Hey my Medium Community,

It’s Thanksgiving week and I’ve been feeling grateful for what I have. Also with the pandemic, stress and burnout that many of you are experiencing, I truly want to help you, ambitious and driven professionals in tech, grow your career by having clarity on your goal and going after them with ease and momentum in the new year.

Here’s a concise roadmap for your career success:
1️⃣ Explore options and understand what’s possible
2️⃣ Perform self-assessment and put together a Personal Development Plan with milestones for the next 6–12 months
3️⃣ Execute on your plan and gain momentum
4️⃣ Smash your career goal!
To help you with your career journey, I’ve put together five resources as a bundle. …

What to do when you’ve failed a job interview

Dear {Name},

We are sorry to inform you that the decision has been made not to progress with your application for the {role}. I’m sorry it isn’t better news.

Signed,
Recruiter/Hiring Manager

We have all seen this kind of messages. Unfortunately though, it doesn’t get easier no matter how many times you have seen it.

As someone who has been on the other side of the table many times as an interviewer and have had a good track record when it comes to nailing interviews as an interviewee, I still can’t completely escaped from such rejection messages.

In this article, I’d like to share with you four steps that you can take to still walk away as a winner even after being rejected at an interview. …

3 steps to take before moving into your new engineering management role

Today, I am not going to go into why you might want to become an engineering manager but I am going to share with you how you can approach this career transition.

Note that I use the word “transition” quite intentionally here. The path to engineering management is not as simple as you may have hoped. In fact, it’s not even a career progression, hence the usage of the word “transition.”

Some tech companies put senior engineers on the same level as their engineering managers for this very reason. …

60% off original price for four of my most popular digital products

Hey you! My Medium readers!

October is one of my favourite months of the year because a lot of good things happen in October and it’s also my birthday month. :)

My birthday was on 16 October and to celebrate that, I am offering 40% discount to four of my most popular digital products.

So without any further ado, here they are.. enjoy!

Note: Don’t worry about the price mentioned in the landing pages, once you go into Paypal check out page, discount will be applied automatically for the month of October.

Career Planning Starter Kit for Managers

Forget free food and ping-pong tables, what your employees really want is their career growth. How do you keep your team engaged and high-performing in a remote environment where office perks like free food and ping-pong tables no longer exist? Well, the answer is pretty simple! Invest in their career growth. When you’re a people manager, you’re not only responsible for your own career but also for those of your team members. Researches have shown that the lack of future career development remains a key driver of employee attrition. Not sure where to start? Download the Career Planning Starter Kit for managers. This starter kit includes — Career Planning Workshop Deck (with bonus workshop template if you want to run a career planning workshop for your team), Personal Development Plan Template and Sample Career Objectives for a mid-level manager. …

Helping professionals in tech achieve their goals by providing actionable and strategic career advice is my jam. I find it very rewarding. So without any further ado, here are some of the commonly asked questions from those in the tech industry when it comes to their career. I have intentionally made them short & sweet but there are links to articles that I’ve written if you’d like to read more about any topic.

Enjoy!

A complete guide to how and why you could go about creating your online presence

Regardless of whether you want to be a full stack developer, a Kotlin expert, a DevOps engineer, or a JavaScript guru, it pays to have a personal brand. If you want to stand out amongst a sea of developers and have opportunities arriving to you and great tech companies reaching out to you, then you need to have a personal brand. So let’s include this as one of your career goals: be seen, everywhere.

For a developer, having a personal brand is slightly different than having a personal brand as a marketer, for example. In some ways, it is easier because you are going to share your lessons and knowledge, instead of trying to sell a product or service. …

Avoid negative impacts on your teams

We all make mistakes in our careers and lives. However, in our careers, some mistakes are more costly than others. Engineering managers who have the responsibility of being a multiplier instead of a maker need to understand and avoid deadly mistakes, as their mistakes not only have an impact on themselves and their careers but also on the teams that they look after. With great power comes great responsibility.

So without any further ado, let’s take a look at five deadly mistakes that engineering managers make so you can avoid making them.

1. They Deep-Dive Into Code and Code Reviews in Order to Understand the Complexity of a Project

The beauty of agile rituals is that planning and estimation are done by a team rather than one individual. So there is really no need for engineering managers to be looking into the code base and keeping an eye on code reviews in order to understand the complexity of a project. …

One of the mistakes that unseasoned engineering managers make during their interviews is that they over-index on their technical abilities. Therefore, they tend to not think too much when answering leadership, team management and project management questions and gave high-level and generalised answers.

When you only have 60 to 90 minutes to showcase your skills and experience as an engineering manager, you need to be very strategic in how you want to present yourself and your capabilities to a prospective employer. Often, this is about what you don’t do or don’t say, instead of what you do say.

I have interviewed more than 100 candidates in the past year alone, and I have seen my fair share of bad interviews. Bad interviews are the ones where the candidate knows immediately that they didn’t do well and the interviewer also knows it. In fact, there’s nothing special about it. What’s interesting is when the interview itself wasn’t too bad, but the interviewer was reluctant to put the candidate forward due to one or two things that the interviewee said. Interviewers usually refer to them as yellow or red flags. When a candidate had such flags, even if they passed other questions with flying colours, interviewers had reservations about putting the interviewees forward and hiring them. …