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Comment by lalitmaganti | Hacker News Reader

It's not that I want to avoid the career metagame (I would argue I haven't so far) but that the career metagame is different depending on your environment.

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I know this is off topic but if you ever have the inclination to write about it, I would be really interested in reading about any books, people, experiences, professional lessons learned, etc. that have been helpful to you on progressing along a non-spotlight technical focused engineering path.

I'm in a different domain (aerospace) but am trying to carve out a similar career path and am always looking for more to learn about just being a good engineer.

> if you ever have the inclination to write about it

I definitely plan on writing a lot more about this in the coming months :) After seeing Sean's own posts and the fact this post resonated, it feels like there are people out there who might be interested in this sort of thing :)

> books, people, experiences, professional lessons learned

Books not so much but one thing i've been very fortunate to have is very good mentors I can learn off. I've had the same manager from when I first joined Google and honestly I've learned so much just from watching him work and interact with people. Also a couple of senior directors/engineers in other teams as well who I always make a habit to catch up with.

If you're interested, stay tuned to the blog :)

I've done plenty of low level IC type mentoring: "make sure your MR has a good description" "use library XYZ instead of DIY" "you'll need to go to Design Review for this project" etc. But I'm curious about the other angles as well; on one hand I could do a better job of guiding juniors. On the other hand I could do a better job of recognizing a good vs junior manager, and potentially help them improve. Many times I've seen managers ask "how could I help you better?" to which I had no good answer. You're the manager, that's your job to figure out :-)

This - I've been very honest with my manager that I won't play "the game" in this organisation - I don't really have to, there is plenty for staff engineers to tackle to have a long career without the yoke of management.

Sure, but Google is a very unique environment and the advice is unlikely to work at the majority of employers.

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