A recruiter won’t schedule your interviews just because you’ve got 10+ years of ‘impactful’ experience on a fancy resume written with a best-practice template.

They have got hundreds of applicants with similar skills as yours.

Ouch! Painful to even get a chance to showcase your skills... right?

Tech job seekers need to digest these harsh facts when sending cold emails or LinkedIn messages to get a job referral.

No, the world out there isn’t evil.

There are legitimate reasons behind this, and I’ll cover a few.

But there’s a way out.

I call it “Interview-Call Insurance.” 🛡️

A few weeks ago, I shared a framework to land a $500k+ software engineer job without Leetcoding. But it’s important to get an interview before you can reach that stage.

That’s why today, I’m sharing a multi-faceted approach to getting that interview call. I’ll cover:

1. Why doesn’t cold emailing work? 📧

2. What’s an interview-call insurance? 🛠️

3. Four ways to buy that insurance. 💡

👋 Hey there, I am Gourav. I write about Engineering, Productivity, Thought Leadership, and the Mysteries of the mind! 🧠

❌ Why doesn’t cold emailing work?

Short answer? Because they don’t know you.

People are generally more willing to do favors for those they know—both personally and professionally.

For instance, if folks like , , , , , , , , , hypothetically posted on LinkedIn today that they’re looking for their next opportunity, they wouldn’t need to cold-email anyone. 👋

Their LinkedIn post would be flooded with comments from people eager to help them out or make them their peer. 🫂

This is what happens when you cold-email or DM a stranger on LinkedIn asking for referral:

1. It get lost in their inbox. Tech job market isn’t what it used to be. Current employees are too busy saving their own asses and couldn’t get time to refer you. Referral bonuses—“free money”—aren’t on their priority list anymore.💼

2. Their image is on stake: It's tough for employees to justify referring someone they don't know, especially at senior levels where their reputation is at risk. That’s why you don’t hear back from senior leaders often.

3. Recruiting is screwed up right now: Companies downsized their recruiting teams in last two years. Limited recruiters are juggling multiple jobs with hundreds of candidates. This causes inefficiencies and burnout in filtering candidates.

🔥 Interview Call Insurance

The classic mistake candidates make is reaching out for help when they’re desperate.

Like “I need a referral now.” Immediately.

Well, you know there are no free lunches.

You pay the premium for car insurance before an accident happens. 🚗💥

The accident may or may not happen—hopefully, it doesn’t—but you still prepare for the worst.

It’s the same with getting an interview call. You need to “do the things” that buys you that “interview-call insurance” for yourself.

💼 Four ways to buy Interview Call Insurance

1. Build a personal brand and provide value.

The big problem is the internet doesn’t know what skills you have.

No, polishing resumes doesn’t work anymore. 🚫

To change that, you need to become more visible. You need to inform people.

Building a personal brand helps with that.

Today, you’ve got tons of options, thanks to professional social media. Here are a few, in increasing order of complexity:

• Share your perspective on others’ LinkedIn posts via comments.

• Post regularly on LinkedIn about something “valuable to others.”

• Reach out to people, offering help without expecting anything in return.

• Start a newsletter, like the one you’re reading right now.

• Start a YouTube channel.

• Build and teach others a course on a skill you’re an expert in.

Now, you might rebel and say, “I don’t want to be an influencer” or “I’m not a content creator.” 🙅

Yes, you are. You have to influence people every day at work to take action in some way. And you’re a content creator if you’ve sent an email, DM, or text message in the last 365 days.

Share your expertise in fields like distributed systems, databases, or system design. Your current projects. Your leadership style. The list of topics is endless.

But you also don’t need to be an expert to post something online. You can also write about how you feel working, the kind of work culture you like or dislike.

Trust me, I get way more job opportunities now than ever before—thanks to my writing.

2. Build friendships with leaders at work

No, not the kind of friendship where you gossip about others. Though funny enough, that works sometimes, too.

And definitely not the type where you break HR rules—if you catch my drift ;)

I’m talking about building relationships through supporting your leadership.

This is simple. Just do small extra things on top of your regular work at your current job:

Deliver results.✅
Make an impact.✅
Solve your leaders’ bigger problems.✅
Then ask them, “What else can I solve for you?”✅✅✅
Have regular 1:1s to catch up on life—both inside and outside of work!✅✅✅✅✅

When you solve your leaders’ problems, they’re willing to help you out. Sometimes even when you’re about to leave the company or get laid off.

I have a friend who got laid off due to bad luck—his entire project/org was shut down. Fortunately, a senior manager from a peer org reached out, gave him multiple leads, and connected him directly with recruiters from other companies.

Gone are the days when your managers would envy you for leaving.

3. Don’t lose touch with people who leave your company.

This one builds on the previous point. What if your leader friends leave and you’ve built a strong relationship with them?

Simple. Keep that relationship warm. 🔥

I’m still in touch with almost all the leaders from my past organizations. Actively with a few. Passively with others.

• Just text them once a month to see how they’re doing. Offer help if they need it.

• This can actually have a win-win outcome. When a leader moves somewhere else, they might need people they can trust—and they might vouch for you internally. This happened to me when I moved to Coinbase.

Building trust goes a long way.

4. Build relationships with recruiters

Wait, how? They don’t know you—and that’s exactly the problem we’re trying to solve.🤔

When your current job is stable, and the market is good, randomly apply and interview with companies once a quarter.

This has a few benefits:

• You get to know some recruiters and grab their direct contact information.

• You know your worth.

For this article, the first point is key. 🎯

Another way? Build rapport with recruiters at your current company. So, when they leave, you’ll know how to reach out—kind of like not losing touch with leaders.

Final thing: Never ignore a cold email from a recruiter during your good times. Reply with kindness, save their contact for future, maintain a friendly relationship.

Shoutouts 🔊

1. How to have 27 hours in your day by

2. Why techies leave Big Tech by

3. Lessons from Projects That Didn’t See the Light of Day by

4. You May Need a Gap Year - Five Reflections by

5. 3 Career Principles that got me to Director at Google by and

🤝 Let’s Connect

Sponsorship | Collaboration | LinkedIn | 1:1 Mentoring | Twitter

Gourav Khanijoe

Code a bit. Then eat.

Cut time with your family. Grind Leetcode while dreaming about doubling your compensation.

Give interviews. Fail.

Feel like sh*t. Sleep.

Repeat.

Sounds familiar?

This is how most software engineers practice switching jobs.

It sucks when you have to spend a lot of time being an algo-coding monkey to crack interviews.

Reality at job is totally different. You are hired and paid to come up with ideas and solve business problems quickly, not to memorize algorithms like parrots.

But what if I told you something amazing? Something achievable.

As a Staff+ Engineer, you can land a $500k+ salary without Leetcode.

As a Senior+ Engineer, you can land a $300k+ salary without Leetcode.

As a Junior-Mid-Senior level engineer, you can land a $200k+ salary without Leetcode.

Yes, without Leetcode—it’s possible. I’ve been there, done that myself.

Today, I’ll cover:

• How Leetcode evolved and why it isn’t for everyone?

• Is it really possible to get high compensation as a SWE without Leetcode?

• A framework I use to land high-paying SWE jobs with almost no Leetcode.

👋 Hey there, I am Gourav. I write about Engineering, Productivity, Thought Leadership, and the Mysteries of the mind!

How have Coding Interviews and Leetcode evolved?

Coding interviews existed long before Leetcode became a thing.

In 2016, I cracked my Amazon interview after practicing 100 known questions on GeeksforGeeks. Those were closer to real-world problems.

Over time, big tech companies found it convenient to use Leetcode as a proxy for assessing problem-solving skills.

Leetcode monetized this problem. To thrive on its subscription model, it began scaling and overcomplicating its problems.

Now, there are over 3,300 problems, mostly unrelated to what engineers actually face in their daily work.

Companies end up hiring algorithm experts, not necessarily great software engineers.

Why It Isn’t for Everyone?

For new grads with time on their hands, grinding through thousands of Leetcode problems is doable.

But for experienced engineers with families? That’s a whole different ball game.

We’re busy delivering results on real, high-impact projects at work. Plus, we’ve got lives outside of work that we can’t just put on pause.

Most of us are out of touch with those tricky algorithms and shouldn’t have to cram them like we’re back in college.

Think about it: the algorithms we’re expected to memorize took experts months to create!

Is it really possible to get high compensation as a SWE without Leetcode?

What’s the catch?

You can get into FAANG without Leetcode— it’s not an easy road.

Here's the thing: You don’t need to chain yourself to Big Tech to get the salary, learning, and growth you’re after.

You can find all that in mid-tier companies too.

The trouble starts when you get wrapped up in the whole “Big Tech Prestige” mindset.

Joe: “Hey, I heard you can land a fat salary without grinding through Leetcode.”

Nick: “Nah, man, that’s a pipe dream. No way Big Tech hires without Leetcode.”

Joe: “But what’s your priority? Is it the pay, learning, growth—or just having a fancy company name on your resume?”

I get it.

Working at Amazon, Google, or Netflix is the dream. Even your grandma knows those names.

But let’s take a step back for a second. What are you really aiming for?

If your next gig offers similar pay, growth, and learning as Big Tech, why not explore that?

Play a different game.

The best part?

Once you’ve got some solid experience under your belt, the dynamics shift.

If you are valuable, even Big Tech is occasionally open to bending their interview process to fit your terms. More on that in next section.

Use my EOF framework to cruise through coding rounds.

When I was on the job hunt after Coinbase, the last thing I wanted to do was grind through Leetcode.

So, I tapped into my network and found a bunch of non-FAANG companies working on some seriously cool stuff—places that value real-world coding chops over solving obscure algorithms.

And guess what? I scored four offers in just twenty days.

Two from mid-tier companies, one from a startup, and even one from Apple.

All of them over $500k for a Staff role—except the startup.

Here’s how I did it with the Eliminate-Offset-Frame (EOF) framework to sidestep the whole Leetcode circus.

Eliminate

I ‘eliminate’ Leetcode prep using these two methods:

1. I use a list of companies that don’t ask Leetcode.

   1. I then use levels.fyi and Glassdoor to filter companies based on my target compensation.

   2. Then, I find its employees on LinkedIn and try to understand the culture and work ethics.

   3. If everything aligns, I schedule interviews, and unless I had a bad day, 90% of the time, I get an offer.

2. I negotiate with big tech companies to skip Leetcode rounds.

   1. Many experienced folks know this secret, and it works a few times.

   2. Before interviewing with Apple, I negotiated to replace the Leetcode rounds with real coding challenges. I got the offer.

