kotojo

My company is about to wrap up our mid year review/promotion cycle, and I put in for promotion to senior engineer. I feel I've been doing good work with a big impact for the company and our customers, so believe there is a good chance I've gotten this promotion. So far in my career these types of promotions have been straight forward. I went from junior to mid, and then through various companies intermediate number schemes for their levels. The main thing though, is the work has pretty much been consistently the same, but just slightly larger each time. I believe this is really the last time in my career a promotion will be as straight forward as "Here's more money, and just slightly larger scope of issues we trust you with".

Now I've been thinking what comes after that? In the mainstream there seems to be two main paths. Either go towards the management track, or go towards the architect/staff engineer track. Both of them are drastically different jobs from one another with multitudes of pros/cons. A third, and less traveled option, seems to be to attempt to strike out on your own. The only one I can still have an idea from my current situation of what it would be like though is the architect track. It grows into managing larger, higher risk projects, but still is deeply technical in nature. The other two are so far off from what I actively do though it seems impossible to know that's what I wanted without jumping in and asking questions later.

That's the short summary of where my current crossroads are and advice on that would be great, but I think it would also be enlightening to hear how people handle their career goals in a more holistic sense. Do you have 10 year plans? 6 month plans? No plans? How do you tackle unknowns like above?

Having never gone to college and coasting my way through high school I never really learned good study habits, but I'm trying to change that now. I'm currently reading Design Data Intensive Applications and forcing myself to take notes. I have noticed that it helps me retain information much better than just reading, but I feel like I'm extremely inefficient. I am almost rewriting the whole book sentence by sentence as I got through the chapters.

How do you figure out what's "important"? How do you take notes on those important things in a concise manner?

I'm currently a software developer with around 5 years of experience, but have never had a major hand in architecting new systems. All my prior experience has been just working within existing systems. My current position is giving me the opportunity to have a larger hand in architecture, but I feel a bit overwhelmed trying to understand how to create systems just from general product design documents.

How did you learn to build this skill. Do you have an concrete resources to ready/study for building this skill faster than just the normal try/fail/repeat loop?

I’m just in a transition period between two different projects at work and the new one is still in a discovery phase, so I am finding myself with a significant amount of free time for a week or so.

What are your go to activities to make the most of this time?

I have been writing software professionally for four years, but entered through non-traditional means. I've picked up bits and pieces over time, but never had any sort of formal education and want to try to rectify that. Most things I see people talk about though are sources like the gatech omscs program. That requires some sort of bachelors degree and structured time (wife/house/baby) that I don't have.

Does anyone have recommendations for places I can learn these things as a non college graduate with no required learning schedule?

I just hit the requirements for tenure to get access to my growth fund for the year, but it expires on Feb. 2 and the new years fund will come in and this $1k will disappear. I need help figuring out what to get in that time!

Related information: Anything I buy that is a course/subscription (pluralsight, lynda, etc) needs to show completion of a course by that deadline, and all purchases have to directly tie to growth in my day job. So, buying a book on Elixir when the tech stack at work is React/React Native/Golang would get rejected, but books on any of our stack or ios/android programming would be approved.

When the new year starts I plan on getting a subscription to linux academy to go through their aws cert courses, but really am not sure what to buy by Feb 2nd besides a pile of books. Really just feel like I'd get something on go, and all the top rec books (clean code, prag prog, etc).

Hiya, I've been doing software development for about 5 years now, but always at smaller companies. My last company had about 25 developers on a single product and that was largest team I'd ever worked on at that time. I'm now working on team with closer to 250 developers across 3 locations/timezones and it's extremely overwhelming.

I've been here for about a month now and still feel like I'm mostly just in free falling trying to figure out 95% of what anyone talks about or how to do things. It seems like everything works fundamentally differently than it does for a smaller scale company.

Do you have any advice for short/long term success as a developer that is very new to operating in an environment at this scale?