Posts connected by the career-growth tag.
4 posts
Every team change cost me six to twelve months of career momentum while trust and context warmed back up. A decade of those changes also turned adapting into a skill, and that skill matters more now that the way software engineers work is changing fast.
Nanodegrees and massive open online courses gave me an endless exploration phase and almost no action phase. Watching someone else code feels like learning right up until you open an empty file. Exercism and Math Academy fixed that by making the first move yours.
Time matters, but expertise does not come from time alone. In software engineering, AI makes the missing part impossible to ignore: growth comes from new constraints, real feedback, rising stakes, and ownership of outcomes.
Tanya Reilly's 'Being Glue' names the invisible human work that holds a team together but never shows up on your own record. The deeper pattern is the same one behind every high-maintenance system: a person standing in for a fix that was never made. The goal is not to be better glue, it is to build systems that heal themselves so humans are needed as glue as rarely as possible.