An Exponential Growth or A Linear Growth-Which path are you treading on as a Developer?

As a Developer if you were amused as to why a few of your friends careers are taking off on an exponential career trajectory while that of others  seem to be on a linear path.

You can read on or listen to what my observations have been for such a difference in career trajectories among the developers we see around.

The typical approach to a career path as a developer is to see oneself getting promoted from SDE-1 to SDE-2 and so on to SDE-4 and maybe then to Team Lead to Tech Architect to Head of Engineering or something along those lines. This is a linear approach. This would typically take 20-30 years of your career.

However, there is an another path.

A path of choosing to expose yourself to very very challenging situations. Like being part of the team that is scaling an application from 1 Million users to 100 Million users or being part of a team that grew from a size of 2-3 to 20 developers or working on re-architecting a product to make it fundamentally faster, etc. When large opportunities come up, people look for people with such experience than people with a certain senior job title.

So if you are a developer figuring out how to set your career for success, then you should definitely look out for such interesting and challenging opportunities. Though this path might seem risky in the short-run, it will definitely be very rewarding in the long run.

PS: If you are interested in taking such challenging opportunities, then check our career's page.

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