Offset

This is a fallback I use when I can’t completely cut Leetcode rounds.

I have a good grasp of system design interviews. I try to use this leverage to 'offset' one or more Leetcode rounds with these interviews.

At a mid-sized company, I replaced one of the two Leetcode rounds with an in-depth design discussion. For the other one, I prepared Blind 75 questions and was able to get through it without any issues.

Frame

This is my final fallback.

If I'm here, it's because a mid-tier company didn't meet my expectations for culture, pay, or ethics. Or, I'm desperately seeking a specific company that wouldn't accept my leetcode negotiation offer.

Two options. Either:

1. Smartly crack a few important Leetcode patterns with timeboxed preparation. Still no guarantee.

2. Take a step back and ‘Frame’ the problem differently.

I can join at some other role in company and later transfer internally at the role I aimed for.

Here’s how one of my friends did it:

He was a skilled Salesforce engineer who wanted to transition to a software engineering role at Amazon. The leap to prepare for Leetcode was too steep. Instead, he interviewed for a Salesforce engineer position at Amazon. Since it was a different interview loop, he avoided Leetcode-style questions and got the job.

Later on, he transitioned to SDE-2 role internally.

I acknowledge that this is a slow option, but it works for those who don’t have a strict timeline constraint.

Shoutouts 🔊

1. Being an engineering manager at Amazon by and

2. If you cannot track, you cannot improve by

3. Growing from engineer to Staff engineer and thriving by and

4. How to Cultivate Clarity and Kindness in Your Engineering Team by

🤝 Let’s Connect

Sponsorship | Collaboration | LinkedIn | 1:1 Mentoring | Twitter

Gourav Khanijoe

Throughout my career, I’ve been through countless performance reviews. While I’ve received both positive and constructive feedback, there are a few pieces of advice that truly stand out. Addressing them transformed my career and leadership skills in profound ways. 💡

In today’s edition, I’m sharing the top five critical pieces of feedback I received and how I tackled each one. Please shower some love and share with your friends if you like it! 💖

👋 Hey there, I am Gourav. I write about Engineering, Productivity, Thought Leadership, and the Mysteries of the mind!

Thank you for your kind support and love on my previous article.

1. Influence Without Authority

What Was I Doing Wrong?❗

When I first got promoted to a Mid-Senior Engineer in my career, I felt I was in power. Instead of acknowledging others' opinions, I imposed my own. ❌

I remember when a junior engineer, Sam, once questioned a code comment I had made. I was baffled and my ego flared—how could someone question their senior's comment? - I thought 🤔

The Feedback 📮

"You’re leading by asserting power," my manager said, "not by guiding others with respect and collaboration."

That hit me hard. 💥 I was causing friction in the team, and junior engineers were second-guessing their contributions because they feared my reaction. ❌

That night, I couldn’t sleep, replaying conversations in my head—realizing how often I shut down differing opinions and pushed my agenda. 😔

How I Addressed It 🚀

• I confided in my mentor, who encouraged me to talk to Sam. When I did, I realized he was right. I apologized and admitted my ego had blinded me to his valid points. ✅

• Over time, I embraced the idea that I didn’t always have the best answers. I encouraged others to lead discussions and share perspectives. I started asking others to lead sprint ceremonies and share their viewpoints. This created space for diverse perspectives to emerge. 🗣️💬 ✅

Key Takeaway 🌟

True leadership isn’t about control. It’s about influence— understanding, and guiding others by example, and not due to formal authority.

2. Active Listening

What Was I Doing Wrong?❗

During strategy discussions or critical reviews, I had a habit of interrupting others the moment they opposed my ideas. ❌

I wasn’t listening to understand—I was waiting for my turn to speak, cutting people off mid-sentence to push my justifications.

The Feedback 📮

In a 1:1, the senior engineer told me, “You’re smart, but it seems like you’ve already decided what the other person is going to say, and you’re just waiting to jump in.”🎯

It was then raised during my review. I felt a mix of frustration and embarrassment. 😳 I thought I was being efficient, but the reality was that I wasn’t listening actively. ❌

How I Addressed It 🚀

• I read the book 📖 You're Not Listening and realized that real listening isn’t just about hearing words—it’s about making people feel understood. I had to train myself to shift my mindset from trying to win a conversation to trying to understand it.🤝

• One of the most challenging changes I made was to satisfy my urge to speak by taking notes during meetings. When I felt the impulse to interrupt, I’d write down my thoughts instead. This gave me the space to listen fully. 📝 ✅

• I also made it a rule to be the last person to speak. The change was tough. But, it improved things. The discussions became richer, and people opened up more. 💡 ✅

Key Takeaway 🌟

Active listening is an underrated leadership skill. It’s about understanding, not just responding. When you listen with intent, you create space for better ideas and deeper connections.

3. Content Over Consensus

What Was I Doing Wrong?❗

I wanted everyone to agree before moving forward with any major project. I thought this would produce better results, but instead, it led to endless meetings and stalled progress. ✖️

One complex project suffered because of this. I kept revisiting the same conversations, trying to get everyone's approval. As a result, we lost weeks of valuable time.⏳ ❌

The Feedback 📮

I got this in performance review - "You’re spending too much time trying to get consensus. It’s stalling execution. You would benefit from getting consent, not consensus." 🛑

At first, I struggled because I had always believed that getting everyone to agree was key to effective collaboration.

But my manager explained that leadership isn’t about making sure everyone is happy with every decision. It’s about moving forward with the right intent, even if not everyone is fully on board.

How I Addressed It 🚀

• I began breaking projects into smaller phases, seeking consent to prototype early ideas instead of pushing for full alignment upfront. 💡 ✅

• One example was a critical backend payment processor project. Rather than waiting for everyone to agree, I secured permission to build a small proof of concept. ✅

• I got buy-in in my project when the prototype results spoke for itself and over time, even skeptics came on board. ♨️

Key Takeaway 🌟

Leadership often requires making progress without universal agreement. Aim for forward momentum and allow the results to speak for themselves, rather than waiting for everyone to be on the same page.

4. Scaling Myself

What Was I Doing Wrong?❗

I fell into the "do it yourself" trap. I was a fast coder and thought taking on tasks directly was the quickest way to get things done. ❌

But this led to burnout, and my team wasn’t growing because I wasn’t giving them the space to contribute. 🤯

The Feedback 📮

In my performance review, my manager didn't mince words. He told me, “Gourav, you need to scale yourself.” ❌ This wasn’t a surprise to me, I immediately agreed.

How I Addressed It 🚀

• I deliberately slowed down myself and instead started mentor others more. I would delegate tasks that I could have easily done on my own. ✅

• At first, it was frustrating—watching others take longer than I would have—but I resisted the urge to jump in. ☑️

• Slowly, I saw progress. Engineers began growing in confidence, delivering better results, and stepping into leadership roles. 🏆 ✅

• Finally, I led a project with a 12-engineer team on a major payments project, which we delivered on schedule and it resulted in several members earning promotions. 🎉 ✅

Key Takeaway 🌟

Scaling yourself requires slowing down to speed up. By mentoring, delegating, and trusting your team, you create a culture of growth and collaboration that extends beyond your own individual contributions.

5. Clear, Crisp, Actionable Communication

What Was I Doing Wrong?❗

I’ve always been a talker, often over-explaining. In meetings, I would give excessive context and over-justify my points, which confused people instead of clarifying. ❌

During a wider team meeting, I was asked for a brief update but I ended up providing a long-winded explanation, and noticed I was losing everyone’s attention halfway through. 🤦‍♂️

The Feedback 📮

In my performance review, my manager pointed out that my communication needs to get to the point and be direct and actionable. ❌

He recommended I read the book Simply Said, which focused on delivering clear, concise, and impactful communication. That recommendation was a turning point for me.

How I Addressed It 🚀

• I started reading the book, and it was a revelation. It taught me that effective communication about conveying what matters to others succinctly.

• One interesting fact is that I am still addressing that feedback. One practice that I have incorporated is that I am writing short reflection pieces on it every Sunday. As I am learning this, I am writing those down and sharing the knowledge with others on how to do it. ✍️ ✅

• My manager and I have observed that my Slack comms have became shorter and more focused, my presentations more engaging, and my conversations more efficient. There is still room for improvement but I am on the right path. 🎯 ✅

Key Takeaway 🌟

Clear, concise communication is a critical skill for any leader. When you cut out the noise and focus on the essentials, your message becomes stronger, and your influence grows. Say less, but mean more.

Shoutouts 🔊

1. Grinding My Way to Work-Life Balance by on ‘A Life engineered’ by

2. Best Mentors in the World Just For You by

3. Senior Engineer or Senior Citizen? How Can Vintage Tech Workers Age Like Fine Wine? by

4. Empathy is a superpower in the engineering industry by

🤝 Let’s Connect

Sponsorship | Collaboration | LinkedIn | 1:1 Mentoring | Twitter

Gourav Khanijoe

In roles like Senior or Staff Engineer, Engineering Manager, or Technical Product Manager, it’s even more crucial to succeed early. The company has invested its trust in you during the interview.

Imagine joining a new company and feeling judged by every team member when you're asking questions or discussing topics. What could be going wrong?

Unfortunately, there isn’t a clear checklist for the behaviors or traits to exhibit when joining a new company or even a new team internally. But, I've seen a common theme among new leaders. They often carry unconscious habits from their old roles. These habits can hinder success in a new environment..

I have worked in companies of all sizes and onboarded successfully a few times. I made a few mistakes, while others I observed among struggling new joiners. In today’s edition, I will share from my experience, a few mistakes to avoid when joining a new company as a leader.

👋 Hey there, I am Gourav. I write about Engineering, Productivity, Thought Leadership, and the Mysteries of the mind!

In the last few weeks, I couldn't release new editions because life hit me hard. My family and I had some big ups and downs. Things are finally settling, so I'm back with this new edition. I hope you like it.

1. Breadth vs Depth

In your last job, you were the senior person, and everyone relied on your input for various tasks. You may not need this in your new role immediately.

When I joined a company, in the past they told me that focusing on too many things at once was lowering my chances of success by losing focus.

It's crucial to check with your manager on their priorities. Generally, as a Senior/Staff engineer, it's better to have depth in a few areas and then expand breadth after settling in.

