11/11/2019

Let your team evolve! - Career

A painting titled "Why so many people don't evolve appropriately in their career!" (mostly juniors and mids, but sometimes also seniors) ... Here is why!


My edit based on the original comic by BizarroComics.

I've been working in the tech industry for several years now, and what helped me the most that seniors gave me a chance to move forward. (of course, you still need to put a lot of effort from your side).

The best seniors I've worked with were not only strong in pure technical but also they were really good in tech-related stuff ... and mainly how to make people around them get better! (especially juniors)

In my career I've recognized a pattern, the entire people's career is affected heavily by their first job! And people acts later affected by that. If their first job was great and worked with smart, open, humble, and supportive people so their career later will be much much better, and vice versa.

So dear senior, seniority is not just technical! It's also about working with people and make sure they are going forward!

Here are some takeaways based on what I saw in the last couple of years.

1. Junior development could be started from day one

I saw many seniors were treating juniors like "babies"! They always think that they, the juniors, still young and not experienced to do many things. And they need to wait a bit more before they involve in proper tasks.

People's development could be started from day one. And as a senior, you don't need to wait anytime to support juniors around you. And juniors need to learn "how to think" to solve problems instead of just looking for a solution for a problem. It's kinda like "MVP pyramid", where you have small a chunk from many skills instead big chunk from a single skill.

2. You don't need to be a senior to start developing people

There is no correlation between your experience and developing people. You don't need to wait till you are a senior to support the people around you. One junior or mid in a group of juniors could enhance the whole group significantly.

That could be done by asking questions, support other people, or making a competitive state in the group. You could be this person or you find someone else to pair with them and go forward.

3. If you didn't have seniors to support you, find them!

We all know that life is not perfect. And it's hard to find that great senior who could help and support you in your career. Many seniors who are strong technically could be not that informative or interested/good in people's development at all.

Whatever the reason, that great senior that you are looking for could be not in your current company! So you need to find them. You need to find a mentor even outside your current company to guide you in your career.

Again, life is not that perfect! In reality, it's hard to find that mentor and if you found them it's harder to keep in touch with them for a long time. So you mostly will need to find more than one person and learn the best from each one.

4. Don't wait for someone to make your personal development plan

Last but not least, a word for juniors ... most of the time you will need help from seniors to make your personal development plan; however you don't need to wait and you can make your own. You just need to put more effort to make one by asking more seniors and collecting all data could help you to build your plan.

...

Those some points I've been realized during my career and I didn't find many people focus on them, so I just like to emphasize them.

Hope you a happy career! :-)

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Hello, my name is Ahmed AbouZaid, I'm a passionate Tech Lead DevOps Engineer. 👋

With 16+ years of open-source contributions, 12+ years of professional hands-on experience in DevOps, and an M.Sc. in Data Engineering from Edinburgh Napier University (UK), I enjoy facilitating the growth of both businesses and individuals.

I specialize in Cloud-Native and Kubernetes. I'm also a Free/Open source geek and book author. My favorite topics are DevOps transformation, automation, data, and metrics.

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