The Work Item - Real Talk on Tech's Toughest Career Choices
The web is full of podcasts that dole out generic career advice - “Follow your passion!”, “Keep learning!”, “Set clear goals!” This is all good if you’re just starting out, but the pointers start to lose their luster quickly as you progress and start hitting invisible walls in your growth. All of a sudden, it’s harder to get promoted, opportunities to advance become more ambiguous, and the choices in front of you aren’t as obvious as they were when you first started your job. What does it take to get to the Staff engineer level? If you want to become an executive in the future, what should you do now to maximize your chances of hitting that goal? Should you have a time-bound career map or focus on unique opportunities that pop up serendipitously? Should you try your hand at entrepreneurship, and if so - how do you build a robust safety net? For these questions and more, The Work Item is the podcast where I attempt to answer them with help from folks that went through trial by fire. They are not social media thought leaders - they are actual practicioners who have first-hand experience dealing with some of the more thorny challenges in this industry. With folks like Jason Lengstorf (Founder, Learn With Jason), Craig Hewitt (Founder, Castos), Saron Yitbarek (Founder, CodeNewbie), Rob Walling (Founder, MicroConf), Cedric Chin (Founder, CommonCog), Jason Fried (CEO, 37signals), Gennadiy Korol (CEO, Moon Studios), Mayuko Inoue (iOS Engineer, Apple), Camille Fournier, and many, many more you will get extraordinary insights that will help you unlock your career potential beyond the basics you’ll learn elsewhere.
Show episodes
If you've been immersed in the tech world for some time, you probably have heard one specific YouTube channel mentioned more than once - Learn With Jason. It's a project started by Jason Lengstorf, a former VP of developer experience at a web tooling startup (he was a head of developer relations prior to that too), tha
Jennifer Wong is a seasoned engineering manager who started her journey in civil engineering. The fast pace of the tech industry drew her in, and she stuck with it for years since making that call. In this episode, I chat with Jennifer about her transition from a non-traditional career path into software, reasons to ta
Craig Hewitt, the founder of the podcasting platform Castos, comes from generations of entrepreneurs, and his own journey builds on the experience and stamina of those that came before him. In this show, we chat about best practices for hiring developers for your bootstrapped startup, finding the right approach to deli
#81 - Making A Career Out Of A Hobby - Kirupa Chinnathambi (Product Manager - Google)
In episode 81, Den Delimarsky chats with Kirupa Chinnathambi, a product manager at Google who has built his own personal brand in what is now known as kirupa.com. Kirupa is a talented web developer, designer, writer, and packs so much knowledge in his blog that you can learn how to create great web-based experiences on
One of the things that Miriam Suzanne realized early in her developer journey is that web development is a tool - she wanted to build a website for her theater company and ended up building a career and a company around it. And not just that, but she also joined the CSS Working Group - the official standards body that
#79 - How To Get Promoted To Tech Executive - Lena Reinhard (VP Engineering, CircleCI, Travis CI)
We often talk about promotions and growth, but the moment the conversation shifts towards paths to staff or executive positions, the advice goes blank. There is very little actionable information out there that can tell you how you can get to the highest echelons of leadership. To get a clearer picture on this topic, I
