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It's our first profile of the year — and it's a good one. We're featuring career advice from a leader who's scaled engineering and product teams for the past decade, plus additional reads to help you out as you think through this important topic.
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Raylene Yung has had front-row seat on two very different startup rides. She joined Facebook as a new grad engineer back in 2009, and by the time she left in 2015, she was the youngest engineering director at a company that had grown from 700 to 10,000 employees. Yung then switched tracks for a four-year stint at Stripe, where she built the product management team, defined career growth and recruiting frameworks, ran the core Payments business, and spun up the company’s global engineering hub in Singapore.
She translated this crash course into a lot of heads down writing time, producing Stripe’s Atlas guide to scaling engineering teams, as well as her own handbook for eng teams (which covers everything from 1:1s to performance reviews). After a decade of working at explosive growth startups, Yung left Stripe to take some much needed time off and carve out white space to continue sharing what she’s learned.
Today on the Review, she’s doing just that as she trains her focus on a particularly important topic: career growth for engineers. While there’s a lot of industry emphasis on ladders, levels and ascending quickly through the ranks, Yung's no longer sure that’s the best way for software engineers to think about their careers.
“Companies have developed ‘parallel’ ladders between IC and engineering management tracks — and I helped with this very task at Stripe — but I’ve since come to think of these engineering roles more as progressing along a pair of joint and often intertwined steps,” she says. (See her chart below.) “Too many believe that it’s a binary choice, but in reality, the skills required to succeed as a technical lead or manager are much more connected than you think. I’ve seen first-hand that many people switch between these roles throughout their careers or even at the same company. But that career flexibility is only possible if you’ve nailed the skills of being a great team and technical leader.”
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That’s why Yung recommends engineers engage in serious introspection to deeply understand what motivates and excites them before moving on to the next step. “Throughout my career, I’ve found it’s about asking the right questions, the ones that keep you focused on growth and learning, not on moving up,” she says.
Yung walks us through each of these stages in an engineer’s career to provide tailored advice, outlining common mistakes that are all too easy to make, as well as the more productive questions engineers should be asking. Drawing on examples from her own journey, she guides us along the path from early engineer to the transition into management to the most complex and senior roles an engineer can hold.
We’ve included a preview of some of the lessons she learned below, but be sure to check out today’s article for her advice in full.
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Thanks as always for reading and sharing!
-The Review editors
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TLDR: Yung's career advice in a nutshell
If Yung had to distill all of this advice into a simple checklist for engineers pushing for career growth, here’s what she’d say:
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Additional reads on career growth for engineers:
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Three reads from the Review archives, plus three other sources we’d recommend checking out on this topic:
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What impactful engineering looks like. Back when she was an engineering manager at Dropbox, Jessica McKellar shared the tenets that have made her an effective technical leader.
The 90-Day plan that turns engineers into remarkable managers. David Loftesness (engineering leader at eero and Twitter) shares the plan he uses to help engineering leaders set their priorities, gain their footing, and assess their own performance.
The principles of quantum team management. James Everingham walks us through a different approach to management, drawing on science and machine-building.
Over the summer, Square published their framework and career ladder for software engineers.
Stripe’s Will Larson shared some career advice on his blog last year.
This excerpt from Holloway’s Guide to Technical Recruiting and Hiring digs into job titles and levels for software engineers.
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Most popular advice on the Review:
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First Round's 5th Annual State of Startups Report
This year we expanded the scope of our annual survey to cover not just founders but startup employees as well. With 950 total submissions, it’s our most detailed look yet into the challenges of operating a startup.
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