The Second Act: Thriving as an Experienced Technologist

When people embark on a tech career, there’s a plethora of available advice – some good and some terrible. Most advice centers around getting training and certification, developing hands-on experience, and finding a role in which you can grow. This guidance is helpful for the first decade or more of one’s career. As I once told an aspiring young developer, “No experience in tech is bad experience” in the early years.

At a certain point, though, even the most eager and talented technologist reaches a boundary by merely learning more. Even though there’s always more to learn and explore, ever-deepening technical capability without scaling your knowledge through others will meet a law of diminishing returns. Your ability to grow and learn as an individual no longer has the same outsized impact on your career it once had. Eventually, you no longer get more opportunities because you know more than the next person.

And so, what are the options? What change is necessary to grow in effectiveness and opportunity? Some choose management as their path to growth – they formally step into a leadership role in their organization. This will require a step back from daily deep technical work and will demand entirely new skills. Formal management roles, often unpalatable for deeply technical people, are not the only option. The other path will require the technical individual contributor to transform into a technical leader.

Many people wrongly believe that leadership requires a title, positional authority, and the commiserate ability to hire, fire, and make salary decisions for others. At its core, however, leadership is the ability to influence people to move in a particular direction. A technologist who profoundly understands the tech and can marshal people becomes a powerful organizational asset and will unlock career opportunities previously unimaginable.

Think of the technical people you admire — Kelsey Hightower is a great example. For all of his technical knowledge and hard work, his work in the community — public speaking, mentoring, human interaction — has elevated his career. As you catalog the people you admire, you’ll realize they all exhibit this trait. You know their names precisely because they’ve worked to influence and grow others.

Some of you will be nonplussed by the idea of engaging broadly and focusing on other people after a decade or more of deep technical work on yourself. You may tell yourself that you’re not good at it, it’s not what you want to do, or you “just don’t like people.” Your life and career are your own. However, you will limit your career opportunities as an expert-level technologist if you don’t learn to lead and develop others.

There’s no single way to scale your knowledge and experience — and you don’t have to be an extreme extrovert. You can:

• Write articles or blog posts or build a formal or informal community of practice at your job.
• Join and then lead a community user group, attend conferences, and organize a meetup.
• Seek out peers and schedule one-to-one conversations to learn and share knowledge.
• Build documentation and then share it broadly within your company.
• Write a book or develop training content.
• Develop and maintain tools that codify your knowledge into repeatable processes.
• Identify the areas where you have significant expertise and invite colleagues to shadow, reverse shadow, and then deliver by themselves.

I’ve personally seen technologists apply one or more of these strategies to become technical leaders and enable thousands of other engineers. These activities will scale your expertise and cement you as an expert of experts.