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
Good work doesn’t need to be complex- The first thing to understand is that good projects don’t have to be technically complex. This is especially true when developing your proof of concepts/demo. Too many people make the mistake of equating complexity with quality. It is no doubt true that most useful, large-scale systems require many moving parts to run efficiently and securely. However, this is the product of many rounds of iteration. You’re much better off building something simpler, to serve as a demonstration of your ideas. This can be challenging because boiling down a complicated system into its essence requires a deep appreciation of the system and its components.
Rahul’s project was simple at its core, but that didn’t diminish its utility (another example of a simple solution that brought lots of value is Instagram’s like button). We have covered the story of a software engineer that was able to speedrun 4 promotions in 4 years by leveraging the simple solutions applied correctly. Over-engineering is a costly mistake, one that should be avoided when you can. Rahul was able to construct a simple but high-value product based on two things- 1) Keeping in touch with developments that happened in his industry and 2) His intuition about how those developments might be leveraged to create solutions useful to the end customers. Developing the latter is difficult work, and will be the subject of its own article (send any resources you found helpful for this topic). Let’s discuss the former first.
Keep track of your industry- As developers, it’s extremely important to stay in touch with the ongoings of the field. Paradigms come and go, people develop no-code tools/libraries to make lives easier, and new libraries allow you to automate huge chunks of workflows. To be an effective software developer, it’s critical to stay on top of the field to stay in touch with important ideas, tools, and frameworks. Following high-quality content creators, and research sources, and being part of multiple communities is a must in order to do so effectively. PS- this is not a replacement for learning the fundamentals. It is the fundamentals that will allow you to judge which trends are worth learning about and will allow you to pick up new ideas quickly.
Strip what you can- When building out proof of concepts, it is extremely important to have a project that can be modified and tested quickly. In the video, Rahul shared that making simple changes (such as changing color) to the Pinterest app could take 5 minutes to build. So he used a skeleton app, where he could test out changes quickly. This allowed him to integrate those changes into the main app in a more deliberate manner, after understanding possible implications. Your proof of concept has to be simple to run and test so that you can get it out there. Your manager will not have the time to jump through hoops and set up environments. Wherever you can, make the process easier- give them an exe, reduce loading times, make UI simple to follow, etc. This is true in app design, but critical when demonstrating a new proof of concept. The status quo bias is a very strong force, and it’s important that you don’t give them an opportunity to reject the app w/o testing things out first.
Bias to Action- It’s okay to go in without a fully sketched-out plan. When solutions are small-scale (proof of concepts should not be Frankenstein’s monster), you’re better off stumbling around and building things over twiddling your thumbs. Your journey into development will give you insights that sitting around will not provide. There are many times when sitting around and thinking things through is valuable. However when nothing is built, getting the ball rolling never hurts. Don’t be afraid to jump in and start stirring the pot. Your fingertip feel and knowledge will be great guides into the correct development directions.
No one can give you control of your career, that is something that you have to take for yourself. People are busy living their own lives. This means that if you can go ahead, build something valuable, and present it- people will give you the leeway to work on it. The best way to have your dream job is to invent it, and that requires you to take initiative and drive results. Rahul’s story is a great example of how this can be done effectively.
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