Carve your own path
You don’t need to listen to every piece of advice you find on the internet to grow – this includes the content I write. People who tend to write content have been in general (but not always!) successful in their career but this doesn’t mean their guidance will work for you
- They may have been lucky (in addition to being good) – e.g. to take an extreme-ish example, if Taylor Swift were to tell you to drop everything to become a musician because it worked for her, you probably wouldn’t take it as a serious advice. While she has been and is successful, many other artists weren’t for a bajillion reasons.
- They may have taken a path that does not suit you. There are multiple archetypes of software engineers (technical lead, coding machine, subject matter expert etc.) in different domains (generalist, low level storage, network, etc.). They are just one of the types of senior engineers you could become.
- They may have skills that differ from yours – similarly as above, there are multiple paths to grow, you should play with your existing strength and your interests rather than forcing them. It will be much easier for you to grow that way.
I personally grew as a generalist (building large scale infrastructure for high QPS and large teams) and as a subject matter expert (for privacy and policies). While the content I write in general applies to most engineers, it applies to different degrees – so I may recommend something that won’t work for you and vice versa. The truth is that it would take way too long (at least longer than Linkedin’s maximum post length) to always give all colors to a piece of advice – though I do try to keep them broadly correct.
Last but not least (and this might resonate more with people who have older siblings), your path to happiness is the one you will carve and take, not necessarily the one your older sibling took (or some random senior engineer on the internet). You are your own person 🙂