Engineers: Stop trying to win other people's game

Summary

Last week, I wrote about a category of softwares engineer companies should be seeking: masters of context— the people who know when to slam the gas, when to tap the brakes, and how to shift their entire approach without being asked.The response to that post was significant. I received quite a few comments proclaiming how rare it was to find an engineer that fit the bill.That’s fair!But it’s not because only a tiny sliver of engineers are capable of working this way. They’re rare because very few engineers are ever taught to optimize for these skills, and even fewer companies reward them during the initial hiring phase. So the market ends up under-producing exactly the kind of talent it desires.This post is for the engineers who want to be in that “rare” bucket.Think about your career along two simple axes:How you workWhat you work on (the skill frontier)Established terrain: Mature, saturated technologies, vs.Western fronts: Domains where the rules are still being writtenWhile these axes describe the mechanics of your work, there is also an operating system underneath: product thinking and customer centricity. This operating system determines whether those mechanics actually translate into meaningful outcomes.The engineers who advance fastest today live in the top-right corner of that map:They deliberately choose frontier domains; they work on the right stuff.They’re masters of context in how they work, and guided by a clear understanding of customer outcomes.That combination is what I call the Western Front Innovator.Today’s post is about how engineers struggling to progress professionally can intentionally steer their careers toward that top-right corner.If as part of your journey, you find yourself asking questions such as:“How can I progress with learning React?”or“How can I become an expert with Kubernetes?”Stop right there!Swarms of others have been developing expertise with technologies that emerged last decade for… at least a decade. It’s already their superp...