Bruno Rey shared lessons learned from his career from junior to staff and beyond at QCon San Francisco. He suggested thinking about career growth in circles: self, team, company, and customers. Success comes from understanding broader impacts, embracing compromise, and acting fast, especially in startups, Bruno Rey mentioned. He advised seeking mentors for honest feedback, being open to unexpected or crisis-driven opportunities, and thriving in change with an anti-fragile mindset.
Software engineers should develop ambition, increase their capacity, and seek opportunities to grow their careers, Rey mentioned. He advises being proactive, broadening your influence by learning from peers, and stepping outside your comfort zone. Software engineers can keep a brag doc to ensure that their work is visible and plan their growth with realistic long-term goals.
Rey suggested thinking about career paths as concentric circles:
What’s best for me? What’s best for my team? What’s best for the company? It’s also important to put yourself in other people’s shoes: is this what’s best for our customers? Is it what’s best for our stakeholders?
Try to see how your work fits into your team, how your team fits into the business unit (or division or pillar or whatever your company calls it), and finally, how that works for the company, Rey said. Understand why sometimes we need to compromise on some solutions even though we don’t want to. Having that mindset will make you think like a leader, and will take you faster to a leadership position, as he explained:
I used to focus too much on perfection, basically thinking inside my bubble and aiming to write software that I would enjoy maintaining. Once I started looking at how other people operate (in smaller companies, working closely with e.g. founders, the CEO, and sales department) I understood that what I was doing was not what the company really needed.
At a startup, you need to stay on top of the market, Rey said. You need to aim to always deliver results, act fast, and get early feedback. He suggested taking customers’ complaints seriously and going the extra mile to provide angry users with an immediate solution to their problem, even if you don’t really solve the bug’s root cause as an engineer would like.
Rey mentioned that software engineers should find role models and mentors:
No one can thrive in a company by working alone. And no one can see themselves objectively. We look at life through a filter, through a lens shaped from our previous experiences and learnings.
We learn to evaluate things by assessing some variables and quantifying them, but it’s really hard for a single individual to get the full picture right, Rey said. A second pair of eyes helps. This is especially true when doing introspection, Rey explained:
Sporadic feedback is good and it helps a lot, but a mentor can provide you with a long term following of your growth and that’s very valuable.
A good mentor will talk to you openly about your shortcomings, and more than likely, those will be blind spots that you didn’t even think about. Or maybe you thought they were unimportant, or maybe you thought that you were doing a good job at that, but you actually aren’t, Rey said.
Career opportunities aren’t always nice, and aren’t always clear or explicit, Rey mentioned:
We all love nice opportunities when the team or the company is growing. They need to fill some positions above you and it’s an ideal situation. It’s also very hard to come by, and shouldn’t be considered as the only type of opportunity there is.
Sometimes someone above you leaves the company or the team, sometimes it’s their decision and sometimes it isn’t. You can choose to put yourself as a candidate to backfill that role, Rey said. While this is an opportunity for a better title, in many cases it can put you in a challenging situation. The person leaving was maybe facing a demanding context and that may not be the best training scenario for you in this new role, he mentioned. While it can be a nice opportunity, you have to understand that it may come with some risk.
There are also career opportunities during a crisis, Rey said. A big portion of the market has gone through difficult times these last years, so a lot of engineers were exposed to company crises, small or big:
If you manage to navigate that crisis properly, you can find ways to come out stronger when things calm down. You can be the new subject matter expert in an area of your knowledge. You can become one of the leads of your team if the team shrinks. Or you can thrive in a new team/position if you are moved.
Rey referred to the anti-fragile concept, described in the book “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and mentioned an article by Damian Schenkelman posted on X which explains how anti-fragile applies to startups in particular. You need people who are able to work in the “disorder” context of a startup, look for people who welcome change and thrive in it, who are able to learn by themselves and especially who are able to handle ambiguity and adapt, he concluded.
