Apprentice, Specialist, Lieutenant, Leader - Ideas on how to craft your career
As an individual contributor, should you be a jack of many trades or a master of one?
As you grow into your career, should you become a jack of many trades or a master of one? How should an individual contributor craft or shape their career?
This progression is one way to develop a relevant profile and become an indispensable engineer.
Apprentice → Specialist → Lieutenant → Leader Here are a few ideas on how to think about each point along this career pathway.
Apprentice [Years 0 to 5]
Fresh out of university, you are a blank slate. As an Electrical/Computer Engineer, you will graduate with a set of broad skills, almost never experiencing a proper chip tape-out, with the goal of working in some aspect of chip development (as an RTL designer, DV Engineer, Analog Design, Physical Design, etc.).
When you start that first job, you must be able to do a variety of tasks and become a jack of many trades. This will require you to hustle and learn quickly, but the benefit of this hustle is that you are demonstrating to your team leads that —
You have the capacity to learn quickly and contribute to the project
You can solve any problem that’s thrown your way
This helps you win the confidence of you peers and dramatically increases your chances of receiving high-quality problems to work on.
But, most importantly, becoming a jack of all trades allows you to learn how the sausage is made — the tools and methodologies used to design and validate a successful chip, how production code is written by experienced engineers, the various stages in SoC/ASIC development such as Performance Modeling, DFT, Physical Design, Timing Closure, Emulation, Verification, Post-Silicon Validation, and so on.
Specialist [Years 6 to 11]
At this point in your career, you’ve experienced a few tape-outs. So, as a natural progression you will be given the opportunity to own a meaningful chunk of the design. Use this to develop deep expertise in at least one area of your field.
Being regarded as the “go-to” person for a specific building block brings additional benefits, such as having to interact with cross-functional teams and become a proper stakeholder in meetings.
From my personal experience this is when I genuinely began to believe in my abilities to engineer, and began to feel like my contributions were making a meaningful difference.
Generally speaking, developing this feeling is a significant milestone. Your career shouldn't feel like a vast generic blob. Milestones like the one above will help you put stakes in the ground which you can look back on with confidence.
Lieutenant [Years 12 to 17]
As the lieutenant you are the linchpin of the team. You are responsible for executing several important functions. You will have to wear three different hats:
You will continue to work as a specialist to deliver a specific complex portion of the chip, in the process producing a large amount of code.
You will leverage your experience from being a jack of many trades to carry out auxiliary functions. For example, develop tools, methodologies, and workflows for the rest of the team to use.
You will be entrusted by the team director to execute their vision, and sometimes filling in for them in their absence. You will be responsible not just for the work you produce but also for that produced by the team.
You are responsible for interviewing and building a team on behalf of your team manager, and make recommendations on how to get past technical challenges. At this stage you should be developing, based on your experience, your own philosophy of how things have to be done.
Regularly reflect on your experience, make notes, and refine your craft.
Leader [Years 18+]
As a leader, i.e., a Director, Architect or a Distinguished Engineer, you now have the opportunity employ the lessons from your experience, and build products and lead teams according to your vision.
Conclusion
Apprentice → Specialist → Lieutenant → Leader This, by no means, is the only way to think about your career. But, coming up with some framework like this and understanding what role you are playing in the team will help you set effective goals and get the most out of that point in your career.
That’s it for this session. See you in the next one.
I can see a level 5 — Seer. You’ve seen so much, that you are the driving force of the industry.
But few people get to this level.