You Can Go Your Own Way: Navigating Your Own Career Path

Abstract

Career paths seem obvious at the beginning: start your job, climb the ladder, retire. When we apply this pattern to a technical career, however, that general pattern raises some questions: Do I have to become an architect or a manager to make it to the next level? Do I have to stop coding? How can I advance my career if I am fundamentally uninterested in either?

In this session, I'll share what I learned in the course of my journey to Distinguished Engineer, sharing insights and ideas that you can use to find and shape opportunities and create a career that will make you happy while still stretching and encouraging you to grow.

Speaker

Erin Schnabel

Distinguished Engineer @RedHat

Erin Schnabel (@ebullientworks) is a Distinguished Engineer and maker of things at Red Hat. She is a Java Champion, with over 25 years under her belt as a developer, technical leader, architect and advocate, and she strongly prefers being up to her elbows in code. Erin learns (and teaches) by coding ridiculous things, like "Monster Combat" (https://github.com/ebullient/monster-combat), an application that makes monsters fight each other to explore application metrics; "Pockets", a command-line application that works with relational data (https://github.com/ebullient/pockets-cli); and “Game On! Text Adventure” (https://gameontext.org) for exploring cloud native development.

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Date

Monday Mar 27 / 04:10PM BST ( 50 minutes )

Location

Whittle (3rd Fl.)

Topics

staff+ career personal improvement

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