Transcription
I started coding in 1984. CTO, founder, exit survivor. I've made money and I've lost it. If I'd started over, I'd change seven things. Not the tech, the career moves. I wasted years playing hero instead of architect. Three of these will make you uncomfortable. One will piss you off. If you're stuck, this is exactly why. Watch it all or go back to firefighting.
I've watched trends pretend to be the future and fail. Stacks change. Names change. Problems stay the same. The lessons that mattered weren't about frameworks. They were about choices. I gave away a decade being useful instead of valuable. I fixed things that shouldn't have been broken. A motorcycle crash forced me to stop and start to think. It's pretty brutal. It's pretty effective. If you get to the end without skipping, you're ahead.
I thought being helpful made me promotable. Wrong. It makes you replaceable. Every f you run to teaches the team to call you. You become the person who fixes things, not the person who prevents them. Leadership is judgment, not presence. If I started over, I'd practice a strategic no. Say no to half the requests right away. Force triage. Most emergencies are just panic dressed up like work. Automate the rest. Document the fix. Train someone else to do it. Handle only the real 20%. That's where the leverage is.
Good work doesn't speak for itself. It ghosts. Management doesn't see your nights. They see the outcomes. You're paying an invisibility tax every quarter. If I started over, I'd keep receipts from day one. Weekly, three bullets. What shipped, what you unblocked, what you prevented. 5 minutes every Friday. Send it monthly. Tidos wins to business impact. Don't say fixed bug. Say protected revenue by reducing off failures. Quarterly, walk in with 12 weeks of proof. Control the narrative or someone else will.
Tech isn't the whole job. The people who win are the ones who speak business. VPs care about revenue, cost, and risk. If you can't tie your work to those, you're invisible. Learn three metrics: CAC, LTV, and time to value. Every project brief should answer which one you're moving. If you speed on boarding, you reduce time to value. Say that, repeat it. Promoted devs don't just ship features, they explain why those features change the business.
Politics isn't handshakes and fake smiles. It's influence. I used to think politics was gross. In the meantime, others were basically shaping the road map. You're either at the table or you're on the menu. Spend 10% of your time on political capital. One coffee a week with someone outside of your team. Ask what keeps them up at night. Volunteer for crossf functional projects. Ask the questions everyone is thinking. Access gets you influence. Influence gets you a seat.
You can't fix culture from the middle. Broken cultures don't heal around good work. They absorb you. I gave bad companies years they didn't deserve. That was time stolen from my future. Use a 6-month verdict. First 3 months, observe who gets promoted. Next 3 months, test the system. Ask for stretch work. At 6 months, decide. If politics beats craft, leave. Loyalty to a toxic org is self-sabotage. They'll replace you in 2 weeks.
Being a great coder is a tool, not a strategy. Competent people get promoted because of positioning. How people talk about you when you're gone is currency. Stop grinding elite code and start grinding impact. Be the person who prevents incidents, not the cleaner. Propose the architecture review before the outage. Be the translator between tech and product. If you're ignoring how you're frame, you're losing.
Don't expect opportunities to find you. Design the conditions that make them unavoidable. Market your work for credibility, not vanity. Build external proof from day one. Write, speak, teach. Let people know your name before they interview you. Network before you need to. Talk to VPs and CTOs to stay warm. When I left my last role, I had multiple offers. That wasn't luck. That was design.
Seven mistakes. Condense. Those are platitudes. These are traps. You're saying yes too much. You're invisible. You're speaking the wrong language. And you're staying too long in bad rooms. Frameworks you can actually use. Link is in the description. 30,000 subs. I'm opening 10 slots for one-on-one calls. This isn't coaching for comfort. This is for people stalled in the same level for years. If you're burnt out or invisible, this is for you. Not for juniors, not for the comfortable. 45 minutes. We build a 90-day plan. If you don't qualify, don't apply. Form in the description. I'll reach out. I wasted years learning this. You got it in 8 minutes. You have the skills. You're missing the strategy. Your career is your responsibility. Take it or don't. Your choice.