Advice For Individual Contributors

A concise list of advice.

This is a guide on how individual contributors (ICs) can achieve outsized impact within a software organization.

Make Breakthroughs

Individual contributors have the special property that they can get real work done. Managers are often constrained because their leverage is through people, which often means slower and steadier change.

ICs can bypass this. You can work a weekend to deliver a working prototype. You can spend nights finding an insane performance optimization. You can Proof-of-Concept a feature scheduled for next year.

So much of a company is bound by risk assessment, expected timing, and prioritization minutiae. Finding a genuine breakthrough cuts through the bureaucracy and fundamentally shifts the timeline.

If this work is so important, why isn’t it prioritized? It’s not prioritized because if you make it part of the day-to-day, it gets bogged down and dragged out like everything else, often resulting in sunk time with nothing to show for it.

By taking a calculated risk on yourself—the risk that you might fail—you can deliver a breakthrough that dramatically increases your value and the company’s. Occasionally, ICs should go all-in, work intensely, and find a breakthrough.

Act Like A Leader

If you want to be a leader, you have to act like one.

That begins with being optimistic, not starting or encouraging big commiseration sessions with more junior people, not trying to set up an us-vs-them dynamic against “management” or treat other company structures like the bad guy.

Many senior ICs think it’s their job to be the union rep for ICs. The only thing that actually accomplishes is undermining your own credibility. It doesn’t deliver the value that would make people’s bonuses go up, and it doesn’t change hearts and minds.

But you also shouldn’t be a shill for management.

Like it or not, your job is to be an unaffiliated, unbiased leader, and doing what’s right in individual situations.

Take Specific Ownership

Another critical part of being an IC leader is owning things.

One of the specific virtues of the manager position is that it provides radical clarity on ownership - you own the team. With that ownership comes risk, reward, and accountability. The team wins, you win. The team fails, you fail.

Too often ICs get slotted into being 1 of n engineers on a team, becoming a non-unique, non-owner of outcomes. In fact, agile development processes often specifically encourage interchangeable resourcing.

But ICs should avoid taking this too far. Ownership and accountability are critical forcing functions for growth. You should ask yourself - what specifically could fail that would cause me to get less rewards? What specifically could do well that I should uniquely get credit for?

If you don’t have a good answer, you don’t have enough specific, named ownership. While ownership can come in many forms (services, features..etc), the core unit of ownership is a goal. If you don’t uniquely own any specific goal you are shortchanging yourself.

Send Regular Updates

Send regular updates.

Bi-weekly is usually a good cadence.

Send your boss a doc that says what you’re doing, what you need help with, and cc their boss.

This serves multiple functions

• Builds awareness of your work

• Builds awareness (and record) of your needs

• Forces you to reflect on the above

• Forces you to make sure you’re making meaningful progress on things every two weeks

• Forces you to write regularly

• Gives you more time in 1:1s to do important discussions (context already set on status)

• If your update is thoughtful, it also makes your own boss look good, which is strictly positive for your career

The benefits of this ritual are truly massive.

You’ll be shocked at how much better you get at self-management when forced to do it.

You’ll be shocked at how often your boss/boss’s boss can solve your problems faster when presented this way, and how grateful they will be for the clear updates.

PS if you use AI to write these updates you’ve destroyed their purpose entirely and are subtracting value.

Talk To Senior Leaders

Talk to people more senior than you in the org chart.

Seriously - book time with senior people, or ask them for 30 minutes to discuss what they think is valuable and worth doing. Senior leaders absolutely love this, because it lets them get more important work done through their team, and it often doubles as a therapy session.

Talk to five people from different parts of the business.

Then go solve one of those problems.

This is an extremely underrated activity because:

• It helps you get both perspective and ideas on ways to help the business

• People don’t do this nearly enough. Too many people do recurring skip levels that are boring and useless; too few do meetings with senior leaders they haven’t talked to.

• It’s good for your brand

• If you solve a leader’s problem, they’ll be in your corner for a very long time. If you can solve a leader’s big problem five different times, in my experience they’ll literally be an ally or direct sponsor of your career for life

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