Ducks in a Row: An (Almost) Foolproof Formula for Success
by Miki Saxon
Is there an eternal answer to the eternal question of ‘what should be learned/done to make oneself promotable’?
Yes,
The answer was recently expounded upon by Xin Li, a Staff Software Engineer At Google, in response to a question posed on Quora.
I work at Google Mountain View. Here, if your base salary is around 200K, you are most likely a Staff Software Engineer. The defining characteristics at that level are:
- Go beyond being a technical expert to also being a domain expert. You need to know what should be done, rather than just how things can be done.
- Be an owner. The buck stops with you. If something goes wrong with your part of the product, it’s ultimately your responsibility, even if the mistake wasn’t made by you.
- Work for your people, rather than have your people work for you. That is be the one to volunteer to take on the tasks others don’t want to do. Your job is to make your people look good. Give them the opportunity to grow professionally, and support them where they need it, and clear obstacles for them, so they can be at their best.
- Be a leader and a consensus driver. Real world problems don’t have cookie cutter solutions, and not everyone will agree on what the right solution is. You need to have a vision, work across teams, and bring people together, resolve differences.
- And of course you still need technical chops. You need to be good at technical system design. Be able to create an architecture that is as complicated as it needs to be, but no more, and no less. It needs to serve the requirements of today, while robust enough to be extensible a few years down the road.
If you want to get to this salary level as a software engineer, I think the requirements are fairly similar everywhere. As you can see, these requirements have less to do with any particular language you may or may not choose. Focus on delivering value for your employer, and the rest will follow.
Xin Li’s response specifically addressed a software career path, but is universally applicable.
“Focus on delivering value for your employer, and the rest will follow.”
That’s as close to a guaranteed formula to drive success in any career that I’ve ever seen.
Best of all, it’s never too late to start.
Flickr image credit: Chad Sparkes
