- The power of an annual review: Reflect on the past to reimagine your future
Anne-Laure Le Cunff offers guidence on running your own annual review - Warning: Upgrade your personal operating model
Effective leaders continually adapt their priorities, roles, time, and energy practices to stay ahead of new realities. Arne Gast and Suchita Prasad offer a framework for thinking about how to do this. - Surely you can be serious
Adam Mastroianni on what it means to be serious - Give yourself an A
Write yourself a letter explaining why you’re giving yourself an A, and date it a year from today. From "The Art of Possibility" by Rozamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander - How hard should your employer work to retain you?
Charity Majors's advice is spot on for both employers and employees - The moral implications of being a moderately successful computer scientist and a woman
Irene Zhang highlights the fallacies that lead to women (1) leaving tech, (2) generally being anxious in our society, and (3) experiencing horrific harassment and misogyny. - How and why to host a brag lunch
Nadya Duke Boone offers advice on supporting one another to practice talking about how awesome you are. - Boost yourself: 3 lessons from 10 years in tech
"If you’re different, you’re likely undervaluing yourself." — Teri Drummond - The end of 0% interest rates: what the new normal means for engineering managers and tech leads
[BEHIND A PAYWALL]
Gergely Orosz looks at the trend towards flatter teams and greater spans of control and what it means for opportunities in the tech industry. - Recommending Kent Beck: 2011
Kent Beck writes a 'future' letter of recommendation for himself, to help him be more concrete about what he wants to achieve. - Strategies for managing being overwhelmed
James Stanier offers some excellent advice to help you leave a state of overwhelm - Building personal and organizational prestige
Will Larson's offer his perspective on the value of building personal prestige and offers tips on how to do this - Talking about exit plans
David Kiger gives practical advice on talking about exit plans with your manager and with your reports - Getting a job as an engineering executive
Will Lethain's guide to getting an exec role is jammed packed with excellent advice - Planning and preparing for your next role
Rachal Nabor's reminder that no job is forever - so get into the habit of building your resume, reflecting on your work needs, and practicing interviewing as a regular part of your work routine. - Questions to ask yourself to become a better leader
Lena Reinhard provides an excellent framework to help you reflect on how you wish to develop as a leader. - Let's talk about money
Flora Devlin's excellent advice on salary negotiation - Everybody's winging it
Jean Hsu's helpful reminder that we are all winging it - The hierarchy is bullshit (and bad for business)
Charity Majors helpful reminder to choose changes in your career that work for you - How to get promoted at work
Steve Dennis's advice on how to get promoted is invaluable - Everything you need to know about managing managers
Lena Reinhard's list is a really good primer on what becoming a manager of managers is going to be like - What you give up when moving into engineering management
Karl Hughes gives an excellent overview of some of the changes that moving from being an individual contributor into engineering management will involve - 5 signs it’s time to quit your job
Cate Huston gives a really good run down of key signs that it may be time to quit your job and includes suggestions on how to validate them - Writing better self reviews
Brian Levin's advice is spot on and will help you demonstrate your development, value and impact - How women rise: Break the 12 habits holding you back - A summary
Richard Hughes-Jones provides a helpful summary of Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith's book, "How Women Rise: Break the 12 Habits Holding You Back". The advice it offers is valuable to everyone developing their careers. - Being glue
So much of most valuable and essential work of software development is not coding and this work is often undervalued when it comes to gaining promotion. Tanya Reilly provides excellent advice to both engineers and managers on how to deal with this challenge. - Thriving on the technical leadership path
Keavy McMinn shares insights from her career about staying on the technical leadership path - Take control of your career: A personal growth framework
Aaron Randall talks about a Personal Growth Framework – a low-lift way of helping identify areas to grow that are exciting and valuable for career development. - Get your work recognized: write a brag document
Julia Evans offers excellent advice for helping you and your manager give you credit for everything that you have achieved and learned. - Your professional growth questionnaire
Rands offers some questions to ask yourself on a regular basis to help you grow in your career - Impostor syndrome and individual competence
Jessica Rose gives an excellent introduction to imposter syndrome and some practical advice for helping yourself and others overcome it. - Staff-plus engineering learning resources
A great set of resources for to help you understand what a Staff Engineer does and to help develop your skills to be or become a Staff Engineer - Year Compass
A framework to help you you reflecting on your progress last year and think about what you want from the next
Mentoring and being mentored
Mentoring can be helpful to your own career and others
- To mentor or mentee - that is the question
Matt Bee shares his experiences of being both a mentor and a mentee and highlights the value that both roles get. - What are the essential qualities of a good mentor?
