Summarizer

This is huge advice for people who want to climb a given career ladder. The overwhelming majority of organizations will say they want you focused on real user problems, but actually want you to make your boss (and their boss) look good. This usually looks more like clearing tasks from a list than creating new goals. At Google there are both kinds of teams.

It’s crazy how fast the tables turned on SWE being barely required to do anything to SWE being required to do everything. I quite like the 2026 culture of SWE but it’s so much more demanding and competitive than it was 5 or 10 years ago

I think this is true for essential complexity. And indeed it's one of the best reasons to release early and often, because usage helps clarify which parts of the requirements are truly required. But plenty of projects add quite a lot of incidental complexity, especially with technology choices. E.g., Resume Driven Development encourages picking impressive or novel tools, when something much simpler would do. Another big source of unneeded complexity is code for possibilities that never come to fruition, or that are essentially historical. Sometimes that about requirements, but often it's about addressing engineer anxiety.

15 years in leadership worked at 3 jobs lead major transformations at retail where nearly 100B of revenue goes through what i built. Ran $55-$100M in a yearly budget… over 300 FTEs and 3x contractors under my or my budget,…largest retailer in google at that time…my work influenced GCP roadmap, Datastax roadmap, … much more all behind the scenes…. besides your capabilities and ability that had to be there to get you in those positions - but once you are in those positions - only that mattered is politics and asskissing. I know so many people smarter than me, always stayed lower b/c they didn’t know how to play politics. Only reason i never got higher was I didn’t know how to play politics and kiss ass any more or any better. The top people are all who kissed each others ass and looked out only for their cohort (e.g. people who were in same positions as them in early 2013). So teach your kids to kiss ass and play poltiics.

So teach your kids to kiss ass and play poltiics. Or to stay far away and do something useful with their lives.

For some, that's not only their competency but they enjoy it. Is building relationships and status less worthwhile than building code or bridges or houses or painting pictures? People get to choose the game they play.

Because that's not how they perceive their works. Instead it is "advocating for one's own team and passion", "helping others advance their career", "networking and building long-term connections".

You need to have the right personality. Either actually enjoy the game, or have an unsatiable (fear-driven?) need for status, or something else of this sort. We don't get to choose our personalities, though some limited modifications are possible - see treatments for personality disorders, for example.

Well, I think that it depends on perspective and motivations. Kissing asses/politics can be treated as skill used for different purposes. Imagine your ambition is to build bridge, skyscraper or fancy opera house. To be chosen as the one for such projects, you must play many games including politics. (I assume good intentions, selfish ones are possible too, but are they worth discussing?)

This is OP's lesson 20: Eventually, time becomes worth more than money. Act accordingly. I’ve watched senior engineers burn out chasing the next promo level, optimizing for a few more percentage points of compensation. Some of them got it. Most of them wondered, afterward, if it was worth what they gave up.

we are human being interacting with other human beings. what you call "kissing ass" is just learning to influence and work with other humans. It is by far the most useful skill to have in workplace. But don't worry. continue your disdain of it, includeing calling it negative names, and watch your career stagnate.

> The existence of people who succeed in pushing for inferior solutions, and managing to leave before it becomes clear Guess this is just random evolution at play. Some companies will pay a bigger price than others. And not everyone even recognizes it and pinpoint it like you did. But overall influencing people is on net good skill for the individual. And what is good for the geese is good for the gander??

> I've literally never had the thought of "how do I influence other people." Why is that considered a valuable skill? If you're a software developer you must have thought "current priorities are not right, we should do X for the users / Y to get better quality" and tried to influence your management to get those priorities moved. Maybe by starting a campaign with your users so the demands come from multiple services and not just you, or by measuring quality indicators and showing how what you want to implement would improve them etc. That's why you want to start getting coffee with people, maybe go outside with the smokers. It can take months of "work" to get people to propose the idea you want done. But this kind of influencing won't help your career.

I don't disagree with you, except that a career can stagnate. Maybe you are already working in your ideal role, solving cool problems every day. Maybe moving up the ladder nets you more money but less of what you actually want in life. Less a comment for yourself and more for the reader by the way. It is important to know what you want and strive for that.

I agree -- the career advancement bent of this article is the most off putting aspect.

> The top people are all who kissed each others ass and looked out only for their cohort (e.g. people who were in same positions as them in early 2013). So teach your kids to kiss ass and play poltiics. After more than 20 years in big tech, I agree, this is basically it. Your work can only get you so far. If it makes you feel any better, you can reframe politics as 'people systems' and work on optimizing the relationships in the system. Or whatever. But the gist of it is to find a powerful group and try to become a member of that group.

