How I built career capital?
The word career capital I borrowed from the author Cal Newport and his book (So Good They Can't Ignore You) I read and shared with friends and family a long time ago. I read all his book starting with Deep Work - has forever changed my perception on how to build a career that I will come to love and enjoy for a long time. I am eternally grateful to him for publishing all the books he did.
Disclaimer - The following notes are my reflections on my past two decades of my career. My definition of success can differ from yours. I am by no means a rock star app developer or a business builder. But I have come to enjoy building software systems over time following few simple rules. My professional life, work ethic, operating principles are mostly influenced by Cal Newport, Ryan Holiday, Seth Godin, Stoic Philosophers and autobiographies of famous inventors, historian and countless of other more accomplished thinkers. Building a system that works for me and my family is what is outlined here.
This page lists my journey through being an individual contributor to an engineering manager to an engineering leader. Following describes all along the way what content helped me shape my thinking and my career that I have come to enjoy a lot.
Summary of Steps to achieve career capital
Work for a startup
It forced me to wear too many hats. Ranging from being a LinkedIn Recruiter, to a team philosopher and sponge listener, to chief architect of the software system to build to hacker of POC to prove feasibility. Helped me stay keep my skill set sharp.
Startup are more receptive to a new idea, technology adoption to solve business problems smarter. You are in R & D environment, just don't treat like you have endless time.
I realized in retrospect to my first startup HealthFusion - I learnt all my foundational operating principles to be an effective engineer here. I learnt very quickly - TDD is my friend - When you are the sole engineer who is the architect, implementer, DBA, DevOps Engineer and QA and on top reporting to the founder of the company. You ensure your code quality is spot on since literally your employment depended on it! 😉
TDD and Automation was key to scale team of one(myself) to never have to visit things I have implemented once and the requirements are not changing.
Focus on quality over quantity.
The founding principle for my career success so far - Adopting Test Driven Development and Clean Code practices.
Hiring smart people for my team.
I was fortunate to have worked with people who were way smarter than me and in return I elevated my own learning and growth as we worked together to build the start up from ground up!
Adopt Lean Principles - Build - Measure - Learn cycle on every aspect of your career.
Agile Methodologies, KanBan is my favorite.
CI/CD and DevOps Pipeline for continuous feedback for system stability.
Be intentional in integrating family into your career and give adequate thought to integrating work with family. Treat your life as a project that needs planning. Make your spouse and children your partner in your career journey. As a working women trying to balance raising kids, studying part time, cooking, cleaning etc. It is important to brain tattoo the biggest constraint we have - 24 hours a day.
Of the 24 hour, spend 7 to 8 hours sleeping, this leaves 16 hours for everything else, if 8 hours goes into work, you have 8 hours left to fit in everything else.
Time blocking and planning weekly and sharing calendar with my husband of our shared responsibilities.
Wake up earlier than your family. It was an important factor for me, since this helped me carve time for continuous learning and it is a daily practice still.