The Unexpected Way To Get Promotions as a Software Engineer

In today’s episode, we have Nash Raghavan, Director of Engineering at Netflix.

Nash spent the early part of his career in consumer hardware working at companies like Palm and HP

One thing that he learned from these first jobs was that competing in the consumer hardware space is really tough, so he wanted to move out of consumer hardware space and joined LinkedIn for 7 years as head of engineering for Lynda.com which is now LinkedIn engineering

There he learned a ton about distributed systems and cloud computing.

After taking a career break, he eventually joined Netflix as part of their studio engineering organization.  

Timestamps: 

00:00 - Intro

01:12 How difficult was it to move from one industry to another?

02:47 How to make sure you're not scoping down your creative thinking

04:30 How do you make sure you are not bringing in bad habits to another company

06:28 What is involved in a product reboot

09:18 How to encourage a team to change something that's already working

13:14 How does being a part of a product reboot help your career?

15:00 Making an impact...how important is that for an engineer?

19:26 How do you make decisions on a day-to-day basis?

21:41 How to find opportunities to work on product reboots

24:19 Advice on engineers taking breaks

26:27 The Netflix Culture

28:25 Unique challenges of building software for partners compared to building software for end consumers

32:12 Biggest myth/misconception at each career transition, what was the truth?

34:23 - Is management right for me?