True. I used to count myself in that category. Do the work and stay away from games. I was also thinking of myself as clever, self-respecting by doing hard work and leaving daily politicking for others. And now sometime back I got like 2-3 dressing downs from managers, reason being I am not taking leadership feedback seriously enough and mending my ways. This despite I am only one with left with knowledge of legacy system. Clearly I am pretty dispensable while thinking otherwise all along. No outside prospects considering market situation, miserable current workplace ultimately due to my choices. So in end just no winning for me by not playing game.

Politics and leadership is a responsibility. By avoiding it, you're setting a bad example. Once you know how an organization works, you should help lead it. If we consider a family, you're essentially saying you'll only "do the work": brush teeth, feed kids, clean up, but not take on any responsibilities for the actual goals of the family. Not pushing to have your kids learn things, just executing somebody else's ideas, driving them to sports; not improving the living situation by perhaps investigating if you should get a bigger car. Nothing leading, only executing the ideas of your spouse. I exaggerate of course, but there is something there.

Thats sociopathy in corporate world. Big companies have often 20-40% of such individuals, ie finance has way more (as I see daily) and concentration rises as you rise up in ranks. The thing is - you don't have to play that game. Sure, you will miss some promotions to largely meaningless titles, much more stress and pressure in such work, and a bit of money but in most companies the money is not worth it (ie work 50% more to get 20% more compensation, in net income rather 10% more since extra income will be hit with high marginal tax bracket in most countries). But main reason is - what you do 40+ hours weekly for decades (and especially how you do it) seeps back in into you even if you actively try to prevent that. Is it really worth tainting your personality permanently with more sociopathic behavior and thinking, with subsequent negative effect on all personal relationships and even things like personal happiness? I am old enough to see these trends among peers, they are very gradual but once you know what to look for, rather obvious. When poor such a deal is easy to rationalize since poverty can be crippling, but once beyond that quality of life should be top priority, we are here for rather short time. Otherwise most probably regrets happen later, just listen well to old folks what they are proud of and what not so much.

I’d agree on most of these but the biggest value in such a list is for the writer to actually put it on paper. You have to reflect on multiple aspects in your career and synthesise those. Reading them is close to useless, like scanning a page full of news, it all just evaporates once you start your daily work routine. The best suggestion would probably be to try and write such a list yourself IMO.

May be because you are not familiar with Addy Osmani and his work. He is known for his very high quality performance optimisation work for web for almost a decade now. So anything he has read, edited and put his stamp of authority on is worth reading.

This is why (flawed though the process may be in other ways), a company like Amazon asks "customer obsession" questions in engineering interviews. To gather data about whether the candidate appreciates this point about needing to understand user problems, and also what steps the candidate takes to try and learn the users' POV or walk a mile in their shoes so to speak. Of course interview processes can be gamed, and signal to noise ratio deserves skepticism, so nothing is perfect, but the core principle of WHY that exists as part of the interview process (at Amazon and many many other companies too) is exactly for the same reason you say it's your "favorite". Also IIRC, there was some internal research done in the late 2010s or so, that out of the hiring assessment data gathered across thousands of interviews, the single best predictor of positive on-the-job performance for software engineers, was NOT how well candidates did on coding rounds or system design but rather how well they did at the Customer Obsession round.

yeah there are ways, but is it good for your career lol Also the one person who has to review it before checking in needs to be resilient too

Read it carefully. He's not saying that these are all common values or practices at Google. He's saying he learned those lessons while working at Google. Despite the metaphor of a "lesson", a "lessons learned" post is almost never about something the author was explicitly told. It was something that you had to learn from experience, or at best from informal advice. Where you had to swim against the flow of your circumstances. I neither think Osmani means to say that Google is _against_ these lessons. Every organization as big as Google has a lot of accumulated wisdom that will help you. These are just the things which remain hard, and some of which are even harder in a large organization.

This resonates a lot. The shift from "was I right?" to "does this actually help people?" changes everything. I've found that the engineers who got promoted fastest weren't always the smartest problem solvers, they were the ones who genuinely cared about the end outcome. The hardest part is that user focus is sometimes at odds with technical cleanliness. You can ship something inelegant but useful, or elegant but slightly off from what people need. Most orgs mess this up by choosing elegance.

