Engineering leaders — Continue to reinvent yourself

Software engineering career ladder is very interesting, but in my opinion learning opportunities are probably more biased towards individual contributors. Well, I know I just opened a can of worms. But, this isn’t about that debate. It’s about how engineering leaders need to be conscious about investing in them and re-inventing themselves

Let’s peel the onion. We, as engineering leaders, really care about our teams. We know that if we don’t invest in building and nurturing a rockstar team, we will be behind in this perennially dynamic tech environment. We spend time and resources to find ways to help our top engineering talent, by providing them the right training & opportunities so they can unleash themselves and build the future of our engineering organization. While we do that, we also get captivated by project delivery, roadmap/OKRs, managing stakeholders, metrics etc., especially in large companies. To top this, we complain about work-life balance.

Wait a minute, why is this only about our org, company and our teams? Why isn’t there anything about ourselves? What are we doing to help ourselves in areas like learning, understanding what’s going on in the tech industry, what are our competitors doing, what makes us successful in the company/Industry? The result of all this is, we as engineering leaders, who were specialists at one point in time when we were Individual contributors, became generalists now. No doubt, most companies invest heavily in building leadership skills by identifying leader pipelines and investing in training and providing the opportunities to groom leadership talent. But, remember we are “Engineering Leaders”. It isn’t only about honing our leadership skills, We also need to continue to nurture our engineering/tech skills.

I spent time introspecting about this about a year and half back. As I reflected on myself, I started sensing a flattening learning curve from a tech stand point, and thought about how I was not giving enough time for myself to develop in the areas I couldn’t make a lot of progress in the recent past. The pandemic situation presented a wonderful opportunity for me. Living in the bustling tech City of India, Bangalore, I could carve out time I spent commuting over the weekdays, and time I spent in malls & restaurants over the weekends in focusing on resurrecting my learning curve. I made a learning plan focused around discipline. Learning habits are like working out. Once you are in a routine, skipping it for a day or two will make you feel you committed a cardinal sin. That kept me going for about a year now. And, I doubt if this is stopping anytime soon

Thankfully, the company I now work for provides outstanding resources and an environment to learn, but remember the common theme for development is, “Your learning and growth is your responsibility”. This especially applies to engineering leaders