Shine Bright as an IC: Growing Yourself As Your Company Grows

The presentation titled Shine Bright as an IC: Growing Yourself As Your Company Grows was delivered by Suhail Patel, a Staff Engineer at Monzo. The talk focused on the opportunities for growth that come with being part of a growing company and emphasized the importance of taking control of one's professional journey rather than relying on managers or peers.

Some of the key points highlighted include:

• The need for engineers to progress beyond technical mastery, by mastering influence, communication, and strategic thinking.
• The importance of building organizational relationships to become leaders who can unblock key projects and get them delivered.
• Engaging in extracurricular activities such as hiring, coaching, mentoring, and building community both within and outside the organization to enhance one's career trajectory.
• Suhail shared personal insights, stressing the significance of understanding business outcomes and investing in the right technologies at the right time.
• For engineering leaders, investing in networks within and outside the organization as code and systems are ephemeral but people are crucial to achieving goals.
• The concept of organizational cracks, encouraging leaders to address problems at the root before they proliferate and become tolerated problems within the company.

The presentation was geared towards those aiming for senior roles such as Staff+/Principal Engineers, providing actionable advice on personal and organizational growth strategies.

Technologies and methodologies discussed include the infrastructure components utilized at Monzo, such as Kubernetes and microservices, as well as insights into maintaining relevancy in a rapidly evolving tech environment.

Overall, the talk provided a roadmap for individual contributors aspiring to grow alongside their companies, emphasizing continuous learning and proactive engagement beyond technical tasks.

This is the end of the AI-generated content.

Being part of a growing company is a fantastic opportunity to level yourself as an individual very rapidly, if you choose to grasp it. You've already immersed yourself with context and you might be the go to person for a key area of the organization. Having a brag document of all your great code and adventures in writing software is only achieving half the job.

Getting involved in "extra curricular" activities such as hiring, coaching / mentoring, writing proposals and building your community in and outside of your organisation can really boost your career. You need to have technical mastery but also craft your organisational relationships to be a leader that gets key projects unblocked and delivered.

This talk brings an insight into what these activities look like and I want to give a cheat sheet on how to be great at them from day one. If you are eyeing up getting to Staff+/Principal level, this is the talk for you.

Key Takeaways:

• Many folks seem to think that just technical mastery and getting deeper into the code will get them that promotion. We will touch on why that is not the case in many organizations.
• We will cover being a great interviewer, how mentoring & coaching can fundamentally alter your perspective in how you write code, having really productive 1:1s with your colleagues and how this all links up into building a persona within your organization.
• We will use examples from my own career and mistakes I've made just focusing on the code to steer the audience towards making career investments that actually get them noticed within their organizations.