Three Ways to Scale Yourself Beyond Mid-Level Engineer
Write, Lead, and Automate
To operate at the next level, especially for Senior and Staff level roles, you need to have a bigger impact.
You increase your impact by scaling yourself.
Write
Writing is the ultimate way for engineers to scale themselves.
Write your thoughts down once and direct people to it forever. Write visions, RFCs, team processes, specific tickets for others to do.
For maximum impact, write short and direct.
It’s impossible for you to have conversations with everyone involved, write things down and continually resurface that writing to ensure folks are aligned.
Avoid repeating yourself by documenting decisions and meeting notes. Anytime you have to DM answers to someone or see the same question, write it down publicly and just share that link next time.
Writing saves you time and extends your reach.
Lead
Set the direction of a project or ticket, and then let others go implement.
Ask yourself, can someone else do this work? Can someone else be grown from this work?
Scope out bite sized pieces of the bigger project and hand those off to someone else.
You remain the glue of all the moving pieces, keeping everything aligned with the greater vision.
Automate
Make it a habit to automate away manual actions.
Make use of:
Code
CI/CD
Slack Integrations
Calendar Reminders
Document Templates
Any tool that can streamline your individual and your team’s processes are tools to scale you. If it feels repetitive or boring, it’s a good candidate for automation.
What ways have you found effective to scale yourself and your impact?