The question of whether or not any given job change is going to turn out well is one without any easy answers. With so many different factors involved, both at individual and organizational levels, it can be difficult to recognize patterns even for yourself.
Read MoreOne of the hard parts about changing jobs is all the unknowns. Even the most thorough interview process can’t uncover every aspect of what your new day-to-day work environment will be like. If you’re a couple months into a new role, you might find yourself wondering if you made the right decision. How can you tell whether or not you made a mistake?
Read MoreWhen it feels like the only way to keep making progress at work is to change jobs every couple years, of course it’s going to be hard to think long-term. With so many different things that the IC track after “senior” can look like, you’ll want to ask yourself some deliberate questions about where you want your career to go.
Read MoreWhen you enter your mid-career, the nature of the work you do begins to change. The scope of your work will increase. This might take the form of an organizational focus, looking at how engineering work gets done, or a deeply technical focus, but either way, the more senior you become the more you’ll be expected to understand the broader impacts of your work throughout the organization.
Read MoreInterpersonal dynamics are different in your mid-career. There are still lots of ways in which you are still going to be learning and growing as an engineer. But you are also in a leadership role — people will often look to you for examples of how to behave — so it’s critical to make sure the impact you’re having is a positive one.
Read MoreIf you find yourself struggling to work effectively with your manager in your mid-career, it doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong. As you enter mid-career, you will likely also find that your managerial relationships end up changing, both in terms of what you can expect from those relationships and in terms of what you end up needing from them.
Read MoreOne of the biggest things I wish I had known a few years back is that feeling like my progress had slowed down didn’t mean that I was a failure or an impostor. Remember that different skills and different stages of your career have different rates of change.
Read MoreCareer progress these days is a lot less linear than it used to be, and engineers will start to face different challenges in the middle stages of their career. I started out with an expectation that I would build a career at an organization and level up until I became an engineering fellow or distinguished architect or whatever fancy job title was at the top of the ladder there. But that’s not how things worked out - so now what?
Read MoreProgress isn't always linear. It doesn't always come in the form of big concrete achievements. There's a big difference between feeling like I did some things that were failures versus feeling that I myself am a failure.
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