋 Intro to Caleb

Before we get into it I wanted to introduce my fellow writer

Caleb Mellas

, who was one of 8 engineers at a hyper-growth startup that was acquired for $187,000,000 🤯. He is a former Tech Lead, and now freshly minted Engineering Manager at Olo, Inc.

Similarly to me, Caleb shares daily insights on leveling up in your software engineering career on LinkedIn and is the author of the Level up software engineering 🚀 newsletter that deep dives into software engineering, growing in your career, and developing your leadership/soft-skills topics.

Today we are putting together our combined 20 years of experience in tech and sharing with you the strategies that helped us to grow fast in this industry.

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1. Focus on people

Seniority in software engineering is about impact.

Growing as a Senior+ software engineer is not about coding more… It's about having more impact.

The more senior of an engineer you become, the more complex problems you will have to solve. 

And these problems aren’t always just more technically complex – they even begin to affect more people, team members, clients, other teams, stakeholders, etc.

One of the best ways to tackle these problems, and expand your impact is to develop your people skills.

Here are 5 people skills you need to develop as a tech person:

Collaboration

Being a solo dev hero-coder is only going to take you so far.

The real magic happens when you realize you can achieve more by collaborating with others. You truly are better together. So lean into collaboration with your team, customer support, other departments… 

You’ll be amazed at how much you can accomplish.

Vulnerability

Caleb here 👋

Oof, this one is hard. Especially as a Senior engineer or Tech Lead.

We can often think we’ll lose the respect of others if we admit we don’t have it all figured out, or made a mistake that turned out poorly.

In reality, if I think back to when leaders in my life have been vulnerable… That's actually when I respected them the most. These are the times they owned up to their mistake and worked hard to make it right.

Don’t hide your mistakes. Admit them. Ask for help.

You’ll learn faster, solve hard problems faster and take others on the journey with you.

This is a win/win for everyone 😉

Growing others

You are going to reach a point in your tech skills, where becoming a better coder only has minimal impact.

Sure, maybe you are 5% better at coding, but it’s not really bringing much impact to your team, and the business – which is what really matters at more senior levels.

What really moves the needle is becoming a force-multiplier.

One massive way to do that is by starting to coach and support others in their growth.

By focusing on sharing with and teaching others what you already know, you will cement your existing knowledge, gain self-confidence, and grow others and yourself in the process.

Hint: this is far more valuable than learning the next programming language or hot framework

Remember: you don’t really know something until you can explain it to someone else 😉

Listening

Ane here 👋

Listening seems simple… 

We do it all the time in those endless meetings, right?! Sort of, yes.

There’s actually a different kind of listening though that really helps you level up.

It’s called active (real) listening.

Active listening is a skill that requires patience and effort to develop but also has endless benefits. It allows you to build deeper relationships, connect with others faster, and speed up your learning process.

Here are some ideas on how to improve your listening: 

➡️ Turn off distractions

When you are in a conversation, bring your whole attention to it. Mute your notifications, minimize distractions, and if something urgent comes up, acknowledge it, and deal with it quickly so you can fully reengage. 

➡️ Get comfortable with silence

This is a hard one, but it’s something you can practice. Practicing silence gives the other person permission to share their thoughts without you jumping in to correct or explain. After they speak, thank them for sharing, and take a pause.

➡️ Reflect back to others

Reflecting back goes with silence. After someone shares, thank them for sharing, explain back what you heard them say and ask some clarifying questions. This helps minimize miscommunications and make others feel heard and valued.

Working with feedback

Feedback is the best tool we have for growth these days. 

Is it hard to receive? Yes. 

Is it an amazing gift at the same time? Also yes.

Work hard to develop a healthy culture of feedback, it will help you level up massively over the years. This includes receiving feedback, giving feedback, acting on feedback, and reinforcing feedback.

You can find strategies to develop your feedback skills here: 

• How to ask for useful feedback

• Give the gift of life-changing feedback

➡ You can find more details on these topics in Caleb’s article: https://levelupsoftwareengineering.substack.com/p/whats-next-after-java-and-react 

2. Make your work visible 🔎

You don’t need more coding skills to level up your tech career! What you need is to make your current skills more visible!

These days it’s not enough to do the work. 

You need to do work that makes a real impact, and surface that impact / wins to others!

And talking about your wins can be uncomfortable for many of us because it may feel like bragging.

But the reality is, if you do really good work, people will be stoked to hear about it!

It’s impossible for engineering / business leaders to keep track of everything you are doing, so do yourself a favor and share your impact and wins with others!

Make it visible.

Showing the work and the impact of that work is key to getting to the next level.

Once you start looking for opportunities to showcase your work, you will realize that there are lots of opportunities you can take advantage of. Conversations with your team members, showcases, performance reviews, demos, slack, standups, 1-1 with your manager, the internet, etc. 

Here are some tips to be really intentional about it:

• Keep a list of daily accomplishments. Start your brag doc!

• Quantify your impact in terms others can understand. 

  • Who did you help? 

  • What was the impact of that work? Use the language of product or business folks.

• Talk about progress not just results. Every little step is a win.

• Share what you do with others. Let them celebrate with you!

3. Ask for forgiveness not for permission 

Ane here 👋

Having a bias for action, and asking for forgiveness, rather than permission seems risky. But with big risks come big rewards – and I was willing to take those risks in my career.

Here are a few examples:

➡ Create a clear process when there is none

❌ Wait for others to create a process and give me direction 

✅ Create a process to solve my problem and take action on it. Be ready to say sorry if I am overstepping.

➡ Test limits instead of playing it safe

❌ "Don’t touch this piece of code - we don’t know what it does but someone is using it" 

✅ Add logs to the code -> monitor -> delete the piece of code -> see who complains -> say sorry -> now we know what this is used for and who to talk to about it.

➡ Make a decision when people can’t decide on a direction

❌"Let’s talk some more" 

✅ "Let’s do this: <strategy>" - while being ready to be challenged on it.

! Funny enough, in practice this got us much closer to a decision even if it was the opposite decision than the one I proposed.

Reading all these examples, you might think people would be pissed at me. The reality was quite different. People were actually relieved that someone else was stepping up, and taking care/responsibility for these things. This strategy proved my resilience, courage and proactiveness. 

In my own career, this strategy helped me develop as a leader, grow my visibility and recognition, and find new growth opportunities.

4. STOP just giving status updates to your manager! 🛑

Despite common belief, your manager is not there just so you give them your status. 

They are there to support you. (Hint: it’s part of their job description 😉). 

In fact, using your 1:1 weekly meetings to just talk about project status updates will really hurt your long term growth.

I know it sometimes feels productive, and it’s easier than talking about promotion stuff, or asking for feedback – but really, talking only about projects every week is not helping you.

Here are some ways to utilize use your manager, and help them help you:

• Tell them your aspirations/goals instead of waiting for them to ask.

• Ask for opportunities in areas you want to grow your skills in.

• Ask for advice on how to develop your people skills.

• Get your questions answered: ask for information.

• Ask for specific feedback on something you said.

• Ask for support in a difficult situation.

• Ask for their opinions. 

These ideas will hopefully get you to a place where, instead of dreading the conversations with your managers, you can look forward to them!

Invest in the relationship with your manager, it will pay off massively. 🚀 

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🎥 Level up you tech career conversation

If you want to dive deeper, check out our full discussion on LinkedIn: Watch the full conversation here.

Caleb Mellas

and

Anemari Fiser