Management

Pre(r)amble I have interesting and very talented members in my team that I have the pleasure to mentor, coach and work with. Some of them are at a career point where they should be reaching to the next level, and when they come for advice about it, one of the first things I say is - Get some facetime with your Skip Level. This is important in many promotions, especially at Staff and Principal level. At that level, the person is in direct or indirect working path with the skip level. Having the context and confidence of the people’s skill makes it easy for the Skip Level to agree and nominate for promotion. ...

Traits vs Skills As an engineer, most of the things you are going to work with will be skills. You can learn a language, with effort understand distributed systems, keep taking Andy Pavlo courses and reading DB books to get good with databases. As long as you have a decent social skill, you can learn (very happily) all the other skills needed to be a great engineer. Moving to staff+ role? Having extreme ownership can get you a lot further along with you honing the technical skills. ...