Almost every job in the US is primarily about pleasing leadership at the end of the day. If companies didn’t want that sort of incentive structure to play out then they would insulate employees from the whims of their bosses with things like contracts or golden parachutes that come out of their leaderships budget. They pretty much don’t though, so you need to please your leadership first to get through the threat of at will employment, before considering anything else. If you’re lucky what pleases your leadership is productive and if your super lucky what pleases them even pleases you. Gotta suck it up and eat shit or quit if it doesn’t though

I was going post exactly this! He was talking about those engineers that really exemplified, from his point of view, good engineers. And dealing with engineering managers that didn't see much use in such activity might be part of "figur[ing] out how to navigate everything around the code: the people, the politics, the alignment, the ambiguity".

There is a lot of nuance to their point. They are saying, in the long run, career wise, focusing on the actual user matters and makes your projects better. Google UX is decent and the author was not trying to comment on UX as a thing at Google. More that, if you follow the user what you are doing can be grounded and it makes your project way more likely to succeed. I would even argue that in many cases it bucks the trend. The author even pointed out, in essence there is a graveyard of internal projects that failed to last because they seemed cool but did nothing for the user.

Oh, I have no doubt they are at Google. I was just trying to say that the author was not really making a commentary on UX directly. The author was trying to make the point that understanding what sort of products and problems users have is a valid long term strategy for solving meaningful problems and attaching yourself to projects, within Google, that are more likely to yield good results. And if you, yourself, are doing this within Google it benefits you directly. A lot of arguments win and die on data, so if you can make a data driven argument about how users are using a system, or what the ground reality of usage in a particular system is and can pair that with anecdotal user feedback it can take you a long way to steering your own, and your orgs work, towards things that align well with internal goals and or help reset and re-prioritize internal goals.

His learnings from 14 years at Google. Surely we've all learned things working for employers or with engineers that don't do a thing well. In 14 years he probably also experienced great engineers come and go and start other successful businesses they very likely did not run exactly like Google.

Eh, sure. But at the same time lessons aren't learned by reading what someone else has to say. They're learned by experience, and everyone's is different. An engineer with "14 years at Google" hardly makes them an expert at giving career advice, but they sure like to write like it does. This type of article reads more like a promotion piece from self-involved people, than heartfelt advice from someone knowledgeable. This is evident from the author's "bio" page: written in 3rd person, full of aggrandizing claims of their accomplishments, and photos with famous people they've met. I'm conditioned to tune out most of what these characters have to say. If this is the type of people who excel in Big Tech, it must be an insufferable place to be.

If you can easily acquire new projects and are happy with what you do, that can be very nice. I would probably fail at selling myself

I've never needed to sell myself. $corp will advertise needing a contractor and you apply as usual. If you have the skills and experience you tend to get hired. The only difference is you don't get job security, pension or any perks. But you do get a lump sum though. Where you can then decide what's best.

Nothing novel, but all true, well expressed, and worth repeating. This should be part of every CS curriculum. #2 and #14 are tough pills to swallow. It's not enough to be right, or even have a long track record of being right. You usually have to convince others that it was their idea all along, but still advocate for yourself at performance review time.

I clicked through to the bio and am super confused. Third person, extremely long, lots of pictures with CEOs and smelling of LLM writing. Here's a sample: > His story isn’t just about writing code, but about inspiring a community to strive for a better web. And perhaps the most exciting chapter is still being written, as he helps shape how AI and the web will intersect in the coming decade. Few individuals have done as much to push the web forward while uplifting its developers, and that legacy will be felt for a long time to come. https://addyosmani.com/bio/

Few individuals have done as much to push the web forward while uplifting its developers, and that legacy will be felt for a long time to come. And modest too.

He led Chrome DevRel for many years - if you were learning about new web platform technologies circa 2010-2015 you probably ran across his writing. The bio is cringe, but the important thing to realize about these professional-networking bios is that they are sales pitches, intended to sell a person (and specifically, their experience and connections) to a large corporation who will pay them even more money. An ordinary person, with ordinary authentic emotions, is not the intended audience. They're specifically selling to people whose job is to deal with bullshit.

These lessons should be learned by every junior engineer and shared with every other engineer. I agree with the point, “Your network outlasts every job you’ll ever have,” that you mentioned. I literally know developers who aren’t actually good at what they do, but they always manage to find another job.

