Climb the Career Ladder with Focused Expertise
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One of the key strategies for gaining seniority is expertise. Whether you're trying to get promoted or land a new job at a higher level, you need to demonstrate mastery over a valuable skill or domain.
Here's what most job seekers get wrong about this: They think that being an expert" is reserved for senior or principal engineers who have decades of experience. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Instead of assuming that expertise is a distant goal, realize that you can become more knowledgeable than anyone as long as you narrow the scope appropriately. For example, in one afternoon, you can become the go-to person in your team of 10 for anything related to configuring logs for your company's version control software.
In a company with any amount of sophistication, each person's knowledge is incomplete. There will always be problems that fall into the category of If we had more time, we'd look into that." Your goal is to identify which of these gaps could make a meaningful business impact. It need not be purely technical; it could be about search engine optimization (SEO), launch processes, or improving the developer experience.
This is actionable advice if you're on the job market. If you're looking for a job, especially as a junior engineer, your #1 goal is to demonstrate mastery over a technology or domain.
This means you should be selective about how much you claim to know on your resume. If you mention every programming language or analysis tool you've ever touched, you are making it impossible for someone to identify your level of expertise. This is especially true when you have less than 4 years of experience.
When you claim to know everything, I'll assume you actually suck at everything. You should be able to teach me something about each of the projects or technologies you mention, e.g. discuss tradeoffs or interesting technical decisions you made.
Yes, you do disqualify yourself from certain jobs where you didn't list the technologies they were looking for. But those jobs weren't a good fit anyway.
-Rahul
ICYMI: Top Programming LanguagesIf you're taking our advice and looking to develop expertise in a programming language your team needs, check out Spectrums Top Programming Languages interactive. There you'll find out what programming languages are the most important in your field, and which are most in demand by employers.
ICYMI: Data Centers Seek Engineers Amid a Talent ShortageThe rapid development of AI is fueling a data center boom, unlocking billions of dollars in investments to build the infrastructure needed to support data- and energy-hungry models. This surge in construction has created a strong demand for certain electrical engineers, whose expertise in power systems and energy efficiency is essential for designing, building, and maintaining energy-intensive AI infrastructure.
ICYMI: In Praise of Normal" EngineersYou don't have to be a superhero to develop valuable skills either. In one of the most popular articles on IEEE Spectrum this month, Charity Majors breaks down the dangers of lionizing the 10x engineer," writing Individual engineers don't own software; engineering teams own software. It doesn't matter how fast an individual engineer can write software. What matters is how fast the team can collectively write, test, review, ship, maintain, refactor, extend, architect, and revise the software that they own."