2. Not Building Trust

This is the most significant factor that can lead to failure in a new job, despite having technical strength.

Trust is crucial in every aspect of leadership. If your team doesn’t trust you today, you can’t lead them tomorrow.

Many tech-savvy people question the team’s every past decision. They cause conflicts to prove their point. Ego sometimes motivates individuals, especially those in senior roles. This behavior harms your career. It also leads to resentment and hurts performance and respect.

Another aspect is showing seniority and forgetting the key point: "Influence without authority".

When joining a new company, it's better to mentally step down and understand the ground realities that other engineers face. Imposing your knowledge without understanding the new tech stack and systems can hurt your success. You were an expert at your old company. But, these new systems and fields are complex. Comprehend their perspectives first, then exert your persuasive power.

3. Fighting with Your Manager

This is rarely effective. I once did this and regret it even today.

There are better ways to make your point while being humble and a good listener. While it's sometimes valid to disagree with your manager, remember they were here before you and probably know better than you. Being patient and putting effort into building a trusting relationship is essential.

Every manager has their own style and thought process. Adapting to their approach will take some adjusting. But, you must do this while keeping your aura and finding a balance. This will foster a good long-term relationship.

Remember, your manager is more important to you than the whole company. They play a huge role in your career growth, protecting you in difficult situations, and vouching for and promoting you.

4. Over-Showing Your Expertise

You may have done well in the interview. And you know a lot about distributed systems and complex software problems. But, if you talk too much about your past jobs, you may seem inflexible. You may seem like you don't want to learn new things or adapt to the new work culture.

Key Takeaways

1. Understand clear expectations of the role before you scatter yourself over.

2. Be humble, and polite and earn the trust of your juniors, peers, and leaders.

3. Never break a relationship with your manager. A manager is your best buddy.

4. Don’t stick to old practices, processes, and tech stacks. Unlearn to learn more.

Shoutouts 🔊

1. How to Start Writing a Newsletter and Succeed by Raviraj Achar

2. 5 Toxic Behaviors to Avoid if you are a Software Engineer by

3. Great software teams don't release in phases by Anton Zaides

4. 7 Tips to Crush Your Onboarding from An Apple Staff Engineer by in collaboration with

5. How to Influence Without Authority with Irina Stanescu by in partnership with

Let’s Connect 🤝

Sponsorship | Collaboration | LinkedIn | 1:1 Mentoring | Twitter

Gourav Khanijoe

👋 Hey there, I am Gourav. I write about Engineering, Productivity, Thought Leadership, and the Mysteries of the mind!

I am thrilled to share that we are a 1000+ members community now. Can’t express my gratitude enough to each one of you reading this newsletter. 🙏

I have worked in software companies of all sizes, from startups to Big Tech. I noticed some interesting aspects on how people think and build software.

Today I am sharing my key takeaways from working at companies of different sizes. These will be based on anecdotes of my experiences. I hope this will help you decide which company type is best for you.

1. Big Tech

Not all Big Tech companies are the same. I used to work in one such company and designed a technical solution involving distributed systems. It was roasted by other Senior and Principal Engineers in the review, to an unnecessary extent in the name of scale and safe rollout. It’s not uncommon at a few Big Tech companies.

They used to pick a lot of nitpicks and ask questions out of context. They looked forward to a 5-10-year vision, while the feature needs to be shipped “quickly” as per PMs’ timelines.

This loop of "improve the doc", misaligned expectations, and pushback from sister teams leads to churn and process-driven burnout. They add up to over-skepticism and slow down the company.

But there is a strong reason why they are forced to follow such a suit. They operate at a huge scale. A small hiccup can cause a loss of billions of dollars and of customer trust built over years. And that is the reason, Engineers are paid top-notch at Big Tech.

My key takeaways are:

1. You will learn many best practices and understand how to operate systems at scale.

2. When you land impact, it will touch millions of customers across the globe.

3. Your payscale is exceptional.

4. You often end up coding relatively less and get stuck in processes and approvals.

5. Safe practices come with burnout. You might end up waiting to see the impact of your work for months or years in some projects.

2. Mid-Tier Companies

To clear up this vague definition. I am referring ‘Mid-Tier’ to companies that are still on a growth trajectory. They also have a very high scale but not to the extent of Big Tech.

When I moved to mid-tier companies, I observed they move so fast and deliver results quickly by:

• making a small testable net-new logic module, possibly behind a feature gate.

• gathering early feedback by internal dogfooding and acceptance testing.

• iterating back, fixing stuff, adding more features, and repeating.

• avoiding unnecessary processes and consensus.

I had to unlearn many processes and coding practices. Most importantly, I had to unlearn 'asking for permission'. The autonomy and flexibility were great. They had the perfect blend of moving fast, showing impact quickly, and not overcomplicating. It positively blew my mind. On top of it, Engineers are paid really well.

But to enable teams to move fast, dedicated infrastructure teams build some abstractions. These hide the underlying concepts from product engineers. Systems could also go stale or become monolith pretty quickly.

My key takeaways are:

1. You will learn the art of a true 'Bias for Action' by coding the MVP quickly. This will deliver results faster and save the company's resources and money.

2. You seek consent over consensus.

3. Pay could be a little less than Big Tech, but mostly comparable.

4. You may slightly miss out a bit on best practices, processes, failure modes, and rollout experience at scale. System code becomes complex to manage relatively fast. But this is not always true.

5. Moving quickly without understanding the core dependencies could lead to shallow learning. This is especially true for some product-focused teams.

3. Startups

In between jobs, I also had an excellent opportunity to join a startup as Founding Engineer number #1. If done well, this role is sometimes matched to a CTO role.

I wrote the first set of APIs. I also implemented the build-and-deploy systems. I set a vision for the product and talked to potential customers. It was such a roller coaster ride. This journey was filled with a tremendous amount of learning in a short period. At the same time, the base pay was comparable to Big Tech but everything else was paper money.

But I was so burnt out after spending a major portion of my day and night contributing to the company. And I had some other personal commitments that I had to meet. I made a tough decision to part ways with the company.

My key takeaways are:

1. If you ever want to start your own company, working at an early-stage startup first is your best bet.

2. The surge of learning is incomparable. You learn deep tech in a short time. You also learn many different skills. This paves a path to C-suite leadership if you stick around.

3. The Gross Pay isn't great. But, it has a higher upside if you stay a long time and the company succeeds due to your deep contributions.

4. Your energy should match the commitments required at the startups. Also, the timing should suit your life. Otherwise, you won’t do the job or personal life justice.

5. Burnout at startups is real. Defining boundaries between personal and work life is hard. You should make a conscious, informed, and hard decision before joining a startup.

Shout-outs 🔊

1. Dumb Code Beats Smart Code - Don’t make the mistakes I made by

2. Feedback is a gift only if it is received well by

3. Design a Distributed Priority Queue by

4. The Role of a Technical Program Manager by

5. Feature flags are ruining your codebase by

6. Super Specific Feedback: How to give actionable feedback on work output by

7. 3+1 strategies to track your achievements by

Let’s Connect 🤝

Sponsorship | Collaboration | LinkedIn | 1:1 Mentoring | Twitter

Gourav Khanijoe

👋 Hey there, fellow tech enthusiasts, professionals, and wanderers of the digital realm! 🚀

I am Gourav. I write about Engineering, Productivity, Thought Leadership, and the Mysteries of the mind!

Performance reviews could be stressful. Back when I was a junior engineer, watching managers and senior engineers go into a performance review was enough to make me nervous.

“Would they delve into my pull requests? Could they possibly overlook my successes and zero in on that one incident where my code caused a hiccup? Am I being seen as just an average performer?” - endless questions pop up in my mind.

I've worked as a Staff+ Engineer for quite some time and have been part of many such conversations. With experience, I can tell that performance reviews are supposed to help you and not go against you. The process is designed NOT to scrutinize but to help you grow. Staff+ folks are invited in there to back you up when preconceived notions come into play.

Today, I'll share my firsthand experience to help you all understand the dynamics of perf reviews and calibrations and what role Staff+ engineers play in reviews. Towards the end, I will share what assessment I am getting in my reviews to help explain why the feedback should be ‘NO Surprise’

Staff+ and Managers Crush Bias During Review Prep

As a Staff Engineer, when performance season came around, I started getting lots of messages on Slack from managers asking for feedback on various junior and senior engineers.

This made me curious about what happens behind the scenes in preparing for performance reviews.

Luckily, I have many Engineering managers as close friends, and I got to understand what they do before the meeting. 😀

Here’s what Engineering Managers do “before” the review meeting:

• They think about the growth, successes, setbacks, strengths, and weaknesses of their team members.

• They gather data points, looking at code contributions, design documents, and peer feedback.

• Then, they talk to senior or staff engineers to get more feedback and confirm their own thoughts. This validation through feedback is crucial for them before the review meeting.

• Then they form opinions about each team member. For those doing well, they plan a path for promotion. For those consistently falling short, they create a performance improvement plan (PIP) and a plan to help them grow.

This cleared up two of my big doubts:

1. Managers do prep a lot and put in a lot of effort.

2. They don't want to push their own ideas as feedback. Instead, they seek diverse input, avoiding personal bias in decision-making.

But what if your manager is playing games?

When I joined my first-ever performance review meeting, I was surprised at how the process is designed to keep everyone in check.

Senior managers typically invite Engineering Managers (EMs) whose subordinates undergo calibration. They also invite senior and staff+ engineers to help in the goal is to turn anecdotes into facts.

Here’s what happens in the review meeting:

EMs are asked to discuss the strengths and growth points of key teammates.

Effective managers provide a growth-focused perspective and data-driven feedback. They also give estimated ratings on a five-level scale to the engineers they manage.

They brief on why a particular engineer deserves a higher rating, possibly being on a promotion path, and why others may need support, guiding them toward not meeting expectations.

Whenever a manager proposes someone for a promotion, they are often encouraged to make a promo plan and work on it immediately if there are no concerns.

Conversely though, if someone is put on a performance plan, managers face scrutiny. They are questioned about regular feedback and support to prevent reaching a point where a 'plan' is necessary.

Staff Engineers are asked to validate points. I recall a time when I took part in reviews and saved an Engineer from a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP) with strong data points.

But here are the interesting points I learned:

1. Performance reviews aim to help, not penalize. Your manager plays a crucial role in your success, if they rate you lower, it reflects poorly on them first and on you later.

