How to build a career you enjoy as an engineer. What I wish someone told me when I started

“We all have a finite amount of time to live, and within that mortal countdown, we devote some fraction towards our work. Even for the most career-focused, your life will be filled with many things beyond work.” - Will Larson

As Will Larson put it, we all have finite time, and yet as we become more experienced the expectation on our time becomes that we have higher “impact.”

We get fancier titles, have more meetings, and sometimes get further separated from the actual work. If you don’t pay attention to what is going on around you, you may find yourself in a role you don’t like or perhaps at a level below what you’d hope.

It can be easy to sleepwalk in your career or just expect your manager to help you pick the projects that will take you from mid-level to senior or staff.

That’s not how it usually works.

There is a need for you to take control and avoid doing work that is just provided because it's easy to find and complete. You have to eventually start looking for projects that increase in scope, complexity and likely risk.

As one of my managers used to say:

If you want to get a promotion, you don’t need to complete 1,000 tasks; you need to figure out how to eliminate the need for the 1,000 tasks.