Sushma Gundra

While the practice of doing crap pull requests and letting your teammates correct you is questionable, and this whole story might be bogus to begin with, it does strike a chord with me. From my experience, the developers who want to spend weeks reading docs and doing tutorials before writing any code, end up not writing much code in the long run. Jump in, break stuff, ask questions! The best devs will have a PR on the 1st day: fixing some crap sample code, tutorial or how-to that no one bothered to update for a while.

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Everyday, we share and celebrate our personal wins with our professional network. But, today I am celebrating promotions (L5 and L6)  of two of my mentees (working from two different countries) at Google. No - they did not get promoted because I mentored them, instead it was 100% their leadership and impact that got rewarded with very well deserved promotions. Why am I telling this story? Because, I practiced something different from my prior mentoring camps and that paid off to hit this organizational goal.   (1) Sponsor and support: It is one thing to mentor and completely different to support one's career. Mentors can preach what good looks like in a 1:1 setting, while the supporter walks with the candidate till the end of the journey. It needs curving out time to be present in their design reviews, tech talks or hard negotiations. It helped me to calibrate their progression towards success.    (2) Make it a goal: One may ask - how did you find this much time? Well - I turned this into my organization and leadership goal. Also, I started sponsoring a few org wide initiatives that are aligned with respective promo needs of these individuals. That helped me to negotiate time with my leadership. (3) Career accounting: This is one area where I struggled in my career - managing the books of career accounting. We miss documenting where my time is spent and why? This is where we start losing focus on what is most important for the organization and career. I did spend a good amount of time with my mentees to practice this trait and improve their focus on career goals. (4) Structuring a personalized growth plan: Every individual is at a different maturity level in their career trajectory and therefore, growth strategy has to be personalized. While that is not surprising, it is important to structure with a network of feedback providers and prior promo committee members. In short, I opened up a direct communication channel to get input on where each mentee needs to demonstrate strength and that helped to remove ambiguity. (5) Upward management: Many of us struggle to manage our managers and partners. This comes in the form of expectation management, communicating priorities and goals effectively, establishing trust while demonstrating judgment and ownership. This is a specific area where I started a focused coaching within my camp and promo packets reflected those evidences. I wish all the very best to my mentees in their new roles at Google. Cheers!

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Back at Meta, I worked with a 10x engineer who grew from senior to staff in just 1 year, 5x faster than average. Here was his secret for insane growth: Embrace looking like an idiot. This engineer joined my team, which entirely did Android. However, he came from an iOS background and had never written Android code before. Instead of spending months doing tutorials and reading docs, he just started hacking code together, putting out a PR within his 1st week. It was literally some of the worst Android code I had ever seen. So I left a lot of feedback. And several other engineers left a lot of feedback. His mountain of mistakes didn't phase him at all, quite the opposite. He happily took all the feedback and asked follow-up questions, eager for more. He repeated this process constantly, and after ~2 months, he was writing more code than 95% of the team, including me. You couldn't even tell that he was new to Android. If you want to grow fast, completely let go of your fear and ego. To learn the other tactics this engineer used to learn so quickly, check out my in-depth explainer here: https://lnkd.in/giW8N4FP #techcareergrowth #softwareengineering #staffengineer #growthtips #meta

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Hello, colleagues, this Yahoo article is interesting and relatable for professionals. Here is a teaser: "Amazon has an incredibly granular list of criteria that need to be met before you can be considered for promotion, so I worked with my manager to identify the gaps in my performance, ... and I created a project for each gap that, if completed, could serve as evidence of my ability. I worked backward to create a strict timeline to finish my projects ... that helped me get systematic about my approach moving forward." https://lnkd.in/dsfvPeAk Take a lesson from this person. I seems Amazon gets very analytical when it comes to promotions. And in a company that size, it is impossible to not promote without rigid check-off type policies or whatever XYZ job promotion software. But, hey, there is a lot I will do for a $500,000 salary. Please take note of this last sentence, if anyone works for Amazon and wants a Quality Engineering Manager/Director anywhere in the world.

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I've been at Amazon a long time. When I talk about my career with Amazon, the most frequent questions people ask me are: What kept me with Amazon for so many years? When I left after nearly 14 years, what drew me away? What brought me back 2 years later? The genuine answer to each, as trite as it sounds, is the same: it's the people The people who took a chance on me. The people that, when I struggled, helped me lean on my strengths and shore up my weaknesses. The people who saw potential and invested in me. The people who modeled the value of building relationships, not just building code. The people who challenged me, made me think differently, and helped me grow. As I've grown in my career it's also those people in whom I can see potential and invest, where I might take a chance to give them an opportunity, for whom my experience could be of some value as they grow, and with whom I can continue building lasting relationships. I've been with Amazon's Global Talent Management and Compensation for about a year and a half, where our mission is to help Amazonians build rewarding careers. In that time, I've met with hundreds of people in our org and every single one of them has been driven by our mission and passionate about how we can meaningfully improve the lives of every Amazon employee. I've learned so much about how challenging, rewarding, and important taking a culture-first approach can be. This post isn't a claim that Amazon is objectively unique, I know there are amazing people in every company, though it has been my personal experience that Amazon's intentionally peculiar culture is one that encourages these kinds of behavior in people. Rather, my point is this: To deliver sustained business and customer value, your organization cannot be a feature factory. It needs to be an organizational engine that continuously inspects and adjusts its culture to grow people and relationships, according to your values, and through which you deliver for your customers. #people #relationships #culture #amazon

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