A professional's milestones

I recently heard from one of the managers at my company about the various stages of a computer engineer and how it can affect one's career growth. Coming to think of it little more, I realize that the stages are indeed quite pertinent in shaping our professional career. Though I am going to look at this from a software engineer's eye (as I am one myself), it sure does apply to any professional field if viewed in the right perspective. So let me go ahead and elucidate them.

How technically strong am I?

After my graduation, I entered the software world by making my first job. As I made my first development plan, I sure wasn't thinking that my short term goal and long term goal would be towards becoming a manager. The question I asked myself at that point was, "How technically strong am I?". I was only thinking of various ways of honing my technical skills, bury myself in writing thousands of lines of code and be contended with solving simple to complex problems and providing efficient solutions. An error free compilation or a bug free code was all that satiated me. I wasn't bothered if my manager looked at my code and appreciated me on it. I had a job to do, and I was just getting it done. I was in my own world. My code, books and hundreds of pages of tutorial were my technical comrades.


How many people do I know?

As a couple of years passed, I slowly realized the need to come out of my shell. Yes, I had written reams and reams of code, fixed whole bunch of bugs and taken care of many nitty, gritty technical issues. But, I probably failed to realize that,there were a lot of people who could have written better code than me, provide more effective and efficient solutions, helped me fix my bugs in a better fashion. The question I asked myself at that point was, "How many people do I know? I realized, it was important for me, to know more "egg heads" within my organization. Limiting acquaintance to my techlead, manager, architect or director was surely not sufficient. There was a clear need to know people outside my team, outside my department and maybe outside my organization too. Knowing people from various areas can be very beneficial at the need of the hour. If I had not bridged the "stranger gap" with a lot of people, many Easter eggs would have remained in the oblivion. My eagerness to fix a small hardware issue with my machine paid off, because I knew Mr.X, a hardware expert. We ran into each other sometime back in an office party. My pet project had a good design review because I contacted Mr. Y who has some prior experience working on a similar project. This only emphasizes the fact that it does become important to know many people in the immediate surroundings if one has to grow further in his/her career.


How many people know me?

Finally, if I am going to be in the same organization for more than 5 years, then it becomes absolutely important for me to have a good answer for the question, "How many people know me?" I was technically sound, have done impressive work, knew a lot of people over the years through various
meetings, interactions and have earned good remarks from a handful of superiors. This is when it becomes important to do some self evaluation and find out how many people in the organization actually know me. Have my efforts helped me gain enough visibility within the organization? Yes, visibility is extremely important if you have to survive and survive successfully in an organization. If I were to go up in the corporate ladder, then lot of higher ups should know me. They need to be aware of my work, my potential, and if I will be an asset to the organization in the longer run. In my opinion, winning the confidence of folks in this stage is probably the toughest. A lot of stymies to cross, lot of tough but smart decisions to be taken and
more than anything, a plastic smile towards everyone is of paramount importance!

I don't mean to say that life after this is simply a walk in the park, but at this stage one would have laid the foundation strong enough to take the career higher and higher. New things remain to be learnt, some mistakes remain to be unlearnt and that is the walk of life everyone needs to understand.


Things don't end here. There are lot more milestones to cross, but I strongly feel that once the above three stages are the most important ones.