Shine Bright as an IC: Growing Yourself As Your Company Grows

Being part of a growing company is a fantastic opportunity to level yourself as an individual very rapidly, if you choose to grasp it. You've already immersed yourself with context and you might be the go to person for a key area of the organization. Having a brag document of all your great code and adventures in writing software is only achieving half the job.

Getting involved in "extra curricular" activities such as hiring, coaching / mentoring, writing proposals and building your community in and outside of your organisation can really boost your career. You need to have technical mastery but also craft your organisational relationships to be a leader that gets key projects unblocked and delivered.

This talk brings an insight into what these activities look like and I want to give a cheat sheet on how to be great at them from day one. If you are eyeing up getting to Staff+/Principal level, this is the talk for you.

Key Takeaways:

• Many folks seem to think that just technical mastery and getting deeper into the code will get them that promotion. We will touch on why that is not the case in many organizations.
• We will cover being a great interviewer, how mentoring & coaching can fundamentally alter your perspective in how you write code, having really productive 1:1s with your colleagues and how this all links up into building a persona within your organization.
• We will use examples from my own career and mistakes I've made just focusing on the code to steer the audience towards making career investments that actually get them noticed within their organizations.