If you're looking to accelerate your career growth, this episode gives you what may feel like hard truths about the path forward. So many engineers fall into traps of overthinking, chasing minor optimizations (like 5% or 10% productivity boosts), or playing the games of politics and networking. While these sideline activities aren't necessarily useless, I want to help you focus on the "big engines" and "primary considerations"—the things that will make the monumental difference in your career building strategy.

• I explain why arguments based on nuance—such as trying to convince your manager that your work is valuable despite low throughput, or doing "glue work"—are often based on flawed strategies that cause your career to suffer and not grow easily.

• I use an allegory (discussing the primary path of treatment for low testosterone) to illustrate that many engineers are trying to fix a fundamental, mainline career problem with a sideline, nuanced solution, instead of focusing on the gold standard primary path.

• I debunk the skill collection fallacy: the misconception that broadening your skill set (learning more languages, frameworks, or techniques) provides the same level of career benefit as it did early on.

• Discover the fundamental path to growth: I advise you to set down new languages and skill sets and instead become a craftsman of a limited set of tools, fully understanding the domain, business problems, and how value flows through the organization.

• Learn why the most important factor that substitutes for very few other things is engaging in the deliberate practice of solving a sheer volume of problems encountered and solved over and over.

• I detail how to avoid the comfort zone: while solving problems is vital, you must ensure those problems progress with you by increasing complexity, scope, responsibility, or sheer volume of work, otherwise, your potential for growth will become limited and you will stall out.

• I caution that a lack of challenge (feeling no discomfort ever) can lead to boredom, disengagement, and eventual burnout, because your brain adapts, reducing the flow state you experience. I suggest finding ways to introduce discomfort that pushes you.

• Understand that the primary course of treatment for a failing or stalled career is simple: become incredibly good at your core set of responsibilities, making things like networking, resume writing, and managing relationships easier as a result.

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If you're an engineer looking to move into a senior role, you have likely heard that you need to demonstrate "ownership". Unfortunately, this crucial term is often poorly defined and leads to a major misconception: that ownership means being assigned a full project or a Tech Lead role. I want to dispel that myth and explain why ownership is actually a necessary behavior and mindset shift, applicable in almost every action you take, regardless of whether you’re leading a project.

• Understand why ownership is a critical aspect of moving along your career track, especially for engineers moving from the associate or mid-level engineer role up to senior.
• Uncover the misconception that ownership requires a specific scope of responsibility, such as owning a project or a deliverable.
• Discover the crucial phrase that defines the ownership mindset: "What now?" or "What next?" which should guide you through every situation you encounter.
• Learn why true ownership is not about inherently knowing every technical detail or executing every step, but about being willing to take responsibility and accountability for figuring out what happens next.
• Explore how a senior engineer's ownership behavior means translating identified problems (like those found in a retro) into action or decisions, thereby ensuring things continue moving forward and don't stall out.
• I explain that engineers show ownership by choosing to opt in to be held accountable for outcomes, rather than waiting for a manager to intervene or ask for a status update.

If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.

If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today!

If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.

Hey everyone, welcome to today's episode of Developer Tea. This is the second part of my interview with Bryan McCann, the CTO at you.com. If you haven't listened to Part One, I'd encourage you to go back, as it provides crucial context for our continued discussion. In this episode, we dive into how you can think about relating to and integrating the massive changes that AI is bringing to your job, whether you are a software engineer, manager, director, or product professional. Bryan and I discuss his interests beyond research, including art and organizational design.

• Explore the two primary paths for developers in the long run: specializing as managers of AI tools (like a product manager with engineering insight) or striving to be better than AI at building better versions of AI itself (the "neurosurgeon" type).
• Understand why refining your intuitions about what should be built becomes increasingly crucial as automation makes execution easier.
• Examine how conceptual biases often become the bottleneck when interacting with powerful AI tools, such as focusing on very narrow tasks for a broad tool.
• Learn how to approach AI failures: treat a failed output as an opportunity to dig in and figure out why, perhaps by asking the AI to write a better prompt or identifying a fundamental missing capability that could become a great startup idea.
• Conceptualize AI as the earliest versions of magic, where the manipulation of symbols (like embeddings) allows us to extend our influence into the world in a flexible and powerful way.
• Discover principles of organizational design by studying how neural networks learn, focusing on strong information flow, skip connections, and aligning with the objective.
• Consider the idea that the next phase of human development might involve emulating AI’s learning mechanisms (rather than expecting AI to become more human-like) to unlock the next phase of humanity and continue our search for meaning.
• Hear Bryan’s final piece of advice for listeners: focus on learning and working on things you are passionate about that will have the highest possible impact.

If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com..

If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today!.

If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.