#3 hit hard. You can edit a bad page, but you can't edit a blank one. I've wasted weeks overthinking architecture for things I'd never built. Shipping something ugly and learning from real feedback taught me more than any amount of planning. Also #6 is underrated. Early on I thought good work speaks for itself. It doesn't. Took me years to realize decisions happen in rooms I'm not in. If no one can explain your impact when you're gone, it doesn't exist. Thanks for sharing this.

>Your job isn’t forever, but your network is. I'm very suspicious of this working in the modern technological age. Even in university I'm feeling this: it is hard to create a bond with real friends, but extremely easy to regress to anonymity and become a loner.

This is good. I worked at google and lasted less than 2 years. Many other things happening in that time - came in via acquisition, worked on backend for that, dad died, transitioned teams, etc. But I was 27-28 and couldn't really navigate that world after my first job at a startup. In some ways, I wish I'd found a way, but in other ways, I know it wasn't meant to be. It's a good list, if you want to do 10 years at Google or elsewhere, internalise that list and it's lessons.

> 17. Your network outlasts every job you’ll ever have. i mean, addy has literally been at google 14 years, i think internal network has outweighed the external one here

That's a solid set of lessons. My favorite is that Software doesn't advocate for you, people do.

Biggest lesson is you will get mass fired. So look for whats best for you, because you are the only one who can?

I feel like the best lesson in here wasn’t numbered, but in the opening statement: > the longer I’ve stayed, the more I’ve realized that the engineers who thrive aren’t necessarily the best programmers - they’re the ones who’ve figured out how to navigate everything around the code: the people, the politics, the alignment, the ambiguity. I have been banging on about this for _years_. I’ve seen engineers much smarter than me and who write much better code fall afoul of this too. Being personable and easy going and insightful for one hour in a meeting can do more for your reputation within a company than a month of burning yourself out completing more tickets than anybody else. I really wish more people understood this. At the end of the day, a manager or a project director who _wants_ you to join a meeting just because you’re a joy to be around and you may have some insight, shows you’re more valued than the best coder on the team if they’re a pain to bring into a meeting because they’re hard to talk to.

> Focus on what you can control. Ignore what you can’t. That's why I left Google for HFT. Much better life.

Insightful take on career progress. Most engineers don't talk about this.

Main lesson from 14 years anywhere should be don't spend more than two years at one job. Because otherwise you start thinking that politics matters.

A lot of lessons from Google are really lessons from a historically unique monopoly era that no longer exists. Useful context, but dangerous to treat as timeless advice.

Interview voice: - How do you actually grow being in one company for 14 years?

Love love love this. So much wisdom I wish I’d had 30 years ago. Here’s the tl;dr in my opinion, with my own paraphrase: > Approach [life] with curiosity and generosity, not transactional hustle. Everything else essentially follows.

excellent article and appreciate the author sharing his perspective which is very valuable. For me the main lesson is, don't let your ego develop from success. Any human is vulnerable to narcissism. It is an interesting phenomenon, where you can originate as a humble person who becomes successful, only to lose your great qualities, when your identity changes. With success you attract different people in your life who may be attracted only to your success and who don't have the stones to confront you on your bs. Developing healthy self awareness comes from surrounding yourself with people that love you, but are not afraid to keep you honest if you do something out of character.

17. Your network outlasts every job you’ll ever have. Maybe you're not allowed a personality after you unlock peak outlasting networking.

This feels somewhat hypocritical coming from Addy. Addy Osmani plagiarized my code and 'apologized' years later by publishing an article on his website[1] that he has never linked to from his social media accounts. I cannot accept his apology until he actually syndicates it with his followers. Seems relevant to note this behavior in light of points "6. Your code doesn’t advocate for you. People do.", "7. The best code is the code you never had to write.", and "14. If you win every debate, you’re probably accumulating silent resistance." 1. https://addyosmani.com/an-apology-to-eli/

Great post, Years following Addy. I wonder know how he manages his time, in addition to being a leader at Google, and writing such a valuable blog.

Unsure why this comment appears to be downvoted! I have followed him for a long time and learned a lot too. I always wonder the same thing about the “tech influencers” and I’d love to know more about how they structure their days. I find it difficult recently to sit down and complete a meaningful piece of work without being distracted by notifications and questions. In the last year this has been exacerbated by the wait time on LLMs completing. I would love to know how top performers organise their time.

Or to say it in his own words: "Few individuals have done as much to push the web forward while uplifting its developers, and that legacy will be felt for a long time to come." source: https://addyosmani.com/bio/