Career advice given by a multinational company CTO
I was lucky enough to sit down with our CTO for 30 minutes and here’s what he told me…
What were your biggest dreams and visions when you were growing up? Did those change as you grew older or did they stay the same?
For me, the dream changed quite regularly. At first, I wanted to become a singer (obviously) , I then decided I could rule the world as a fashion designer but decided I won’t have enough “power” in the field. I switched to dreaming about movie production, the incentive being that I would get to “boss people around” (that’s how my 13 year old mind worked). Eventually, my dreams became a little more….. realistic. I fell in love with technology and after a year of indecisiveness decided to finally pursue it in university. Lots of things changed but one thing remained the same, I had a vision of being in charge. The only difference being the type of organisation I would be in charge of. All though-out university I dreamed of reaching that peak or highest level of achievement which clearly for me was becoming a CTO.
So you can imagine my excitement when out of pure luck with the help of some strategic networking I got a meeting with our companies CTO! I was ecstatic and I’m still kind of buzzing afterwards.
So let me share some of they key major takeaways I took from our conversation (which I scribbled down excitedly straight after the meeting).
You have to see the big picture
One of the first questions I asked him, obviously, was:
“Well how did you get to where you are?”
Simple, he said, you have to see the big picture. As a software engineer, depending on the organisation or product that you are working on it can become very hard to get real customer insight or as they say, to see the big picture of the organisation as a whole. You need to push yourself out of your immediate team and see the real impact your work is having on internal and external customers. Get your face and your voice heard. Get involved in customer facing issues and concerns. Build knowledge around the company as a whole and not as a tiny particle of the subsystem you are working on.
Expand and grow.
I thought about this and said
“Well what if we don’t get a chance to get close to the customer, we help as best we can and let the customer support deal with the rest, what can I do in those cases?”
Just ask 🙂
You can probably get involved in anything you set your mind to, you just have to ask for the opportunity.
You can bet the next time I’m paged to a customer issue, I will follow it though to the end!
Patterns, patterns, patterns
I was incredibly surprised when he told me that he still looks at Stats Warehouse (long term data platform) to look at patterns, statistics and abnormalities. He claims it helps him reinforce the point above and see the big picture. If you can understand, manipulate and abstract away millions of data points to spot weaknesses in the system as a whole, you’re that 50% above the rest. The hard part may not be the analysis or the pattern matching on the data but actually having enough knowledge to understand each data point on it’s own in order to understand how to use it to your advantage.
To me it all seems to lead back to the exact same point — “the big picture”.
You can’t see the big picture without understanding all the little moving parts.
Strategic career moves
I was interested to see wether he had always envisioned himself as becoming CTO or wether the path he was on naturally led him to where he is today. The answer was interesting. He told me he didn’t necessarily have a strategic plan in place in order to become CTO but he did take some strategic decisions in which paths he took with his career. For example, he made the decision to pursue business school to allow him to make better decisions. He accepted projects with the highest visibility and certainly, he learned the big picture.
I find this interesting and humbling to hear. You hear a lot of stories of people in similar positions simply claiming that it was “luck” or maybe “fate”. Those statements make me feel like I am not in control of my own future. Knowing that some strategy comes into play make me a whole lot more hopeful and in control. Don’t you think?
It’s all about the people
An obvious question but just as important as any other
“So what’s the favourite thing about your job?”
Such a confident answer — the people. He highlighted the importance of working with people who help you grow, stand alongside you, teach you and learn from you and most importantly listen and trust your judgement. I’ve heard this type of answer from a huge range of people in the company and it always reassures me. As a young software engineer, with a range of opportunities and leaps at our door its very easy to be tempted to walk away to see if the “grass is truly greener on the other side”. But, these kind of statements make me think twice.
It makes me ask myself, am I supported? Am I learning? Am I teaching? Am I confident? Do I have people I can rely on? Do I have people championing me on? Yes, yes yes!
So why make a hundred different leaps to only discover your grass was always that much greener.
Of course, I’m speaking from a place of pure contentment in the company and the team I work for. That may not be the case for you and that’s why it’s important to point this out — maybe it’s time to make a change.
Brief but powerful. I hope it made you think of your career path, company or journey in a different light. It certainly had me thinking.
“Am I doing everything to see the big picture?”
