Наталя Хандусенко Work 23 December 2024, 14:19

The IT specialist worked at Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon. Here are 3 mistakes he made early in his career

Aaron Goldsmid, a 44-year-old programmer from San Francisco, took an unusual path to technology: his parents were Broadway actors, and he was the first in his family to attend college. He became interested in computer science in high school, and received his higher IT education from Columbia University. At one time, the IT specialist did not have people around him who could give him advice on building an IT career. Now, with 20 years of experience behind him, Goldsmid shares the mistakes that are worth avoiding.

Mistake 1: Thinking about one job ahead instead of two in the future

«When I informally advise people about careers, I usually advise them to think about two jobs in advance,» Aaron Goldsmid told Business Insider .

Goldsmith advises IT professionals early in their careers to ask themselves how their next role can help them land a new job after this one.

After leaving Microsoft, Goldsmid moved from Seattle to New York City, where he grew up. He wanted to find a job in the city, and since the tech scene in New York wasn’t as developed in the early 2000s, he got a job at NBCUniversal, helping to build their streaming video service. IT specialist did well there, but he’s not sure it helped his career.

Then there was a startup, where I didn’t even work for a year because the company had problems. «I realized that I was chasing a position instead of thinking through everything down to the smallest detail,» says the IT specialist.

After that, he tried to focus on skills rather than the prestige of the roles.

When the IT specialist joined Kiva, a nonprofit microfinance organization, in 2018, he didn’t see it as a permanent job. He took the job to gain skills beyond product and engineering capabilities.

«You can move up to a management position quickly, but if you choose a less prestigious position and diversify your experience, it can mean that in the long run you will have much more advantages. If you are thinking about two jobs in the future, evaluate which opportunities will help you more in the long run. It is a marathon, not a sprint,» Goldsmid summed up the first mistake.

Mistake 2: Not building relationships with other teams in the company

«When I was working on the development team at Twitter, my job was to play in other people’s sandboxes and tweak things. The company was going through a difficult period of growth, and we had to be overly focused on hitting our OKRs. Sometimes this hurt my team’s relationships with the rest of the product development department.

We had to go into the other team’s territory and move quickly. I felt like I had to score a goal at any cost, and the problem was that «at any cost.» We often didn’t find a common language with that team, and we had to go back and build relationships after that. Looking back, I realized that I needed to explain better why we were doing this or that from the very beginning,» the IT specialist shared an example.

He says that not all teams are trying to achieve the company’s mission in the same way, so good team relationships can help you better avoid disagreements. Even if the other team doesn’t agree with yours, they will at least respect your process for achieving the task.

Mistake 3: Excessive imitation of senior leaders

Early-career AI professionals often look at people they think are successful and think, «I want to be like them.» But sometimes it’s hard for beginners to distinguish the reasons for a person’s success from their bad habits.

«Early in my career, I overestimated the importance of emulating senior leaders. For example, I saw some of them make radical statements like, ‘This is the future, or it’s not the future.’ They might get away with it because they’ve already proven their competence, but I would do the same thing and it would be a dead end. I hadn’t earned that level of trust yet, and I still had to ‘show my work’ before I could earn that trust,» says Goldsmid.

«As a senior manager at Deel, I am very careful about how I present myself to people early in my career. In large meetings, I remind myself that there will be people who are considering my role through a limited set of interactions. I don’t want to show them my bad behavior or shortcomings to emulate,» added the seasoned IT professional.

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