What's your biggest career mistake?
Both Alex, Rahul, and many mentors in this group are very successful with a wonderful career trajectory.
I'm curious when you generally look back at your career, what are some career choices that you regret making?
Equipped with your current knowledge, if you have the opportunity to start from scratch again, what would you have done differently?
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Discussion
(4 comments)- 23 months agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
Not sticking with ML / AI as a Stanford grad in 2014 and switching into mobile. If I had gone deeper into Artificial Intelligence, I'm sure I could have met very interesting people and built something very cool.
At the same time, I have no regrets about my career. I'm grateful for the people I've met and the projects I've been able to work on. And all things considered, I'm very lucky!
- 13 months agoMid-level Software Engineer [OP]Taro Community
I think I've made the same mistake too (not going deep into AI)! Back in the day, there was no Tensorflow or Pytorch. And the complexity of the deep nets was pretty low. Haven't realized that AI will have this much potential.
As you are a staff engineer now, does switching into the AI domain mean that you might have to downgrade to senior level? Is that the main hurdle for not switching to AI recently?
- 23 months agoStaff SWE @ YouTube, Engineering Mentor, SWE Guru
What a thought-provoking question!
I am blessed to have the opportunity start my career with launching Google Pay in India, as one of the core engineers on payments backend; and since then bolstering YouTube's ecosystem with a 16x growth in non-advertising revenue. I started my journey as competitive programmer who was used to writing deterministic coding solutions under time pressure. Within 6 years, I lead 45+ engineers to solve real-world problems and build products for billions of users!
Looking back, I took a generalist SWE approach in consumer facing domains: I have superficial knowledge of various technologies, somewhat decent product and program management skills, and a good collaborative personality.
I believe that to be a successful generalist, you need to have experience with as many product and technical domains as possible -- somewhat like how consultants have problem-solving experience in various industries. I personally haven't had that, having spent a long time at YouTube. Even at the expense of pace of growth, perhaps I should've ventured to different domains -- ads, search etc., and worked closely with a few other technologies -- like frontend, AI etc.
I still have a long career to go, and I look forward to expanding my generalist expertise :)
- 03 months agoMid-level Software Engineer [OP]Taro Community
Wow! Leading 45+ engineers within 6 years is just simply damn impressive!