2. Regular feedback is crucial; otherwise, both your manager and senior/staff engineer are at stake.

Calibrations ensure that you are set up for success

Post reviews, come calibrations. Calibrations ensure employees aren't judged solely on occasional hiccups or wins. They are judged on consistent, regular tracks.

In my view, this is the most crucial part of the process as it recognizes that impact and performance aren't a straightforward, linear scale.

Expectations may dip due to factors like team changes, project prioritization, extended leaves (such as maternity or paternity), and the employee's reputation.

So, your judgment isn't solely based on your code; it extends to your overall dynamics, like influence, historic contributions, and organizational factors.

Key learnings are:

1. As long as you keep on working hard, deliver value, and keep good relationships, these hold significant importance.

2. Occasional hiccups won’t make a difference if you are otherwise a good engineer.

What feedback am I going to get this time?

I know what feedback I am going to get this time in my performance review.

How do I know before I even received it?

Simple, because Performance Review feedbacks aren’t supposed to be surprises. They are meant to be a reminiscence of the regular feedback you get in your 1:1s.

My manager has lots of experience in managing people. He is also technically strong. He figures out when things may go wrong and gives immediate, positive feedback that sounds charming.

In my past 1:1s, we have been discussing how can I make my written communication like Slack announcements, cross-team feedback capturing, and other documentation crisp and concise. So, there you go…this is what I am going to get in my performance review.

You know the interesting part? I am already working to improve on this before getting it officially stoned out!

🥂 Shoutouts

1. Give Feedback that Helps, not Hurts by

2. How Canva Supports Real-Time Collaboration for 135 Million Monthly Users by

3. Mastering Leadership: Why We Hesitate Giving True Feedback by

4. Taking Decisions in Engineering Teams by

5. I wish I started doing this on day 0 of my career as an engineer by

Let’s Connect

If we haven't crossed paths previously, I'd be delighted to receive a message from you!

Sponsorship

Unlock the potential for your business to shine! Simply reply to this email or DM on LinkedIn, and let's embark on this exciting journey together. Here are the details of various sponsorship packages.

Collaboration on mind?

I am more than happy to collaborate! Whether it's cross-content sharing, podcasts, or interviews, let's create something amazing together. My DMs are open on LinkedIn.

Also, don't hesitate to reply to this email and introduce yourself. I make it a point to respond to every direct message, email, and comment.

Follow me for daily informational

Follow me on LinkedIn for daily interesting bytes, discussing all things software engineering, leadership, financial freedom, mindfulness, productivity —let's connect:

🤝 Connect with me on LinkedIn

💪 Connect for 1:1 mentorship

𝕏 Connect with me on Twitter

Be the change you want to see,

Gourav Khanijoe

👋 Hey there, fellow tech enthusiasts, professionals, and wanderers of the digital realm! 🚀

I am Gourav. I write about Engineering, Productivity, Thought Leadership, and the Mysteries of the mind!

How to get promoted from Staff to Principal Engineer despite having setbacks?

This is the third and final part of the multi-part series. We'll explore the journey from Staff to Principal Engineer. (Promotion from Principal to Distinguished Engineer is super rare, so I won’t go that far). Part 1 focused on progressing from a new grad to a Senior Engineer, while Part 2 covered transitioning from Senior to Staff Engineer.

Some companies have a Senior Staff level. By aiming directly for the Principal Engineer, we effectively cover aspects of both roles.

With that in place, let’s get started with actionable insights on a journey that is close to my heart (I am currently treading on this path)!

Staff → Principal Software Engineer

Experience years: 10-20 (lower experience promotions are rare; the more senior the better)

Current titles: Staff (Software) Engineer, Staff Tech-Lead, Architect, Staff Lead

Target Titles: Principal (Software) Engineer

Scope: Company-wide Impact Projects, Leadership, Technical and People skills, Business Mindset.

Much Needed Context Section:

Besides the context for Staff Promotions, I would like to give insights into the Principal level:

1. Promotion to Principal Engineer is rare. This level makes up the top 1% of the population at the company. You are definitely not expected to reach this level.

2. Getting hired as a Principal is intimidating. Even those with special expertise in fields such as AI, supply chain, crypto, and infrastructure, and having industry and business acumen may face challenges in getting hired as Principals.

3. Principal Engineer = (Top Management Chain work [Director / VP / CTO] - Core People Management + Strong Tech Expertise). Principal engineers need to have people management skills but here I am excluding typical resource allocation and empire-building stuff.

4. While I'm outlining various paths to the Principal Engineer in an action-item format, it's important to note that there's no singular guaranteed route. The journey is inherently ambiguous and challenging, and despite diligent efforts, success is not assured - For e.g. it’s fair for a company to not need this level at all.

With this, let’s get started:

Action Items

Beyond typical Staff Engineer responsibilities, you must also do the following:

1. Own Top 1% of Engineering Project and land Company-wide Business Impact:

   1. The top 1% Engineering Project spans many teams or the whole company’s way of doing day-to-day Engineering. These are the things that all other engineers take for granted and often affect the company’s bottom line.

   2. Examples include but are not limited to:

      1. Choosing a language for the whole company and setting up its infrastructure - build and deploy the system.

      2. Migrating the company’s database from SQL to NoSQL or vice-versa.

      3. Building Business Foundational Frameworks like Payment Gateway Systems.

      4. Introducing safe build-deploy practices by building abstractions and tools like REST APIs interceptor layer.

2. Execution & Strategic Leverage

   1. As one human being, you can only code so fast, there is a limit to what an individual can do. Folks on the path to PE understand this clearly and are a really efficient force multiplier.

   2. This would mean having an influence on many other engineers in the company. Strategically leveraging them and working through them to execute shared goals in a meaningful manner.

   3. That’s why even when you are targeting the PE level, which is an IC role, you still need to be a good people person. Here’s why naively, many go into management because they think, ‘If I can have a team of people who do what I say, I will have more leverage and more impact.’

3. Thought Leadership: It is absurdly vague but let me boil it down to two points:

   1. PE’s opinions matter a lot, not just to other Engineers but also to the C-Suite. CTOs, often look forward to hearing their thoughts and opinions on a strategic business move.

   2. In this position, you share innovative ideas, insights, and opinions with others. You do this to influence, inspire, and lead the industry or community. You also take the hit when things go wrong.

4. Ability to move broader and deeper seamlessly.

   1. You have Know-how at a high level of the whole company.

   2. You can move across business domains, technologies, teams, and leaders with fluidity.

   3. People wait to seek your advice before doing stuff.

5. Be one of the Key faces of the company:

   1. This doesn’t mean becoming a celebrity, (that’s for C-Suite - pun intended).

   2. You must deliver Tech Talks and key Notes at Inter-Company events. Also, you must conduct key events and make the processes lightweight and automated.

   3. You repeatedly experiment with new tools and technologies in the industry and propose the company adopt or sunset a few.

   4. You are a natural mentor at scale via your knowledge-sharing sessions.

There is much more to it. This is because such a role needs and covers a lot of different areas and skills. But, if you do these, there's a high chance it'll bring you closer to your Principal Promotion.

Acceptable setbacks and how to learn and overcome those

The bar for Principal Engineer is so high that any visible setback could cause drastic repercussions on your path to promotion.

However, it’s hard to be consistently in coding mode for some staff engineers when they are on the path to PE as don’t get enough time for it due to other high-priority responsibilities.

As long as the leadership is aligned, they won't see this as a setback, but if they are not cautious, they could perceive it as actionable feedback. The key is still to remain hands-on with coding and find some dedicated time for it.

Some Housekeeping

I have heard from some of the subscribers that the newsletter email sometimes goes to their spam or promotions folder.

Please move your newsletter emails to the primary folder, add gouravkhanijoe@substack.com to your email contacts, or simply reply to this email saying “Hi”!

In case you missed any previous editions due to this, please read all of them here.

Special Thanks

1. Author of the Leading Developers newsletter, for providing valuable feedback and support to this newsletter.

2. Author of the Techlead Mentor newsletter for cross-post collaborative efforts.

3. Author of Strategize Your Career newsletter for supporting my voice.

4. Author of the High Growth Engineer newsletter for conversational support and feedback.

5. Author of Developing Skills newsletter for recommending this newsletter.

In case you missed my previous articles…

How to level up as a Software Engineer despite having setbacks? - Part II (Sr. to Staff Eng)

How to level up as a Software Engineer despite having setbacks? - Part I (New Grad to Mid-level to Sr Eng)

Secret to become a Staff+ Engineer swiftly

Access the full archive here.

Your thoughts matter! Comment or reply with your post ideas—I'm all ears and ready to turn your concepts into content! 🙋‍♀️🙋‍♂️

Let’s Connect

If we haven't crossed paths previously, I'd be delighted to receive a message from you!

Sponsorship

Unlock the potential for your business to shine! Simply reply to this email or DM on LinkedIn, and let's embark on this exciting journey together. Here are the details of various sponsorship packages.

Collaboration on mind?

I am more than happy to collaborate! Whether it's cross-content sharing, podcasts, or interviews, let's create something amazing together. My DMs are open on LinkedIn.

Also, don't hesitate to reply to this email and introduce yourself. I make it a point to respond to every direct message, email, and comment.

Follow me for daily informational

Follow me on LinkedIn for daily interesting bytes, discussing all things software engineering, leadership, financial freedom, mindfulness, productivity —let's connect:

🤝 Connect with me on LinkedIn

💪 Connect for 1:1 mentorship

𝕏 Connect with me on Twitter

Be the change you want to see,

Gourav Khanijoe

👋 Hey there, fellow tech enthusiasts, professionals, and wanderers of the digital realm! 🚀

I am Gourav. I write about Engineering, Productivity, Thought Leadership, and the Mysteries of the mind!

Today at a Glance

• How to get promoted from Senior to Staff Engineer despite having setbacks?

• 2 Must-read Books you when targeting Staff Engineer Level

How to get promoted from Senior to Staff Engineer despite having setbacks?

This is the second part of the multi-part series to help you level up or get promoted to the next level.

In the previous edition, we covered the journey from a Newbie Geek, all the way up to a Senior Software Engineer. Today, I am going to talk about going from Senior to Staff Software Engineer.

As before, I would like you to revisit some disclaimers. I am going to provide you multiple crisp action items to succeed even if you mess up occasionally.

