On mid-career growth

What is the mid-career? For the purposes of this series of blog posts, I’m going to use “mid-career” to mean starting approximately ten years in. Up to this point, people are still getting figuring a lot of things out — this doesn’t mean that you’re junior, but that a lot of your challenges will involve learning the trade, how to work with a team, and the ins and outs of the industry. In later years, I would imagine that if you’ve stayed in roughly the same field, you’ll have enough experience and seniority to stop running into these particular pitfalls. Of course, there are no exact numbers. Careers aren’t a fixed length and “mid-career” doesn’t mean you’re halfway to retirement. As such, these posts will focus on how the challenges you’ll be facing now differ from those of your early career.

For most people, early career progress is about becoming a senior engineer. This doesn’t mean getting any job title with “senior” in it as fast as possible, but rather is about becoming a mature engineer, which takes time and experience. As a senior engineer, you should have strong communication skills, be able to seek out and accept feedback, know how to understand and explain tradeoffs and constraints, and be an empathetic and supportive colleague. You should be able to manage your own work and support your organization and the people around you without a ton of external guidance. This doesn’t mean you know everything, but you should know how to figure out where your shortcomings are and how to address them. These are important skills for everyone to acquire, regardless of your future career goals.

After the senior level is where things start to diverge. While there is a lack of consistency as to what “senior” means at various companies, there is often even less agreement at higher levels. Larger organizations (think Google and Facebook, but also HP and IBM and the like) may have pretty well defined career levels, whereas smaller tech companies often struggle to create consistent leveling frameworks (if they even try to create them at all). This leaves the question of “where do I go after senior” pretty wide open.

You may get lucky and find yourself in an organization with clearly defined levels, on a team with enough opportunities for you to start working towards those levels, and with a manager who has guided people through that promotion process before. But what if that isn’t the case for you? What if you’re at a place that doesn’t know what to do with people beyond the “senior” title, or where promotion processes are vague or inconsistent? If you don’t feel like you have a way to keep making forward progress, or if progress seems to be happening for people around you but you feel stuck, that can be incredibly frustrating.

One 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. Learning more complex skills (such as systems-level architecture) or diving deep into a particular area of knowledge (maybe performance tuning or system internals for part of your stack) is a slower process than building up a baseline of generalist knowledge. Leveling up leadership skills can be a slow and difficult process as well, especially if you’re given fewer opportunities to demonstrate those skills than your peers. Progress isn’t linear. Sometimes it will slow down, but that doesn’t mean that you’re doing something wrong.

Later in this series, I’ll take a look at various questions you can ask yourself if you’re feeling unsure about the overall direction of your career, but if you feel like your challenges are more about velocity than about direction, some things you can try include:

Look for peers within your organization that might be able to help you. Find people who are doing the types of work that you’d like to be doing, and look for ways you can collaborate with them. Do they have some projects they haven’t had time to tackle yet that you could work on? Would they be up for pairing with you on something? Looking for opportunities to work with people who are still senior to you is a great way to make sure you keep learning and growing.
Building strong peer relationships can also be a big benefit if you’re from an underrepresented group. People who are willing to act as sponsors — to help you get opportunities for bigger projects, who will publicly recognize your contributions and advocate for your advancement - are invaluable. This is especially true if your organization doesn’t always recognize or value certain types of work. If you’re doing a lot of glue work, having peers who can help other people understand the value of that work will help make sure you get credit for what you’re bringing to the organization. Connections with peers in different teams or companies can also help you to move elsewhere if you find yourself at a dead end in your current work situation.
If you haven’t yet, have a clear conversation with your manager about where you’d like your career to go. With so many choices and considerations, being more intentional about what forward career progress means to you is going to fall on your shoulders — your manager isn’t necessarily going to know what you want to do next. Once you’ve figured out what sort of role or projects you’d like to take on, a good manager will work with you to help make sure you get opportunities to do those things, but you will likely have to do the heavy lifting of figuring out what you need from them.
Give yourself a break. If you feel blocked and working with your manager or chatting with peers hasn’t helped, it can be useful to instead take a step back for a little while. A bit of rest and distance can often provide some clarity on new approaches you could try or if it’s time to try something (or some place) new instead. You know how you so often figure out the answer to a tricky bug when you’ve stepped away for a shower or a walk? This is like that, but at a larger scale.

Feeling like you aren’t progressing in your career as fast as you used to can be frustrating. It can help to remember that this is normal, and not a sign that you’re doing something wrong. It can also be very helpful to look for ways that you can take ownership over your career progress, whether that be building supportive peer relationships, finding new ways to work with your manager, or taking a good look at where you want to focus next. In the next post, I’ll look at ways your managerial relationships change in the mid-career in more detail — stay tuned!