How can I transition into a an Angular Architect Role?
About Me
I've been a software developer for more than 20 years. I've been in IT for my whole career. I've worked on mainframes, UNIX systems and all versions of Windows as a Dev and Sys Admin. All my roles have been technical, ranging from what's now called DevOps to Development. I've mainly used the C family of languages: C, C++ and C#. When Angular v1 came out, I transitioned to frontend development full-time from mainly doing C#. About a year after Angular v2 came out I transitioned to that, so I've added TypeScript to that list. During the last 15 years, I've moved countries 3 times and now I'm back in the UK.
I've worked as a contractor most of the time since 2010 when I moved to New Zealand. I've had the odd permanent job when necessary, but contracting allowed me to work in different industries over a shorter period of time than would have been possible had I had permanent roles.
What I'm Looking For
I'm looking for a way to transition from my Angular contracting role to an Angular Architect role.
I imagined myself getting known publicly for Angular expertise and advising companies on Angular application architecture.
This type of role is rare (at least in the UK), so competition is high. I imagined a situation where companies approached me and not the other way around.
I just don't know how to build and execute a roadmap to make that happen.
Any advice would be appreciated.
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Discussion
(3 comments)- 1
3 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroOn top of just going to more prestigious tech companies as an Angular developer, you should increase your clout outside of work, especially if you want inbound. There are many options for this:
- Contribute to Angular open-source - Become a core contributor on repos, especially those owned by companies you're targeting. Better yet, make your own repo that becomes big. We have a good open-source guide here: "How to start contributing to open source?"
- Build big side projects with Angular - Front-end is the best for side projects as it's the most demo-able and shareable. Follow the advice here: [Taro Top 10] Building Impressive Side Projects
- Share Angular tips on social media - In particular, LinkedIn is great for sharing technical tips, especially if you can capture them in nice graphics. I gave a case study on how I got big on LinkedIn here: [Case Study] How I Get 500,000+ LinkedIn Post Views Per Week
- Speak at Angular conferences - If you have any connections in your network who have done this before (I imagine you have a couple if you look hard enough given that you have 20 YOE), ask them how they did it and try to replicate it.
Zooming out though, I'm not sure if you want to be so tied to Angular. In general, it's risky tying yourself to a particular piece of technology. I think it's better for your career to be a web-dev specialist overall and learn frameworks like React as well.
- 13 months agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
I'll share a case study that may be instructive: Doug Stevenson.
I don't know Doug personally, but he became well-known among Firebase developers since he was extremely active on StackOverflow, answering questions quickly and in great depth: https://stackoverflow.com/users/807126/doug-stevenson (313K reputation!!). He turned his expertise into a consultancy, which seems to be doing really well: https://firebase-consultant.com/.
One unfair advantage that Doug had is that he worked at Google, which increased his credibility tremendously. But you can replicate a lot his success through building an engineering brand.
- 13 months agoSenior Software Engineer [OP]Taro Community
Thank you. I'm working with Bonnie Brennan at Tech Stack Nation on the above and I hope that I might apply to the Angular GDE program in due course.