With that in place, let’s get started.

Senior → Staff Software Engineer

Experience years: 7-15 (lower experience promotions are rare; the more senior the better)

Current titles: SDE3, Senior Software Engineer, Senior Software Engineer II

Target Titles: Staff (Software) Engineer, Staff Tech-Lead, Architect, Staff Lead

Scope: Cross-team or Cross-organizational: Projects, Leadership, Technical and People skills, Strong Business Intuition.

A special context section:

Senior-to-staff promotions are not usual, often, or expected. That is why I want to provide some quick contextual points before proceeding to action items:

1. Promotion to Staff or getting hired at that level is very difficult and not every senior engineer is expected to reach that level. You won’t be penalized for staying at Senior for 20 years. In many organizations, Senior is the terminal level.

2. The promotion process, role guidelines, archetypes at the Staff level as well as the role of a manager having a Staff level report is diverse and quite ambiguous.

3. If your team has multiple staff engineers, it is a red flag. It means either there is a title inflation or the bar is low, which sets you up for failure when it comes to industry standards.

4. After the senior level, you also have the choice to pursue a managerial path as well.

5. Staff is not just a better senior engineer. It encompasses tech and people leadership as well as a strong sense of responsibility.

Assuming you want to pursue this path, let’s dive now into actionable stuff.

Action Items

Action items include doing everything that you have done at the Senior level, plus:

1. Identifying your Staff Project and executing it ‘nicely’

   1. A Staff Project is a nice combination of:

      1. solving a problem that has a cross-team impact

      2. a constant pain point for stakeholders (customers, developers, company)

      3. has the highest or near high probability of getting funded/resourced and prioritized.

   2. Executing nicely includes:

      1. building a really simple, cost-effective, elegant, and low-operation-intensive solution

      2. showcasing leadership via motivation, clear communication, and force multiplication (delegating stuff to empower others to grow).

2. Pick a problematic area (non-project), convert it into a charter and lead.

   1. Does your company lack extendable APIs? Are you spending too much on cloud-provider costs? Does deployment suck? Is the hiring or promotion process broken? Are critical incidents and pages increasing day by day? - you got the idea.

   2. Understand the root cause and create a low burden/cost/maintenance (possibly automated) campaign or process to detect such things and make course corrections.

   3. Bring people together as you progress because you are onto something that affects the masses. Their opinions matter!

   4. Become the go-to-person for that.

3. Solve your existing leaders’ problems:

   1. A key part of becoming a Staff is taking more responsibility and making it easy for other leaders.

   2. I covered a lot in an existing edition on responsibility, trust, and how to attain that as A Secret to becoming a Staff+ engineer.

4. Find a mentor and a sponsor

   1. A Mentor is one who constantly guides you towards your goals. This should be someone who knows the quirks of the promotion process or may have gone through the process recently.

   2. A Sponsor brings visibility to your work by mentioning and sharing your work in wide groups. This should ideally be someone with very high credibility in the company.

   3. They could be the same person but it’s better to have those as two separate humans so that your mentor is not considered biased.

5. Be visible consistently in many different slack channels. That includes:

   1. the incidents, on-call support, customer escalations

   2. infrastructure breaks

   3. incident postmortems

   4. helping others

   5. recurring issues.

6. Speak ‘Right’ and ‘Appropriate’ with ‘Confidence’.

7. Mentor multiple folks, and help others grow.

8. Build a strong culture, and be humble, inclusive, and helpful.

9. Navigate through complexity, and get stuff done simply.

Acceptable setbacks and how to learn and overcome those

• Scope Creep

  • Setback: Project scope expanding beyond initial plans.

  • Overcome: Reassess project scope, communicate changes to stakeholders, and establish clear boundaries.

• Resource Allocation

  • Setback: Mismanagement of resources.

  • Overcome: Evaluate resource needs, reallocate if possible, and communicate with team members about any adjustments.

2 Must-read Books you when targeting Staff Engineer Level

1. Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track

2. The Staff Engineer's Path: A Guide for Individual Contributors Navigating Growth and Change

In case you missed my previous articles…

How to level up as a Software Engineer despite having setbacks? - Part I (New Grad to Mid-level to Sr Eng)

Secret to become a Staff+ Engineer swiftly

The Secluded Mindset for Becoming an Elite Leader from an Everyday Engineer

How to remove political roadblocks to grab your well-deserved promotion?

Access the full archive here.

Your thoughts matter! Comment or reply with your post ideas—I'm all ears and ready to turn your concepts into content! 🙋‍♀️🙋‍♂️

Let’s Connect

If we haven't crossed paths previously, I'd be delighted to receive a message from you!

Sponsorship

Unlock the potential for your business to shine! Simply reply to this email, and let's embark on this exciting journey together.

Collaboration on mind?

I am more than happy to collaborate! Whether it's cross-content sharing, podcasts, or interviews, let's create something amazing together. My DMs are open on LinkedIn.

Also, don't hesitate to reply to this email and introduce yourself. I make it a point to respond to every direct message, email, and comment.

Follow me for daily informational

Follow me on LinkedIn for daily interesting bytes, discussing all things software engineering, leadership, financial freedom, mindfulness, productivity —let's connect:

🤝 Connect with me on LinkedIn

💪 Connect for 1:1 mentorship

𝕏 Connect with me on Twitter

Be the change you want to see,

Gourav Khanijoe

👋 Hey there, fellow tech enthusiasts, professionals, and wanderers of the digital realm! 🚀

I am Gourav. I write about Engineering, Productivity, Thought Leadership, and the Mysteries of the mind!

I am thrilled to extend a heartfelt welcome to over 250+ new faces who have recently joined our lively newsletter community..

You are now the spirit of !

As we continue to grow and evolve, the energy and enthusiasm brought by each new member contribute to the richness of our shared experience.

Your engagement is what makes this community vibrant, so feel free to hit reply and share your thoughts, feedback, and ideas, or even just to say hello!

Today at a Glance

• Inspiration of the day!

• How to get promoted despite having setbacks?

• 3 Fun facts about Software Engineering.

Inspiration of the day

You have to take responsibility for:

• your career yourself and your actions in terms of your career advancement,

• your learnings and education,

• your project and your day-to-day work.

Pragmatic Engineers take charge of their own careers and aren’t afraid to admit ignorance or error.

Setbacks, errors, failures - It’s not the most pleasant aspect of software engineering to be sure, but it will happen - even on the best of projects. You have to overcome those too!

How to get promoted despite having setbacks?

No fluff, no jokes, no BS!

I am going to talk straight to the point and provide you multiple action items to reach the next level in your software engineering career, even if you messed up occasionally.

I am also covering examples of setbacks or failures that are fairly recoverable to put yourself back on track and mechanisms to overcome if you have the right mindset of learning from your mistakes and taking corrective measures.

But first few disclaimers:

1. There are “no silver bullets”, aka, different companies depending upon the tier or level of maturity (startup, mid-tier, service-based, product-based, big tech) may prioritize different kinds of contributions to be eligible for a promotion.

2. Not all your actions may align with your company’s culture, so you have to be cognizant of your surroundings and “Improvise, Adapt, and … overcome”!

Because of this “My world is not the same as your world” problem, I am providing multiple example action items so that you can use at least 2-3 unique pointers, no matter which workplace you are working at.

If a company’s culture is the real problem, then probably changing the workplace is probably the best solution.

I am dividing it into 3 sections to cover almost every engineer, regardless of where they are in their tech career journey.

Fresher → Mid-level Senior Software Engineer

Experience years: 0-2

Current titles: SDE1, Associate Software Engineer, Software Engineer.

Target Titles: SDE2, Software Engineer I, Senior Software Engineer I

Scope: Tasks or projects in a small team

Action Items

1. Solve coding problems in a reasonably fast manner.

   1. Given a task, you should be writing, debugging, or fixing code promptly.

   2. When stuck, ask for help. Do NOT burn in silence for 3 days on any task.

   3. Buy and slowly read ‘Clean Code’ and ‘Clean Architecture’ books during after hours.

   4. Code regularly - your GitHub green boxes metric is important at this stage.

   5. Start with quantity then learn to incorporate quality quickly.

2. Pick up an on-call pain point and try to solve it in the background.

   1. This will give you instant high visibility and your manager and peers would love you if what you solved helped them reduce ops pain.

3. Give regular updates about the task you are doing and showcase it using demos!

4. Make good working relations with mid-level and senior engineers

   1. Wear a ‘learner’s hat’ and be polite, and thoughtful when interacting with seniors.

   2. Ask good questions and ask many of those!

   3. Your manager relies on these folks to get your feedback and so their words could make you or break you.

5. Once you have built some credibility, try to ask for or be involved in impactful projects.

   1. Since at this level, your promotion is totally in your manager’s hands, they would like to justify it based on ‘how much did you contribute and where’.

Acceptable setbacks and how to learn and overcome those

1. A few code bugs are fine in a complex codebase, especially when you are usually a good coder who delivers stuff swiftly.

   1. Overcome the situation: If you caused an outage, treat it as an opportunity to learn and fix problems. Come up with a plan and set of task items to fix the code bug and trim down the tech debt accumulated due to it.

Anecdote

When I was at this level, I caused an outage in Amazon India payment systems because I used to float or double in Java for calculations. I should have used BigDecimal.

It led to a lot of stuck payment workflows, but I still got promoted after a quarter because of the way I gracefully handled the situation. I turned that incident into an opportunity.

Mid-level Senior → Senior Software Engineer

Experience years: 2-6

Current titles: SDE2, Software Engineer I, Senior Software Engineer I

Target Titles: Sr. Software Engineer, SDE3, Senior Software Engineer II

Scope: Working in a team and cross-collaborating with other teams in the org.

Action Items

1. Work on Impactful projects with quality - consistently

   1. Showing impact is most important at this level to grow to Senior Engineer.

   2. Not just once or twice, but in almost every project.

   3. Learn the art of measuring the impact in terms of revenue, cost, or developer agility improvement numbers.

   4. Code quality, and safe Rollout in a gradual way is of paramount importance.

2. Become a leader in handling Incidents.

   1. Nothing would give you more visibility than solving on-call sev2 incidents attending critical post-mortems, and providing your thoughts.

   2. Try to float around in on-call channels with open eyes and ears and add your meaningful perspective even when you are not on-call.

3. Work closely with stakeholders like Customers, Project Managers, and your own manager and take boring yet complicated stuff off their plate.

