"career path" entries
On leadership
Dinner conversation turns into a career retrospective. Food for thought for leaders and leaders-to-be.
Toss Bhudvanbhen co-authored this post.
Over a recent dinner, my conversation with Toss Bhudvanbhen meandered into discussion of how much our jobs had changed since we entered the workforce. We started during the Dot-Com era. Technology was a relatively young field then (frankly, it still is) so there wasn’t a well-trodden career path. We just went with the flow.
Over time our titles changed from “software developer,” to “senior developer,” to “application architect,” and so on, until one day we realized that we were writing less code but sending more e-mails. Attending fewer code reviews but more meetings. Less worried about how to implement a solution, but more concerned with defining the problem and why it needed to be solved. We had somehow taken on leadership roles.
We’ve stuck with it. Toss now works as a principal consultant at Pariveda Solutions and my consulting work focuses on strategic matters around data and technology.
The thing is, we were never formally trained as management. We just learned along the way. What helped was that we’d worked with some amazing leaders, people who set great examples for us and recognized our ability to understand the bigger picture.