Career advice for engineers: disrupt yourself.

The careers of most engineers mirror the following fairly typical pattern, consisting of concentric circles of increasing scope and responsibility:

• Implement a feature
• Deliver a project
• Build a system or service
• Architect a platform

We are trained as engineers to find the next, larger problem and solve it. It is a well worn path by the end of which we reach a level of technical excellence that enables us to think strategically about building products and platforms. Ironically, we tend not to think as strategically about our career path and about professional growth. We follow the path of increasing scope until our growth slows; until the new problems we encounter are no more challenging than the prior ones.

I recently concluded that I had also failed to invest sufficient time to think strategically about my career. I was leading an established, business-critical engineering team of significant scope at LinkedIn. I had been pursuing that role for several years, without explicitly thinking about why I was doing so — I was on a career path of organic professional growth, one of concentric circles of increasing scope and responsibility. Nine months after taking on the role, I realized that although I was delivering results for the business, I had ceased encountering increasingly challenging problems. Effectively, I had ceased growing.

The abruptness with which that realization hit me was de-stabilizing. I concluded that I needed to disrupt my career to achieve additional growth.

I spent the next few weeks focused on identifying a new path that would be filled with new, challenging problems. I knew that over the course my time at LinkedIn, I had always worked on established products, but had never worked on high potential but less established ones. I had never been truly accountable for defining a product’s technology strategy and building an organization to execute on it. Taking on an challenge of that nature? Now that would be serious professional growth.

Suddenly, I was re-invigorated — I had found the next step in my career path.

So, if you’re an engineer like me who hasn’t taken the time to think strategically about the career path you’re currently on, I suggest you do so. Determine whether your professional growth is slowing. Ask yourself if you’re still being challenged on a regular basis. If not, survey your surroundings for an opportunity to jump onto a different path. Find one filled with new challenges and plenty of opportunities for growth.

Disrupt yourself.

You’ll suddenly realize how much professional growth you’ve been missing out on.