Shane Hastie speaks to Akhilesh Gupta, a Principal Engineer at LinkedIn, about the journey to a staff-plus role. They discuss the responsibilities of a principal engineer, the importance of soft skills, creating a frictionless developer experience, and the decision-making process between management and individual contributor roles.
To aspire for a staff-plus or principal role, engineers should focus on creating impactful solutions, identifying meaningful problems, and developing soft skills like understanding the business, aligning with non-engineering leaders, and effective communication.
A frictionless developer experience is crucial for optimizing business output, and it can be achieved by integrating design, product, and engineering iterations, utilizing efficient coding tools, optimizing build times, and streamlining the entire workflow from requirements gathering to debugging in production.
Deep dives
Growing into a Principal Engineer Role
The podcast explores the journey to becoming a principal engineer at LinkedIn. The guest highlights that a principal engineer at LinkedIn is responsible for setting technical vision and architecture for various products. They also emphasize the importance of growing other engineers and enabling their success within the organization. The guest suggests that engineers aspiring for a staff plus or principal role should focus on creating impactful solutions, identifying and solving meaningful problems, and developing soft skills. These skills include understanding the business, aligning with non-engineering leaders, and effective communication.
Developing a Frictionless Developer Experience
The podcast discusses the significance of a frictionless developer experience and how it can positively impact business output. The guest provides insights into improving the development process, such as integrating design, product, and engineering iterations, utilizing tools like CodePilot for efficient coding, optimizing build times, and reducing the time it takes to deploy code into production. They emphasize the importance of streamlining the entire workflow from requirements gathering to debugging in production to enhance the developer experience.
Transitioning into a Management Role
The podcast explores the topic of transitioning into a management role from an IC (individual contributor) position. The guest highlights the need for engineers interested in management to develop soft skills like leadership, written communication, and collaboration. They emphasize the importance of building relationships, understanding individual team members' needs and aspirations, and investing in their growth and success. The guest suggests that the satisfaction in management comes from enabling the success of others rather than personal code contributions, and they encourage engineers to embrace this new mode of deriving satisfaction.
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods spoke to Akhilesh Gupta, a Principal Engineer at LinkedIn about the journey to a staff-plus role.
Read a transcript of this interview: https://bit.ly/449KG8c
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