Developer Tea

This episode marks the 11th anniversary of the show, and I want to celebrate by continuing our Career Growth Accelerator series. Today, we’re moving beyond the "autopilot" mode that many engineers find themselves in and learning how to define goals that are uniquely yours so you can find the specific challenges that will actually move the needle.🎧 Episode Notes: Going from Autopilot to PurposeMany of us operate on instinct, chasing goals like "get a promotion" or "make more money" without understanding the "why" behind them. This episode is designed to help you interrogate those automatic responses and find a path that is optimized for what you uniquely value.Break the Autopilot Loop: Understand why common goals like "getting a promotion" are often just survival mechanisms intended to keep us safe within social norms rather than reflections of our true values.The "Never Again" Pressure Test: Use the mental exercise of imagining you will never get another promotion; if this causes visceral anxiety, it’s a sign that your goal is rooted in a sense of safety rather than self-actualisation.Move from Post-Rationalisation to Purpose: Instead of backwards-justifying the status quo, learn to be honest about what you truly desire—whether it's the affirmation of intelligence, the freedom of discretionary time, or a specific mission.Create Instructive Goals: Discover why a goal must be personal and specific to be useful; a generic goal provides no roadmap, whereas a unique goal acts as an instruction for what to do next.Find Your True Challenge: Once your goal is defined, identify the specific obstacle standing in your way that requires ingenuity and isn't already decided for you.The "Asterisk" of Solvability: Learn the most critical rule for picking a challenge: it must be something you can reasonably solve given your current means to avoid falling back into paralysis and autopilot.📮 Ask a QuestionIf you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com/contact📮 Join the DiscordJoin our supportive community of engineers working to improve their lives and careers at https://developertea.com/discord.🧡 Leave a ReviewIf you're enjoying the show, head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show.

This episode kicks off the Career Growth Accelerator series, focused on the specific hurdles faced by mid-to-senior level engineers, managers, and leaders who are looking to move to the next level. Before diving into specific strategies, I’m addressing the fundamental prerequisite for real growth: getting out of your own way. We often block our own progress because our ego conflates our self-worth with our career position, making it impossible to see the real problems or lessons we need to learn. In this episode, I share a vital mental exercise to help you disconnect your identity from your job title and begin diagnosing your career challenges honestly.Understand why protecting your ego is one of the most dangerous ways to control your career, leading you to discount valid reasons for stagnation or failure by focusing only on external factors.Discover the fundamental shift needed: disconnecting your self-worth from your career aspirations. Your position is merely a fact and has little bearing on your innate value or capacity to succeed more generally.Learn how to use a distancing thought experiment—viewing your situation as if it were an acquaintance’s story—to remove your ego from the diagnostic process and gain necessary clarity and perspective.Explore why effective growth advice, whether for promotion or post-mortem analysis, requires focusing almost exclusively on the diagnostic aspect ("What happened and why?") rather than building justifications based on your worthiness or past performance.📮 Ask a QuestionIf you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.📮 Join the DiscordIf you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today!🧡 Leave a ReviewIf you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.

Are you a mid-to-senior level engineer or leader who has hit a career roadblock or found yourself stagnated? I'm launching the new Career Growth Accelerator series, focused on the difficult, non-obvious hurdles that prevent you from moving to the next level.In this foundational Episode Zero, I cover the critical prerequisite for growth: Getting Out of Your Own Way. Our ego often protects our self-worth by blaming external factors for failures, making honest diagnosis impossible,.• Learn why protecting your ego is the most dangerous way to control your career.• Discover the fundamental shift: disconnecting your self-worth from your career aspirations to gain clarity.• I introduce a distancing thought experiment to help you diagnose the real problems blocking your path.• Start focusing on the diagnostic aspect—What happened and why?—to build real momentum.Subscribe now so you don't miss out on this series!