   1. Understand the business aspects and how they contribute to the company’s revenue, generated directly or indirectly from your project.

   2. Help stakeholders solve their problems. Solving or helping with others’ problems is really important to gain their trust.

   3. Speak after a thoughtful inner contemplation, and be right a lot.

   4. Don’t argue, and adapt to genuine feedback with an open mind.

4. Communicate as per the target audience clearly.

   1. cover ‘Call to Action’, TL;DR, context, and how to reach out, when communicating on updates or announcements.

   2. In verbal communications, be a good listener first.

5. Present and participate in Tech talks and speak with confidence.

6. Mentor junior engineers and help them grow.

7. Prioritize delivering stuff over fluff (meetings and other distractions).

8. Improve or automate processes that help the team sleep at night.

9. Be humble, and passionate, and hold bias for action.

10. Influence the team, and contribute to the short and long-term vision of how and what the team should work on.

Acceptable setbacks and how to learn and overcome those

1. Taking some meaningful Tech Debts to prioritize new product features is okay.

   1. People may question this, but clear communication becomes the key here.

   2. Make sure to drill down that Tech Debt post-launch with a plan in place.

2. Missing a deadline by a few days could be accepted as long as the customer’s or company’s business is NOT impacted.

   1. Even though I mentioned code quality and bias for action in action items, those sometimes don’t go hand in hand. To balance out stuff there, you sometimes need the extend the deadline so that you deliver meaningful output.

   2. Clear communication on why you think that is the right decision is again the key here.

3. A low-performance rating in the distant past shouldn’t bog you down on your path to promotion if you are doing all these things right.

   1. Learning from past mistakes and doing the action items consistently is sufficient. This is your life, you take hold of it.

To be Continued…

In the next newsletter editions, I will continue this format and cover what you need to do to climb up the ladder further. After a Senior position, reaching out to Staff and beyond is very difficult and often not expected from everyone. The skills, deliverables, and influence needed to reach these levels are significantly different than the levels we discussed today.

Stay tuned for next weeks to learn how to go from:

Senior → Staff Software Engineer
Staff → Principal Engineer

Learn even more…

By subscribing to these newsletters. In addition to the tips and action items I provided in the previous section, subscribing to these newsletters would definitely help you bridge the gap faster:

• Author of Level up software engineering 🚀

• Author of Coding Challenges & Developing Skills

• Author of High Growth Engineer

• Author of Developing Dev

• Author of Strategize Your Career

• Author of Level up as a Tech Lead

• Author of Techlead Mentor

• Omar Halabieh Author of Leadership in 60 Seconds

3 Fun facts about Software Engineering

1. American computer scientist Margaret Hamilton in 1963 created the term "software engineer" to describe her work.

2. Around 54% of software engineers claim to be more productive when they work from home. This is a great matter of discussion in 2024 as the world moves towards the office culture again.

3. AI is getting adopted faster than smartphones and the internet.

In case you missed my previous articles…

The Secluded Mindset for Becoming an Elite Leader from an Everyday Engineer

How to remove political roadblocks to grab your well-deserved promotion?

Secret to become a Staff+ Engineer swiftly

How earth's rotation caused Software Systems to go down?

Access the full archive here.

Your thoughts matter! Comment or reply with your post ideas—I'm all ears and ready to turn your concepts into content! 🙋‍♀️🙋‍♂️

Let’s Connect

If we haven't crossed paths previously, I'd be delighted to receive a message from you!

Free Sponsorship Opportunity

Unlock the potential for your business to shine! Simply hit reply to this email, and let's embark on this exciting journey together. The first 5 businesses that respond to this edition will enjoy a complimentary sponsorship in my newsletter. Don't miss out on this exclusive opportunity!

Collaboration on mind?

I am more than happy to collaborate! Whether it's cross-content sharing, podcasts, or interviews, let's create something amazing together. My DMs are open on LinkedIn.

Also, don't hesitate to reply to this email and introduce yourself. I make it a point to respond to every direct message, email, and comment.

Follow me for daily informational

Follow me on LinkedIn for daily interesting bytes, discussing all things software engineering, leadership, financial freedom, mindfulness, productivity —let's connect:

🤝 Connect with me on LinkedIn

💪 Connect for 1:1 mentorship

𝕏 Connect with me on Twitter

Be the change you want to see,

Gourav Khanijoe

👋 Hey there, fellow tech enthusiasts, professionals, and wanderers of the digital realm! 🚀

I am Gourav. I write about Engineering, Productivity, Thought Leadership, and the Mysteries of the mind!

I want to welcome hundreds of new members to this newsletter who joined our vibrant community in the last week! Your presence adds immense value, and I’m truly grateful for your support..

Your engagement is what makes this community vibrant, so feel free to hit reply and share your thoughts, feedback, and ideas, or even just to say hello!

Today at a Glance

1. The Secluded Mindset for Becoming an Elite Leader from an Everyday Engineer.

2. Quote: How do you get lucky?

3. 2 Fascinating facts

4. Special offers for Survey Respondents and Sponsors!

Your chance to contribute to what you want to learn!

I have been thinking of creating a course to share my experiences and knowledge. With a passion for teaching and a history of mentoring, I'm eager to guide you on how I shaped my career, removed promotion obstacles, life, and beyond.

This is your chance to contribute to what you want to learn! In under 30 seconds, complete this survey, shaping the course content to match your interests.

As a token of gratitude, those on the priority waitlist will enjoy early access, exclusive benefits, and special discounts when enrollments open.

Your insights are invaluable—let's collaborate and craft something extraordinary together! Link to the Survey

The Secluded Mindset for Becoming an Elite Leader from an Everyday Engineer

You may have heard this a few times:

Winners don't do different things, they do things differently

When it comes to achieving higher goals in life, I partially disagree with this statement.

In reality, in any career or business track, you are dealing with many different domains:

1/ engineering, 2/ design, 3/ product, 4/ business operations, 5/ marketing and the most difficult one….6/ Human Psychology

The key lies in embracing a diverse set of learnings and doing multiple different things; differently.

This applies to almost every domain or career stream, but Software Development and Engineering are close to my heart, so I can speak to you about that.

Let’s dive right into that.

It’s your life, you can change it!

You own your life, you can run it, destroy it, create it, or change it.

Are you the person who wakes up in the morning - checks LinkedIn or company email and gets surprised that your colleague’s getting apparently an “undeserved” promotion, leaving to start their own startup, becoming an Angel Investor, or simply publishing a book?

Despite being excellent in Software Engineering, Coding, Testing, and DevOps:

You might be stuck in the promotion loop wanting to grow to

• Senior/Staff/Principal Engineering, or

• Senior Manager/Director/VP levels

… and wondering why this toxic culture exists in the first place hindering your growth.

The fact is that Software Engineering is one of the most flexible, highly paid, skill-in-demand careers. We really can do just about anything we want. But for some reason, developers seem to resist change and stick to typical coding. They hunker down and hope things will get better.

Let’s change that! 🚀

The following sections assume:

• you are a great software developer yet stuck in your career

• want to grow towards Seniority levels of either Independent Contributor (Senior, Staff, Principal) or Engineering Management (Manager, Director, VP, CTO).

• doing everything that you know you should be doing…(well, sort of…we’ll see).

These sections would take you on a different learning path, which at first would seem unrelated, but is almost guaranteed to invoke your curiosity, would make sense once you read it, and possibly help you achieve your goals.

Secluded Mindset - Art of doing different things, differently!

This section is divided into two parts: what and how to do? (previous section covered on why)

What to do do?

Let me now reveal the “Secluded Mindset” that many great leaders around the world have encompassed to grow to leadership levels. I call it Secluded because it’s generally untold and practiced by only a few people.

• ‘Product & Design First, Engineering Later’ Mindset: Ever noticed how your favorite apps just get you? That's not just good code; it's a sprinkle of user-friendly interface and a lot of A/B testing on design. Great engineers foresee the product market fit and work towards creating a great competitive product, putting their engineering toolkit in the back pocket.
  
  Sundar Pichai is a great example here.

  • After graduating from IIT with average grades in Engineering, he worked at the engineering and product management department at Applied Materials, before joining Google.

  • After starting in Google's toolbar and search engine department, foresaw the potential threat of Microsoft creating its search engine. In response, he proposed the Google Chrome project to then-CEO Eric Schmidt, a strategic move to secure Google's position in the evolving web browser landscape. Eventually, climbed up the ladder to become Google’s CEO.

  
  Action Item

  Think of your software as a gift to users…It's not just about HTML or JavaScript buttons backed by microservices architecture; it's an experience that feels like a warm hug from your favorite app.
  

• Human psychology - people first marketing: Sure, your code is readable, extendable, and all that…but can you explain your product to your neighbor?

  
  “Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart — and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them,” Steve Jobs said.
  “Tools are just tools. They either work, or they don’t work.”
  

  • Success happens when you blend coding skills with a dash of human psychology and a pinch of marketing magic. Why?
    Both customers as well as employees/colleagues are humans.

  • Engineering practices are different tools to create a product but psychological storytelling helps you turn those complex algorithms into stories that everyone can enjoy – not just fellow tech wizards.
    

  Action Item
  Spend some time building great human relationships and trust within your organization (details in my previous post) and secondly, learn the human psychology behind how people buy things (btw, this is a great book to read).
  

• Business-driven Innovation: You are working to support a business and not to embrace any technology. Period. Thinking and learning about business-related economics could help you innovate on behalf of your customers and solve real day-to-day problems.
  
  Rohit Prasad, creator of Alex and SVP at Amazon, said -
  ”Touch is inefficient, says Prasad. In home automation, it means if you have to turn on the garage light, you have to find the phone, then open the app, then click on it, find the right light, and then take action…those are too many steps…rather just say: Alex turn on the garage light.”
  
  On the business front, Alexa is considered an extraordinary success for Amazon. It is by far and away the leader in the US with an estimated 66 percent of the virtual assistant market, according to Insider Intelligence.
  
  Action Item

  Picture tech problems as business puzzles and think hard about the impact of what you are doing on ordinary people. Reach out to top stakeholders and project managers to understand business motivation, and revenue opportunities and innovate with a CEO or board member mindset.

How to do?

Having understood what those successful people have been doing, let me tell you a little secret:

Action Item

Wake up in the morning, do it late at night, or after kids go to sleep, or by taking some time off from work - You have to learn new skills, and ‘just do it’.

