Rockstar Software Engineer Story: SW2 to Principal in 4 Years - How To Get Promoted FAST

80-20 rule

Rahul, more of these please.
I have this video on repeat, however, my mind demands more confirmations!

the engineer he is referring to is Vijay Iyengar.

Have a question :
How to merge 2 or more videos on android studios .

I think picking the right project is one criteria, but delivering quickly is the main impact

this guy's head is enormous

finished watching

💯✨

The guy being interviewed is a bystander and not the rockstar.Stop with the clickbait.

Primary reason for this career: luck and absence of standards on this employee's team. Promotion should be a result of sustained performance at a certain level. You cannot own and successfully multiple major projects over a short period of time. Good for him, but stay away from his orgs. They are toxic.

SDE1 to CTO video next please?

This is so cool. I'd thought of being more senior as somebody solving large scale technically complex problems, where hacks and shortcuts don't help justify a promotion. That's the case in Google at least. This is a breath of fresh air.

Now go back to Twitter. Max is sde 3 :)

1. Customer oriented engineer is better than the one who is code obsessed.
2. Every engineering organization should have some level of exposure to customer facing. It is convenient to avoid it by considering customer as a distraction.
3. Impactful coding should/can be measurable in terms of %s or $s.

key:
- being in good company,
- being in a good team or be able to decide what to work on,
- having a good leadership valuing you and your impact,
- going for low hangin fruits and having product mindset,

It seems like technical skills are the LEAST important things to get promotion. Interesting, not that it is shocking, quite much what I have seen.

Wow! This is a simple case of incompetence.

If you build a system, among your primary set of non-functional capabilities should be your ability to arrive at “cost-revenue” maps. That should be much easier with the current infrastructure and architecture patterns.

It would have been a decent story if at least you were running an in-house data centre.

My hypothesis is that some of the Startup core teams might not have a greater exposure to managing software+business at scale. I base that on the theory that most startups focus on solving a problem for the customer or address an opportunity. They don’t look at the bigger picture.

When I am called for advising angel investments, I see that the founders don’t have a good correlation between their product and their cash flow statements.

I am happy that the man got some money for screwing the bulb. He deserves that anyway.

I came here thinking it was about the game dev company Rockstar :facepalm:

I used to find the word "impact" extremely toxic, and almost saw it as an abstract buzzword that's been thrown around the business space.

This was a phenomenal lesson, and one i stress a lot to the people in my newsletter. As a coder, you're not paid to code. You're paid to have an impact. Identify what areas you can use to have that impact, and use cod only if it is useful

Nice insights. However, it seems that impact is mainly about how much extra efficiency/revenue does your actions bring about? And typically those things are worked on by PMs/VPs, etc. So is it financially more rewarding to work as a PM then (as compensation depends on your level)?

Also, it will be interesting to know your thoughts on how to bubble up any impactful product ideas that an engineer might have? Telling them to the PM might result in the PM getting the credit for that at the end.

Finally, how to switch teams midway once you identify an impactful project?

This is what I've found isn't captured in the run-of-the-mill technical interviews. I was promoted 3 times in 3 years for the same reason, IMPACT and VALUE. From a technical skill standpoint, I'm fine, I'm not going to blow you away in a coding interview but I know my way around the tools and can perform very well on the job. My value has been finding simple ways to solve problems, making changes in code or processes to significantly reduce costs (100s of dev hours/year on a team), up-skilling team members, identify and solve customer problems utilizing software, increase revenue by coming up with features users may not have known they wanted, and have the foresight to know how my decisions (either in code or at a higher level) will have impact in the future.

Unfortunately, this company doesn't compensate in-line with the promotions and impact I feel I deliver, have been told I'm delivering, and I've been looking for a change. I've had trouble landing offers because the typical interview process skews heavily toward coding and doesn't encapsulate where I feel the greater part of my skills lie. Managers generally are quite excited to move me forward in the process after speaking with them, then I get to the pass/fail coding interview and that's where there's a hang-up.

I've been applying for mostly Senior level and team lead positions since my years of experience fall within the typical experience range of those positions. I've been leading projects since my second year professionally writing software. I don't just crank out code. Should I be targeting higher level positions?

Great content !

Another great video, thanks Rahul!

Remember that titles are inflated in start-ups :)

Are these titles really as meaningful outside FAANG companies (where there is significantly more structure and rigor in evaluation)?

So, your skills or expertise in architecture doesn't matter. You just need to be a problem solver. I guess the person being talked about is having a wrong title. VP would have been a better role.

aww he deleted my comments :'(

Stop saying “impact”. Just be transparent and say “money”. Otherwise, nice video 👍

Excellent video; very useful!

Rahul you’re on the right track with these interviews! to hear success stories not on how to start from zero to get a job but about how the improvement stories sound like from a Junior to senior engineer. Also how that engineering intuition is trained and enhanced 😊. Thank you for your hard work

Rahul sir please make video on how to learn to code self taught and how to stay motivated while learning it and best way to learn programming

Did he get promotion only from impact? Is he qualified of skills those promotion need? Is he able to guide engineer with lower level to tackle technical challenges?

Say one line in Hindi

Waiting for next tutorial

Reminds me of the saying “the best code is no code at all”. Great story!

Good

i want to know who this 10x engineer now lol. in all honestly, amazing interview. super interesting anecdote on how to have a high impact.

Love the story around this rockstar engineer finding a non-engineering solution to the problem. It's a prime example of how senior engineers are often held responsible for raw impact vs. coding proficiency. Back on my old team at Instagram, this kind of behavior also would have been rewarded tremendously.

Thanks for sharing this. I guess it also depends on the team scope and manager