4 hours of work for a promotion- How a Pintrest Android Engineer made waves with a weekend project[Storytime Saturdays]
How you can stand out with meaningful projects that enable your promotions
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Are you a software engineer struggling to get noticed for promotions?
Do you work in a big organization, with lots of bureaucracy and limited freedom? Perhaps you’re a new grad/employee who wants to get ahead in their career.
Whatever the case, the easiest way to move up the career ladder and gain more freedom is to find meaningful projects and leverage those during your negotiations. But to accomplish this, we need to make sure we can actually work on these meaningful projects. This requires a lot of cajoling and maneuvering to convince your managers to allow you to spend your time on these projects- which can be a very time-consuming process (especially in tech, where mass layoffs are a canon event).
Fortunately, there is an alternative. Instead of waiting around for approval, what if you build a useful side-project and present that to your organization? Presenting a useful proof of concept to your manager/supervisor will be a strong way to convince them to take the project forward. Done right, this will allow you to lead a project with outsized impact, which is crucial to securing your work for the future. In this article, I will be covering the story of how Rahul Pandey- a YouTuber and Software Development Mentor- was able to deliver a project like this during his time at Pinterest. By putting in a few hours of hacking, he built a project that served as the basis for a Pinterest feature that was covered by in media and even got him featured on the company website. He shared his story in this video, and we will be going over his story to discuss the major lessons from the video.
It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission
-A generally useful maxim
How to build Side Projects for Promotions
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