I personally feel most productive as a solopreneur in the early morning hours before starting office work. I shared my morning routine here.

When it comes to resources, you are already blessed with a lot of podcasts, newsletters, books, and online resources that are more than abundant for you to get started.

But don’t fall into the trap of the “digital resources curse” - a pretty common phenomenon where we enjoy collecting resources/materials/gears/equipment but never do the practice or the hard work.

• set a fixed time to study and implement new skills.

• Do practical exercises. For e.g., if you want to be better at coding, use “Coding Challenges” from ’s newsletter!

• Go through the pain of getting stuck - that’s where most learning happens.

• Apply it to real-life tests.

• Repeat…

Quote: How do you get lucky?

covered it very well in his book Do Epic Shit (link):

If you could just start doing wonderful things that you want to succeed at, you have greater chances of being noticed and appreciated, increasing your odds of realizing your dream.

If you do exercise daily, there is a greater probability of you losing fat and increasing muscles.

Funny enough - If you say hello to every stranger, you have greater chances of finding your dream partner!

Your actions decide your luck. So does your lack of actions.

Luck isn’t a good fortune.

Luck is what eventually happens when your hard work yields results.

2 Fascinating Facts

1. The first text message was sent in 1992 by Neil Papworth, a software engineer in the UK. The message read “Merry Christmas” and was sent from a computer to a mobile phone.

2. The programming language Python was created by Guido van Rossum in the late 1980s. He named it after the Monty Python comedy group, of which he was a big fan. Python has since become one of the most popular programming languages in the world.

In case you missed my previous articles…

How to remove political roadblocks to grab your well-deserved promotion?

Secret to become a Staff+ Engineer swiftly

How earth's rotation caused Software Systems to go down?

Dancing into 2024!

Why do we fall short Despite Intelligence and Skill Excellence?

The Art of Empowering Others with Influential Leadership: Spreading Joy and Happiness

Your thoughts matter! Comment or reply with your post ideas—I'm all ears and ready to turn your concepts into content! 🙋‍♀️🙋‍♂️

Let’s Connect

If we haven't crossed paths previously, I'd be delighted to receive a message from you!

Free Sponsorship Opportunity

Unlock the potential for your business to shine! Simply hit reply to this email, and let's embark on this exciting journey together. The first 5 businesses that respond to this edition will enjoy a complimentary sponsorship in my newsletter. Don't miss out on this exclusive opportunity!

Collaboration on mind?

I am more than happy to collaborate! Whether it's cross-content sharing, podcasts, or interviews, let's create something amazing together. My DMs are open on LinkedIn.

Also, don't hesitate to reply to this email and introduce yourself. I make it a point to respond to every direct message, email, and comment.

Follow me for daily informational

Follow me on LinkedIn for daily interesting bytes, discussing all things software engineering, leadership, financial freedom, mindfulness, productivity —let's connect:

🤝 Connect with me on LinkedIn

💪 Connect for 1:1 mentorship

𝕏 Connect with me on Twitter

Be the change you want to see,

Gourav Khanijoe

👋 Hey there, fellow tech enthusiasts, professionals, and wanderers of the digital realm! 🚀

I am Gourav. I write about Engineering, Productivity, Thought Leadership, and the Mysteries of the mind!

First, I want to welcome 130+ new members to this newsletter who joined our vibrant community in the last week! Your presence adds immense value, and I’m truly grateful for your support.

I put a lot of effort into crafting valuable content for all of you, and your appreciation truly motivates me to excel in my writing.

If you find the content enriching and enjoyable, please consider sharing it with your friends and spreading the word.

We have some special freebies coming up in the next few weeks. Stay tuned for exciting updates and exclusive content tailored just for you!

Your engagement is what makes this community vibrant, so feel free to hit reply and share your thoughts, feedback, and ideas, or even just to say hello!

Today at a Glance

• How to remove political roadblocks to grab your promotion?

• Quote: Software is eating the world!

• Special offer for the sponsors in the connect section!

How to remove political roadblocks to grab your promotion?

Picture Source: https://unsplash.com/

Let’s say you are a practical, visionary Software Engineer who:

• knows deeply about the systems that you own, and remains always at the forefront of innovation and improvements

• drives technological advancements in the team or the organization you operate in.

• you adjust your approach to suit the current circumstances and environment.

• you judge the relative importance of all the factors affecting a project and use your experience to produce appropriate solutions.

In short, you are pragmatic enough and know your sh*t. 😉

Yet, you feel frustrated. Political hurdles, processes, and people slow you down. Despite your expertise, there's skepticism about your proposals, as the company culture hesitates with individual engineers making revolutionary decisions. Despite earning trust, speculations persist on how your proposals could disrupt everything. People pull you down and try to question your every move

Well, every such obstacle slows down your promotion, despite being on your dream team, company, and skillset!

So, how to clear the clutter and noise on your ascent to promotion?

Make a ‘Stone Soup’

Let me explain the solution with the most fascinating tale I've ever encountered, inspired by the chapter on philosophy from the book ‘The Pragmatic Programmer’.

Three soldiers, returning home after a war, found themselves quite hungry. They reached a village in search of food to satisfy their hunger, only to discover locked doors and closed windows. The villagers, facing a shortage of food, were keen on hoarding what they had.

Undeterred, the soldiers devised a plan. They boiled a pot of water and placed three stones into it. Intrigued villagers emerged to witness the soldiers' unusual activity.

The soldiers explained that this was a "Stone Soup." When a villager inquired, "Is that all you put in?" the soldiers replied, "Absolutely, but some say it tastes even better if we add a few carrots." Upon hearing this, a villager hurried away and returned with a basket of carrots.

A few minutes later, another villager inquired, "Is that all?"

The soldiers responded, "Well, a couple of potatoes could further enhance the taste." Once again, a villager hurried to return with some potatoes to be added to the soup.

Over the following hours, the soldiers continued to suggest ingredients that would elevate the soup. Different villagers ran off to bring back the specified ingredients.

Finally, the soldiers removed the stones from the soup, and together with the villagers, they sat down to relish the steamy broth.

So, what did you learn from this?

• Create an MVP: Embark on your journey like a soldier by starting with prototyping. Showcase a vision that works in its Minimal Viable Product (MVP) form, making it tangible and relatable.

• Act as a Catalyst: Invoke curiosity and interest in others by intriguingly presenting your prototype. Illustrate how your vision can significantly benefit them, and watch as their support and collaboration naturally follow.

• Make it win-win: Ensure that the end result benefits everyone involved, and not just you.

Ask for forgiveness, not permission - ‘Get Started and get Sh*t Done’

The biggest key takeaway that you should take from this is that despite having the vision to execute the project right away;

‘And you meet with delays and blank stares. People form committees, the budget will need approval and things get complicated.’

Rather just get started and showcase that stuff really works and make others take a pie of success from your work and see the magic.

The only risk here is that, despite working in isolation for quite some time to prove your idea, you may still not see the light in the end. However, it doesn't make a huge difference to your current situation, so just do it!

I don’t think you will ever make a blunder in this approach, but if you end up pissing someone off, ask for forgiveness.

Soothe their perspective - they are right about ‘Boiling Frog’

In the previous story, it’s important to understand the reason behind the initial resistance from villagers!

Why did they behave the way they behaved?

It’s because they have seen enough “Boiling frogs” in their experience. The metaphor suggests that giving too much freedom and autonomy to people allows uncontrollable situations to evolve gradually without notice.

Let’s understand it:

1. If you drop a frog into boiling water, it will jump immediately.

2. If you place a frog in a pan of cold water and gradually heat it up, the frog won’t notice the temperature change and will stay there until cooked.

Make Friends along the way

Similarly in the software world, the systems start falling apart without notice if you don’t give enough speculation. The Codebase expands uncontrollably and becomes hard to change, processes become so rigid, deployments slow down, and whatnot.

That is why build relationships with these speculators and try to balance out the situation with ‘Stone Soup’.

Quote: Software is eating the world!

• In 2011, Marc Andreessen made a widely recognized statement, asserting that "software is consuming the world."

• Subsequently, we have witnessed transformations in various sectors, with companies adapting or facing challenges in light of the impact of entities like Amazon, Netflix, Airbnb, and others.

Some of the text from his famous blog:

• Photography, of course, was eaten by software long ago. It’s virtually impossible to buy a mobile phone that doesn’t include a software-powered camera.

• On LinkedIn, employees can maintain their own resumes for recruiters to search in real-time.

• In today’s cars, the software runs the engines, controls safety features, entertains passengers, guides drivers to destinations, and connects each car to mobile, satellite, and GPS networks.

My thoughts:

• As Artificial Intelligence (AI) accelerates the evolution of the software world at an astonishing pace, this statement is going to be even more relevant going forward.

• Ability to process vast amounts of data, learn from patterns, and automate complex tasks revolutionizes the way we approach software development.

• It’s time for us as software Engineers to ramp up to see the world changing in front of our eyes and contribute towards it by learning newer skills every day.

In case you missed my previous articles…

Secret to become a Staff+ Engineer swiftly

How earth's rotation caused Software Systems to go down?

Dancing into 2024!

Why do we fall short Despite Intelligence and Skill Excellence?

The Art of Empowering Others with Influential Leadership: Spreading Joy and Happiness

Dispelling Career Advice Myths in the Tech World

Your thoughts matter! Comment or reply with your post ideas—I'm all ears and ready to turn your concepts into content! 🙋‍♀️🙋‍♂️

Let’s Connect

If we haven't crossed paths previously, I'd be delighted to receive a message from you!

Free Sponsorship Opportunity

Unlock the potential for your business to shine! Simply hit reply to this email, and let's embark on this exciting journey together. The first 5 businesses that respond to this edition will enjoy a complimentary sponsorship in my newsletter. Don't miss out on this exclusive opportunity!

Collaboration on mind?

I am more than happy to collaborate! Whether it's cross-content sharing, podcasts, or interviews, let's create something amazing together. My DMs are open on LinkedIn.

Also, don't hesitate to reply to this email and introduce yourself. I make it a point to respond to every direct message, email, and comment.