What to look for in a mentor - Why being a mentor benefits you too
Jo Frank shares her learning about what she got out of being a mentor - Places to find mentors
Gergely Orosz's places to find mentors is a great resource for both those looking for a mentor but also for people who want to become a mentor - The value of being a mentor
How being a mentor helped me develop in my own role - Developers mentoring other developers: practices I've seen work well
Gergely Orosz shares his experiences of mentoring and offers advice on making it work for you and your team - The Mentoring Club
A non-profit mentoring platform where you can find a mentor or people to mentor
Networks and support
Everybody needs support from others
- My little phonies: Friendship is money
A.L. Goldfuss on building meaningful support networks - Best community networks for CTOs, engineering managers and other technical leaders
Alphalist provices a list of networks that you may find valuable to join to extend your support network - When your manager isn't supporting you, build a Voltron
Lara Hogan's excellent advice for building your support network as an engineering leader. - A developers guide to human networking
Najaf Ali's practical advice on networking is particularly valuable if you are not sure networking is for you - What does sponsorship look like?
Lara Hogan's insightful advice on how to be a sponsor - Agile in the Ether
A beautiful community of agile practitioners who meet monthly in the ether. - CTO Craft community
A great community for senior technology leaders with 1,000's of members - LeadDev London meet up
An irregular meet up for engineering leaders in London - Leopard.FYI
Connects women (trans & cis) and non-binary engineers to vetted companies with great cultures. Leopard gathers intel on company culture, compensation, gender diversity, interview processes, and more! - Rands Leadership Slack
This is excellent community of over 30,000 engineering leaders with over 600 channels covering every aspect of engineering leadership - Refactoring
A great private community of engineering leaders (800+ members) and a library of guides to being a better leader. - SheTO
SheTO is a private network of women and non-binary engineering leaders - The Old Girls Club
The Old Girls Club is a virtual gathering space for women and non-binary people working in male-dominated industries, with a specific focus on members with 5+ years of experience. - TLDR: Tech Ladies Dinner Roundtable
Awesome women within tech meeting each other and growing a support network in the later stages of their careers
What does an x do?
Find out more about what different technical leadership roles actually involve
- What CTOs look for in a manager of managers with Meri Williams
Meri shares her experience of being a CTO and her view on roles at Director and VP level in this interview from Patrick Kua - The trident model of career development
Patrick Kua suggests thinking abnout 3 tracks for development. 1. Management, 2. Individual Contributor and 3. Technical Leadership. - Evolving CTO roles: The 5 modern archetypes explained
Sergio Visinoni outlines different archetypes of CTO that he sees - Beyond Staff Engineer
Alex Ewerlöf shares his experience of being a Senior Staff Engineer - What is a Staff+ Engineer?
[BEHIND A PAYWALL]
Nicky Wrightson outlines what is involved in Staff+ Engineer roles - Staff archetypes
Will Larson shares four distinct archetypes for the role of Staff Engineer - Being a Principal Engineer at the FT
Anna Shipman describes the role of Principal Engineer - 4 CTOs on what a chief technology officer at a startup actually does
Tomas Vocetka, Lethabo Motsoaledi, Gwen Le Calvez, and Marta Jasinska all share their experiences of what a CTO does - Becoming a CTO
Kevin Goldsmith gives a great introduction to the role of a CTO at different sized companies and shares a few tips to start you on that path - 5 Engineering Manager archetypes
Pat Kua explore 5 Engineering Manager archetypes commonly found in the industry - From Developer to Architect (and back again)
Matthew Rudy Jacobs shares his own story of being a Technical Architect - What does a VP of Engineering do, again?
Raffi Krikorian outlines key aspects of the role of a VP of Engineering - What is the difference between a CTO and a VP or Head of Engineering?
Daniel Doubrovkine shares his take on the differences between these roles - Defining roles: CTO and/or VP Engineering
Sanford Dickert's take on the difference between these roles
What do you want?
Things to help you explore what you really want to do
- Future Map workshop
Sarah Ing shares her process for thinking about what you really want from your next year - How to opt out of the career ladder
Jean Hsu's valuable reminder to consider what you really want when thinking about your career - ⛵️Sailboats, fishermen, and careers
Sheril Mathews offers some insightful questions from for thinking about the 'rules' that you are using to develop your career. - If you could have your way...
...what would your role look like? An excellent question from Jean Hsu to free your thinking. - So you think you want to manage?
Julie Zhuo shares what a good manager does and does not do to help you think about whether this is work that you want to do.
Stories
Be inspired by other people's stories
- Extraordinary Tech Stories
An amazing set of stories showing with wide variety of career paths into tech - Interviews with founders, CTOs, CEOs and CPOs about their careers
Many of Ben Henley-Smith's interviews are fascinating and they cover a wide range of topics around developing in your career