When you hit a career roadblock, the methods that worked for you before often stop working. Today, I’m diving into why that happens, and why the first and most critical step in progressing past stagnation isn't doubling down on skills, but clearly defining the problem standing in your way.Problem Definition As A Path for Career GrowthMy goal on the show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. This episode is for everyone trying to grow, especially if you have hit some kind of roadblock. Most career progression, especially early on, happens somewhat automatically through natural experience, domain expertise, and skill accumulation,. However, as you progress, you will hit missing rungs or roadblocks—things preventing you from progressing in promotions, positions, or specific projects.When blocked, most people rely on the same things they did before, such as gaining experience, reading blogs, or building side projects, using a "scattershot approach" to try and guess what their managers want,. Unfortunately, relying on activity that previously got you ahead will not necessarily work later in your career,. As you climb the career ladder, the number of positions available decreases (the pyramid shape), meaning that even being highly qualified may not lead to the next role if it simply doesn't exist,.If you haven't defined the problem, you have no way of knowing whether the actions you are taking will help you progress where you want to go. Instead of continuing the never-ending cycle of self-improvement, you need to step outside your own context and try to see the problem from an external viewpoint, like a consultant. Recognizing the core problem—like a lack of available roles—allows you to shift your focus away from only improving your skill set and toward solving that specific organizational problem, perhaps by expanding the necessary scope for the role to open up,. Redefining the problem may mean shifting your goal from getting a promotion to convincing someone to let you perform the activities associated with that higher role, which is a different process entirely. In almost every circumstance where you are blocked, there is a problem that you need to work on defining better; this is the first step towards moving past the roadblock,.Explore why the natural career progression that works early on—driven by experience and skill accumulation—slows down and fails when you hit later-stage roadblocks,,.Discover why relying on a "scattershot approach" of extra activity, like reading blogs or building side projects, is often ineffective when facing a structural block in your career path,,.Understand that if a desired role doesn't exist within the company structure, becoming more skilled or qualified won't solve the organizational problem,.Learn how redefining your career problem—for instance, shifting from needing a promotion to needing permission to do high-level tasks—can open up entirely new pathways for growth.Challenge your self-improvement cycle by stepping outside your own context and defining your career roadblock as if you were an external consultant,.📮 Ask a QuestionIf you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.📮 Join the DiscordIf you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today! I'm also in the community, and you can message me directly there.🧡 Leave a ReviewIf you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keeps us focused on what matters to you.

We often look for ways to reduce the load on our brains, seeking shortcuts and optimizations to get ahead. Sometimes this works, reinforcing the belief that we can hack our way around every problem. However, this episode addresses the truth that many fundamental aspects of your career require something difficult, messy, slow, or inefficient, demanding deep thought and repeated failure.This episode details the difficult truths about facing the most essential challenges in your career:Understand the Hard Path: Recognize that many aspects of your career, skill set, relationships, and hobbies require something difficult, messy, slow, or inefficient, demanding deep thought and repeated failure.Identify Your Primary Obstacles: Pinpoint the hard things you are procrastinating on, such as developing essential domain knowledge, deepening relationships with crucial co-workers or your manager, or getting the necessary "reps" of difficult building and practice.The Path to Mastery: Realize that becoming a great engineer (e.g., a great Python developer) is achieved not by reading books or finding perfect tools, but by building things over and over. This practice includes receiving feedback from peers and applying what you learn under challenge.The Pain of Decision: Explore why it is difficult to even decide to do a hard thing. By committing to the challenging path, you are choosing to cut off your optionality and giving up the hope of finding an easier, lower-investment alternative.Sustaining Commitment: Understand that initial motivation or an energetic feeling will not carry you through the obstacle when the development process becomes awkward, slow, or frustrating. Staying committed requires reinforcing your core underlying reason for doing the hard work.The Reward: Recognize that if you successfully address the hard thing you know needs doing, everything else in your life and career becomes easier.🙏 Today's Episode is Brought To you by: Wix StudioDevs, if you think website builders mean limited control—think again. With Wix Studio’s developer-first ecosystem you can spend less time on tedious tasks and more on the functionalities that matters most: ● Develop online in a VS Code-based IDE or locally via GitHub. ● Extend and replace a suite of powerful business solutions. ● And ship faster with Wix Studio’s AI code assistant. All of that, wrapped up in auto-maintained infrastructure for total peace of mind. Work in a developer-first ecosystem. Go to wixstudio.com.📮 Ask a QuestionIf you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.📮 Join the DiscordIf you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today! There are other engineers there going through similar things in their careers, and I am also in there, where you can message me directly.🧡 Leave a ReviewIf you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you.