Will Larson:

The conclusion here is clear: the industry will want different things from you as it evolves, and it will tell you that each of those shifts is because of some complex moral change, but it’s pretty much always about business realities changing. If you take any current morality tale as true, then you’re setting yourself up to be severely out of position when the industry shifts again in a few years, because “good leadership” is just a fad.

Jason Yip:

Good relationships facilitate future support and creates advocates. Being able to get something done is not just about your individual capability but also about your influence with the stakeholders and teams that you depend on.

David A. Patterson:

I started my career at Hughes Aircraft in 1972 while working on my Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). After designing airborne computers for four years, I graduated and then taught and did systems research at UC Berkeley for the next 40. Since 2016, I’ve helped Google with hardware that accelerates artificial intelligence (AI).

At the end of my technical talks, I often share my life story and what I’ve learned from my half-century in computing. I recently was encouraged to share my reflections with a wider audience, so I’ve captured them here as 16 people-focused and career-focused life lessons.

Jim Grey:

Relationships matter if you want to advance. It took me until about ten years ago to start to understand how building relationships across any company I work for is critical if I want to move up, and even remain employed when times are tough. I’ve found that being relentlessly helpful to others, even in things that aren’t strictly your responsibility, keeps you as someone everybody wants on the team. And when you push for a promotion, you have a base of people across the company who think you’re awesome. It greases the skids.

When people ask me what it takes to get recognised at work and progress in their careers, I generally suggest two directions they can pursue.

Option one: Demonstrate deep expertise in an area that is strategically important to the business.

Option two: Demonstrate the ability to solve meaningful problems. The broader the problem and the higher the ambiguity, the more valuable you are if you can drive it to a positive outcome. This is especially relevant in dynamic environments where changing conditions make people with adaptable skills who can work across a variety of contexts valuable.

Career maps and expectation matrices are very useful, but sometimes people can get lost in the details. I like these rules of thumb as a way to help people keep their eyes on the prize.

James Stanier:

Instead, you should think about your career like Tarzan swinging through the jungle. Tarzan starts at one tree and knows that he has an ultimate destination, but the path to get there isn’t immediately clear: there are hundreds of different trees that he could swing to. He doesn’t know which one is the right one at any given time. He just has to trust his instincts and his general sense of direction and then progress to the next vine, and then the next, and then the next.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss:

Performance is contextual: how well you perform your job is deeply dependent on the conditions around you.

Very true.

Moxie Marlinspike:

As a young person, though, I think the best thing you can do is to ignore all of that and simply observe the older people working there. They are the future you. Do not think that you will be substantially different. Look carefully at how they spend their time at work and outside of work, because this is also almost certainly how your life will look. It sounds obvious, but it’s amazing how often young people imagine a different projection for themselves. Look at the real people, and you’ll see the honest future for yourself.

Derek Thompson:

Role-switching is important not because quitting is so wonderful, but rather because sampling from different skills and fields is helpful, provided that you’re prepared to pounce on an area that clicks for you. Explore, then exploit.

…

He argues at one point that artists and other professionals feel happiest when their “body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”

Dave Anderson:

A promotion to a higher job level puts you in a more influential position. You are being given more responsibility. It’s not a reward. Instead, it’s the company granting you more influence.

Of course, increased pay often accompanies a promotion. However, the added responsibility is the reason the company did the promotion, not the compensation.

Those who run the company are always looking for people to take on more responsibility. They’re looking for people who can come up with the next business idea, lead larger spaces, identify opportunities, and fix recurring problems. It is relatively easy to find people who are good at their jobs, and hard to find people capable of doing the next level job.

Circling back, companies promote people into larger responsibilities when that person looks like a leader. Leaders identify their own opportunities.

Cindy Sridharan:

Unless you understand “why” things are the way they are (and there often is a method to every madness, if you’re patient to dig deep enough), any proposal you might have on “how” to improve the situation might end up very much going against the grain, making it that much more of an uphill task for your proposal to be accepted. Furthermore, it’ll make it seem as though you put in no effort to understand the history of the system, which doesn’t exactly breed a lot of confidence into why you should be entrusted with fixing the system.

Rands:

The fourth role is by far the most important. It’s the role the vast majority of engineers will follow in their careers, and I’m going to call it “This. Forever.” The role you have right now is the thing you are going to do be doing forever.

…

A depressing thought? Not when you remember you’re on a quest.

John Barton:

In my very first programming role my manager said to me “You can make any mistake you like once. You’ll have my full support the first time you screw anything up. If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not learning, and if you’re repeating mistakes you aren’t either”.

Jamie Talbot:

Having a formal system means we can better support the growth of our engineers. We’re able to have more honest, open conversations about progress, promotions, and opportunity. While the framework is still relatively new, it is showing early promise at incentivising the kinds of behaviours we want to see in the team, and recognising the different kinds of value that people add.

We already have ideas on how to improve the framework further, and plan to continue iterating on it over time. We are releasing it publicly now, in the hope that it can help other companies that are thinking about how to grow and support their employees.

Medium’s growth framework looks well thought out and nicely structured.

That’s gonna take a while.