if you're like me then you have a plan to keep learning for the rest of your career for the rest of your life if you're a software engineer then you almost certainly have heard that this is necessary this is a critical part of keeping up in your career that learning is a non-negotiable activity that you need to participate in but what exactly does that look like there's a lot of ambiguity and a lack of clarity when we're talking about lifelong learning of course there's the basic idea that you'll have new tools to learn or new techniques new services to figure out new problems to solve but you may have a misguided view of what it means to learn or more specifically what it means to progress in your career as it relates to your learning another way of thinking about this is competency as you learn new things in your career you become more competent if you learn without increasing your competency then you are essentially learning trivia you may know something but if you can't actually apply what you know to your job or to your day-to-day work well then it's not really particularly valuable to your career now it's very hard to know what you know and what you don't know and what you don't know and what you don't know how all of the things that we learn are going to apply for example learning history or learning about different languages different things that you may not have direct application for may help you form a good series of mental models we've talked about that on this show plenty of times before so learning in general tends to have a positive effect regardless of what you are learning because you build better skills and you learn better things and you learn better things you build better connections you build better background what charlie munger called a lattice work of mental models and so it's hard to say whether your learning is going to have a zero effect on your competency usually it doesn't but if we look at our careers in terms of how it matches up to our competency our intuition says that we are going to have a zero effect on our competency our competency is directly responsible for our career growth that is in order to grow in our careers we must learn and that is the only way that we can grow and that that growth is linearly connected to our competency now i'm going to break down in this episode why this simply isn't true but first i want to talk about today's sponsor this episode is brought to you by launch darkly launch darkly is feature management for the modern enterprise and it's fundamentally changing how you deliver software here's how it works it's pretty simple launch darkly enables development and operations teams to deploy code at any time even if a feature isn't ready to be released to users this is a great way to get started and i'm going to talk about how you can get started with launch darkly this means that your deployments and your public releases can be totally decoupled from each other you wrap code in feature flags which gives you the safety to test new features and infrastructure in your production environments without impacting the wrong end users and when you're ready to actually release to those users you can update the flag status and the changes are made instantaneously by launch darkly's real-time streaming architecture with with launch darkly you can innovate faster deploy fearlessly and make each release a masterpiece go and check it out get started for free at launch darkly.com it's a totally free account starting today at launch darkly.com thanks again to launch darkly for sponsoring today's episode of developer team i want to be clear about something before we go into this this uh process of debunking the idea that your competency is somehow linearly connected to your career growth and that is it is connected to your career growth but it's not linear in other words as your competency improves it's likely that your career will improve as well but it's not the only factor the wrong picture that i want to break in your mind is the picture of an engineer that gets better and better and better and better and better at engineering and i'm going to talk about that in a little bit but first i want to talk about the more specifically they become more and more technical they become more capable of doing highly technical things the problem is that there's virtually no evidence of this endless competency growth and you might imagine that your competency to get out of engineering and into some kind of promoted position unfortunately oftentimes this is seen as the jump from ic work to management work that you're not going to be able to do in the future so i want to talk about this is still seen as a promotion rather than a parallel track but this is seen as kind of graduating and it's no surprise many of us grew up with some kind of education system where we graduated out of a class and into a new class i call this pokemon promotion the idea is that as you gain more and more experience points as you get more and more competency in one form eventually you're going to be able to do more and more things and you're going to be able to do more and more things eventually one day you just transform into a new thing and you were yesterday an engineer but you cross that threshold and now suddenly you become an engineering manager but this isn't the picture of how a career progresses there are so many other factors to take into consideration one of them is quite simply that when you change from an ic role for example to a managing role these are totally different things than when you change from an ic role to a management role these are totally different things than when you change from an ic role to a management role reference or use as background some of your engineering skill set but a lot of that is going to fade a lot of it will be replaced with new kinds of responsibility new kinds of demands and so your competency is not growing in one direction it's filling in it might be growing in a new direction in some ways when you switch from being an engineer to an engineer you're engineering manager, you start over. You have to learn from the start. And the same can actually be said for high-level IC roles. If you start out as a kind of junior-level engineer, a lot of the code that you're going to be working on is well-contained. It's in a single project. You don't really have to worry about reviewing other people's code. But as you begin to expand your career, it's not that you're working on harder problems. That's not the only change that you see. You do see that kind of competency increase, but you also see new competencies, right? This is the important part, and this is why it's not linear. You begin to change what you do rather than increasing the intensity of what you do. More senior engineers tend to work on broader problems, different systems. They work in collaborative environments. Seniors... engineers or staff level engineers, even principal engineers, begin to work in more abstract formats where the actual implementation of what they're doing is done by somebody else possibly, but the complexity of what they're doing hasn't grown drastically. Certainly it hasn't grown exponentially and arguably it hasn't grown even linearly. Instead of our competencies going in kind of one specific direction for our whole careers, they tend to grow. They tend to spread. Rather than growing linearly in one direction, they tend to fill in where the gaps are. Now to be clear, we're not talking about skill gaps here. Instead we're talking about context. We're talking about responsibility. All of these kind of softer things where you apply maybe the same skill sets, maybe even elementary skill sets, but in new and dynamic situations. A very important thing to recognize here is that even competency is only one small part of how your career grows. Over time your career growth is going to be influenced by the market, very heavily influenced by your relationships. It'll be influenced by your own soft skills, which the same set of skills might take you through multiple stages of growth. So it's going to be a very important thing to recognize here. multiple promotions. At the end of the day, this is a huge mixing pot of variables. And of course, increasing your competency probably won't have a negative effect on you, but it's not the only way to grow in your career. Instead of trying to endlessly get better in areas where you are weak or endlessly add information, trying to match up to some kind of unrealistic standard of superstar, extremely, you know, kind of academic, you know, kind of academic, you know, kind of academic, level engineering talent, instead of doing that, focus on the things that you're good at and try to find more opportunities to do those things. As you continue to develop in the areas that you're already doing well, your opportunities for growth beyond just increasing your competencies will present themselves to you. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer T. I hope this was a good challenge to the intuitive model that we have in our heads, that we have to endlessly become better engineers, and that the only way to grow in our careers, the top level of our career path is kind of that zen level perfection of engineering. That's absolutely not the case, and I hope that you can grow in your careers every day by focusing on doing the things that you already do well. Thanks so much for listening to this episode. Thank you again to LaunchDarkly for sponsoring. Today's episode, head over to LaunchDarkly.com to get started for free today. Thanks so much, and until next time, enjoy your team.