Follow me for daily informational

Follow me on LinkedIn for daily interesting bytes, discussing all things software engineering, leadership, financial freedom, mindfulness, productivity —let's connect:

🤝 Connect with me on LinkedIn

💪 Connect for 1:1 mentorship

𝕏 Connect with me on Twitter

Be the change you want to see,

Gourav Khanijoe

👋 Hey there, fellow tech enthusiasts, professionals, and wanderers of the digital realm! 🚀

I am Gourav. I write about Engineering, Productivity, Thought Leadership, and the Mysteries of the mind!

Today, I am going to walk you through a secret to navigate to the Staff+ leadership roles and actionable insights to get you there by doing stuff beyond your regular responsibilities. I am also sharing 30 money and wealth lessons that I learned in my journey so far..

Today at a Glance

• What’s the secret to navigating swiftly into a Staff+ Engineering role?

• 2 Fun-facts

• 30 Money & Wealth Lessons from My Tech Journey

Inspiration for the day

How to navigate Swiftly into a Staff+ Software Engineering role?

Promotions at junior or even somewhat senior levels are mostly tied to your inputs, output aka impact, as well as tenure and technical expertise.

Staff+ Engineering roles are beyond this.

Before we talk about how to navigate timely enough to this level, it’s important to understand what we are throwing ourselves into, because that will answer the part of the equation automatically.

Let’s break it down first. What is a Staff+ Engineering role? What do they do?

At big tech and mid-tier companies, Staff+ engineer means Staff or Principal Engineer or Tech Lead and they form the top 1-2% of the engineering IC population. At startup, the role is matchable to a CTO or a Founding Engineer hired at number 1-5.

So, by now, it should be pretty clear that it’s a Software Engineering Leadership role rather than just a Software Engineering role….Right?

Wait a second, you have heard this line numerous times, what’s exactly does it mean to say it’s a leadership role? What does it cater to? Is it the same as being a manager?

Today, let’s just understand this in the easiest way possible from a real-life example so that you never have to fall trap of ambiguity of this role ever again.

You may have heard this line - as you grow in your life, you start to become friends with your parents (assuming you have a healthy relationship with them, otherwise think of your guardian).

You start sharing their burden, start understanding their situation, and help them in different problematic areas like saving or growing money, expanding their business, or just helping them emotionally.

If you are doing that, there you go…..you are becoming a leader, unconsciously. That’s the secret that you rarely hear.

That also answers indirectly in terms of what these folks do. Beyond what a Senior Engineer does:

• They become leaders by helping existing leaders by taking ambiguous, open-ended & complicated stuff off their plate.

• They are right most of the time due to their wide experience and are trusted well and thus have a great influence among seniors, peers, and juniors.

• They set the technical vision for multiple teams, or the entire organization if it’s a small to mid-sized company.

• They influence business and cost decisions.

So, what do you need to do to fast-track your way to Staff+ Engineer?

Firstly, you better plan for this from early on in your software journey, ideally, when you are a mid-senior engineer. But if you missed that boat, that’s okay.

Among thousands of things that you can or should do, let me today focus on one meaty piece.

And that is to peer up with your manager, other Staff+ Engineers, and the Managerial chain and gain their trust by helping them out.

In my experience, not doing this is the single biggest promotion roadblock to these leadership levels.

Just to be clear, there are numerous other reasons why you may not get promoted to Staff+, for example: if there is no need for the role in the organization, existing leadership sucks, there is no budget to fund their salary, and last but not the least, if you are not putting in 100% efforts.

So, here is some actionable stuff that you should start doing from TODAY if you are serious about growing into these levels:

• Pick impactful projects as that’s a prerequisite. This is because you still need to be operating at your current level. But being a contributor or DRI isn’t enough. The project should be cross-cutting, ideally positively impacting multiple teams and customers, and have a scope of influential problem-solving.

• Talk to your manager and the skip level, and try to understand what are their current problematic areas or where are they struggling in their growth path. Remember, their growth with your help is equivalent to your guaranteed growth due to a mutual or win-win situation.

• Be humble with your peers and juniors, and work hard and smart in complex situations like Incident Management - solving customer pain tickets and support requests.

• Conduct powerful collaborative sessions with different stakeholders and support and power them to do their work. Stakeholders may include, product managers, Infrastructure teams, customers, etc.

• Partner with Engineering managers, Directors, VPs, and not just your own manager, to talk through different issues popping up in the organization like hiring, operations, and morale, and propose actionable solutions. Go with solutions in mind and not just problems.

• Your own manager is your top mentor, ally, partner as well as your sponsor. Maintain a healthy relationship with them. A Staff+ Engineer is often a peer or senior to an Engineering manager. The important common denominator between them is that they both are Leaders. So, a manager would only promote you if they truly find you as their partner.

Finally, if you know you are talented enough, meaning you got that feedback from other Principal Engineers or staff+ community but still not getting promoted, probably due to politics or spoiled culture, it’s time to look for opportunities outside.

30 Money & Wealth Lessons from my tech journey

Everyone has a different relationship with money. Do you know why?

It’s by design.

Because No Two DNA’s genetic codes are the same, human behaviors differ, leading to varied thought processes around happiness, pleasures, and fulfilment.

As money is often falsely thought of as a way to tap into Happiness modes, human nature leads to a plethora of opportunities to spend, save, invest, gamble, or lose money.

Here, I am sharing 30 lessons that I learned in my life ‘based on my understanding’ and relationship with money:

1. Money != Wealth.

2. Money is a mode of transaction, Wealth is about freedom and the mechanism to generate money while you are sleeping. (Thanks to Naval Ravikant for this foundational teaching!).

3. Even millions of dollars won’t make you wealthy. True wealth = Health + Financial Freedom + Relationships + Connection with Higher consciousness.

4. Financial freedom is when you don’t “need” to work. Rather, you might focus on what you always “wanted” to work on.

5. One blunder mistake in life could reverse your financial freedom but if you have an auto-pilot of wealth creation set-up, you may always start from scratch.

6. A salary wouldn’t make you wealthy. You need to build something that adds value to others’ lives to start the autopilot of money-making.

7. Even though salary won’t make you rich, you should still work at a Job for some time to build a financial safety net and get experience of how businesses work.

8. Tech and Coding jobs are some of the best for high band salaries.

9. Sharing Tech knowledge won’t make you less dependable, rather it increases your worth in the industry, opening up a lot of wealth-making opportunities.

10. Every Engineer or Manager should write to share knowledge or valuable content - wealth would follow automatically. Doing the reverse won’t help.

11. In this modern age of the Internet, software systems leverage is bigger than any other leverage to increase your sales.

12. 96% of folks miss out on maxing out 401k, employee match, or backdoor Roth and fail to secure or save thousands of money in compounding.

13. Compounding is great, but not the fastest way to get financial freedom. This is for your retirement. Who knows if we will live till then.

14. To become wealthy fast, you need to invent something or build a business.

15. Your values, skills, habits, and attitude towards learning could either make you or break you.

16. Starting to build on AI and LLMs might be a great technology for a startup. But don’t start a startup focused on tech, rather start it to solve a problem. Tech choices are tools.

17. Don’t fall for ‘guaranteed money-making side-hustles’ click baits. There is no “get rich quick side hustle”. In fact, the term 'side hustle' is quite misleading, giving the impression that minimal effort suffices.

18. Don’t leave your Tech Job without having another job offer or established safe funds for your startup and 12 months of emergency funds.

19. Investing in startups as an angel investor is the second best option if you don’t have an idea to solve for others.

20. 66% of investors make emotional or impulsive investing decisions. This is more common for Gen Zers (85%) and millennials (73%) than Gen Xers (60%) and baby boomers (54%). 32% of investors have traded while drunk.

21. At the casino, the house almost always wins.

22. In Equity, a person who knows about fundamental and technical analysis and all tactics might end up losing more than a regular retail investor doing index investing.

23. Index fun Investing is low-cost and straightforward, but remember, nothing is free.

24. It’s still better to pay a marginal fee to an expert managing money for you than you lose more than that by making bad decisions.

25. Property investment is beneficial long term when it’s done in a commercial space having constant need. Warehouses are common examples.

26. Gold is still a good diversification option.

27. 99.99% of crypto tokens are pump-and-dump schemes.

28. If you want to buy expensive cars or gadgets, try not to buy them to impress others but for your genuine use or comfort.

29. At the end of the day, you know how much money you have in the bank, but not how much time you are left with.

30. Even after having loads of money and wealth, there is no guarantee you will be happy. Happiness is a state of mind.

2 Fun-facts

1. The first hard disk drive was created by IBM in 1956. It was the size of a refrigerator and could store 5 MB of data.

   

   Source: https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=952

2. You may be fluent in Javascript or Python, but NASA still operates some projects on programming from the 1970’s.

Books I am reading…

These are the two books I am reading:

1. Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell

2. Hello, Startup: A Programmer's Guide to Building Products, Technologies, and Teams

What’s on your mind? Please share any interesting books that you’ve read in the past. Feel free to reply to this email!

In case you missed my previous articles…

How earth's rotation caused Software Systems to go down?

Dancing into 2024!

Why did I start this newsletter?

Why do we fall short Despite Intelligence and Skill Excellence?

The Art of Empowering Others with Influential Leadership: Spreading Joy and Happiness

Dispelling Career Advice Myths in the Tech World

How to apply Bhagavad Gita teachings to succeed at Work (without Stress)?

Your thoughts matter! Comment or reply with your post ideas—I'm all ears and ready to turn your concepts into content! 🙋‍♀️🙋‍♂️

I am not the only one!

So many other leaders have been pretty successful in sharing their learnings via their writings. Some of these folks are partly the reasons why I started my newsletter.

• Caleb MellasAuthor of Level up software engineering 🚀

• John CrickettAuthor of Coding Challenges

• Jordan CutlerAuthor of High Growth Engineer

• Omar Halabieh Author of Leadership in 60 Seconds

Let’s Connect

If we haven't crossed paths previously, I'd be delighted to receive a message from you!

Collaboration on mind?

I am more than happy to collaborate! Whether it's cross-content sharing, podcasts, or talk interviews, let's create something amazing together. My DMs are open on LinkedIn.

Also, don't hesitate to reply to this email and introduce yourself. I make it a point to respond to every direct message, email, and comment.

Follow me for daily informational

Follow me on LinkedIn for daily interesting bytes, discussing all things software engineering, leadership, financial freedom, mindfulness, productivity —let's connect:

🤝 Connect with me on LinkedIn

𝕏 Connect with me on Twitter

💪 Connect for 1:1 mentorship

Best regards,

Gourav Khanijoe