Having 1,600 contacts doesn’t mean anyone is rowing with you. In this episode, I share the life raft framework. You’ll learn the four situations engineering leaders get stuck in (empty, riding, resisting, rowing), the five seats your crew needs (peers, breadth builders, mentors, sponsors, and coaches), and a 5-step plan to add your next rower this week.
Director by 35 was the plan. Now every missed milestone feels like proof something’s wrong with you. MIT engineer and CTO Mark Herschberg shows why your career plan should work like a project plan: clear up front, fuzzy further out, and built to change when you make a better trade-off.
Looking up the org chart usually leads to two big mistakes: blindly imitating your boss’s 70-hour workweek or walking away from promotions you actually want. But what’s visible up top isn’t what’s valuable to executives. Here is how to scale your impact, set real boundaries, and step into senior engineering leadership on your own terms.
You’ve said it: “when I hit that number, then I’ll slow down.” James Reid calls this the runner-up mindset, and he lived it until a car accident forced him to stop. Winning isn’t a result. It’s a lifestyle — and most of us are optimizing for the wrong one.
SNothing was broken in Chris’s career, but after ten years, he was completely exhausted. You aren’t tired because your engineering job is too hard—you’re tired because it stopped asking anything of you. Here is how to diagnose stagnation and make your next career move without gambling what you’ve built.
Self-promotion makes most engineers cringe. So they stay silent, and the people who decide promotions never learn what they’ve built. You don’t need a personality transplant to get noticed—you just need 15 minutes and a better question to gain visibility without bragging.