I'm looking for career advice and wisdom, especially from those who've made it further along in their career.
I'm turning 39 next week, and I'm currently a L62 SWE at Microsoft (this is one level below "Senior", levels start at 59) First, I'll say that I realize I am extremely privileged to be in this position compared to most of the world and I am thankful for that!
I did not go to college, I have slowly worked my way up from minimum wage tech support job 20 years ago to I.T., SysAdmin, DevOps/SRE, and now a SWE II. I am on track to be promoted a "Senior SWE" in the next 3-6 months.
What I'm trying to figure out is, given my current position, age, experience etc, how far can I realistically go, and how do I get there? I work with a lot of people who are 24-28 years old and some of them are "Senior" SWEs, and Principals who are ~30. I don't begrudge them, they are smart, focused, and made far fewer mistakes than I did as a young person. I experienced some setbacks in life and also pursued other interests (being a musician) more seriously than career in my 20s and 30s. But I have around 15 years of full time job experience, and my current role does not really reflect that.
Now, I have a family, and I am serious about pursuing seniority and higher earning potential. I don't think I'm the smartest guy in the room, but I have a lot of experience, and am a dedicated and driven engineer.
I appreciate your thoughts.
- Director of engineering
- VP of engineering
- Principal engineer
You have 15 years of experience and Microsoft in your CV. That’s all what it takes to impress non-faang companies. Research a bit what it takes to pass interviews for the positions listed above. Prepare yourself for a month or so and start applying. Fake it till you make it, you have all the “raw material” others would die for.
Basically at higher levels it generally isn’t about better tech skills, but more about having more responsibilities and a larger impact. Some teams have way more opportunity for growth - so try and find a team that suits you. As an older engineer hopefully you have a lot of those soft skills already!
Sometimes the easiest way to a promo is interviewing. The system design interview in particular is where you can help your case in earning a higher level.
This progression is pretty impressive! Congrats on getting where you are!
Going forward, do you want to continue on a technical path or you could be interested in software management, product management, etc.?
If the technical path sounds more interesting for now, are there any areas that you wish to explore? Is there some software expertise you'd be interested to develop? (could be AI, real time graphics, cloud architecture, databases, etc.). The people I know who are far in their career have clear expertise areas and spend a lot of time communicating about it both internally (mostly by mentoring juniors) and externally (by giving talks and contributing to open source).
Also, you can try asking here for more input: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/
> I don't think I'm the smartest guy in the room, but I have a lot of experience, and am a dedicated and driven engineer.
Experience and hunger are more valuable than raw intellect. (An unmotivated, inexperienced super genius honestly sounds like an exhausting employee.)
Additionally, the person claiming to be the smartest in the room usually is not.
> made far fewer mistakes than I did
Mistakes are opportunities to learn, so if you made more mistakes, you had more opportunities to learn.
Focus less on what you perceive as shortcomings when compared to others and focus more on your strengths.
I guarantee you bring value to the company that the 30-something principal engineer does not, and it isn’t a matter of cost.
40 is 39 + 1. Don’t let it be more than that.
You're already farther than me. I'm in my 30s and only had one promotion my whole career.