Career growth

Today, I would like to discuss career development briefly. For the last half a year, I’ve been working at Seek, the largest job aggregator in the ANZ region. Getting deeper into the domain and working closely with people concerned about the topic of personal growth in the professional context helped me arrive at some interesting conclusions.

Throughout my life, I’ve tried to be authentic. I believe the real leader needs to understand the groundwork and join the team in the field if necessary. This led me to the conclusion that I need to improve my tech skills before I start telling people what to do. I was thinking of exploring my career more horizontally rather than vertically, getting full-stack knowledge, and taking care of the whole app, enabling the business to add value to the world. Knowing my tech was always the number one priority. It still makes sense to me after many years of practice, but it’s challenging to determine the right moment to move up instead of just moving to the side. I often thought about climbing the ladder, but from my perspective, it’s all about meaningless titles used to evaluate people and determine how much to pay for their work. By the way, I seamlessly climbed the ladder to become a Senior developer, which helps me earn good money.

Apart from earning more, I never found value in the vertical growth of my career. I have always wanted to know more, gain hands-on experience, and drive complex changes safely, understanding every step of the process. But recently, while chatting with my colleagues, I concluded that there is much more to it than just tech. We can’t be experts in everything. At some point, we need to choose the area of expertise or acquire knowledge about the most essential topics from an abstract level and treat the underlying platform as an implementation detail. The second option looks very promising to me, and without giving it much thought, this is the path I’ve been following for a while. In my daily job, I’m an Android developer. Android is huge. You can dedicate your entire career to this platform and be a very valuable expert in this particular technology. It is very tempting, seeing the demand for mobile devs at the moment, but I’m choosing a slightly different approach. I decided to add value to the Android application, always looking at the problem from a broader perspective. For example, when considering architecture, isolating layers into maintainable abstractions, prioritising composition over inheritance, ensuring reusability, and achieving low coupling with high cohesion are all universal principles. You just put it into the context of Kotlin, Swift, Java, C#, Closure, Haskell or even JavaScript, and you will get similar results, just the implementation details are different. Choosing the right tool for the job, not because we know it, but because it suits it best, gives us a superpower. I prefer to identify the problem to solve and choose the technology, rather than selecting technology and then looking for a problem to solve. In my second dev life as a startup “CTO”, I play with NodeJS, Flutter and React. I feel relatively confident swapping the tech, but I’m in the domain context. This is pretty much the end goal of my growth as a Software Engineer.

Apart from technical knowledge, an essential part of career development is domain influence. And influence is the keyword here. In my daily job, I’m a member of a large company with numerous branches and isolated parts. It makes perfect sense to get involved in work that is out of my expertise area and build trust and connection with people who are responsible for other things. This way, I could increase my influence and the value I add to the business, while also enhancing my value. This is the way of vertical growth that speaks to me. Being involved in bigger initiatives, getting hands-on with different parts of the business that may be implemented in different tech stacks, and having an influence on the directions we go are the ways I want to grow. This, I expect, comes with some titles and money, which serves as a positive side-effect of the valuable actions.

So the two things that I plan to base my career on are abstracting out the concepts that I know to be able to apply them more broadly and increasing the influence both in tech and the domain. These, I firmly believe, are the keys to success in any industry.