Overcoming Career Plateaus
Uncommon and Practical Strategies to Reignite Growth and Motivation
If you’re like me, your engineering career started in the spirit of strong motivation, high expectations, and endless energy for delivering new projects.
However, as the years pass and tangible impact becomes increasingly difficult to see and measure, this drive for excellence and endless career opportunities starts to diminish.
You might change your project, your team, or perhaps your job, but at the end of the day, no external change really changes how you feel.
You’ve hit a career plateau.
Career plateaus don’t happen due to a lack of talent or effort. They are a natural phase that arises from repetitive tasks, diminished challenges, or a misalignment between personal values and professional roles.
If this resonates with you, know that you're not alone. And more importantly, there are strategies to reignite your growth and motivation.
Active Boredom
It's possible to be knee-deep in tasks, meetings, and deadlines and still feel bored. I call this state "active boredom”—your hands are busy, and your calendar is full, but your brain is on autopilot, and you don’t feel fulfilled.
Active boredom often creeps in unnoticed during a prolonged period of time when your work doesn’t resonate with your values and goals. You are walking a path that leads, at best, nowhere and, at worst, in the opposite direction to where you’d like to be heading. You find yourself:
Going through the motions: Completing tasks out of obligation rather than interest.
Lacking passion: Feeling indifferent about successes or milestones that once excited you. Sometimes, you might even feel indifferent about the failures of projects your team or the company itself works on.
Avoiding reflection: Sidestepping questions about your career satisfaction or possibilities for improvement.
Ignoring these signs can lead to prolonged dissatisfaction. While a job change might seem like the solution, without understanding the root cause, you risk repeating the same pattern elsewhere.
Actionable Takeaway
You’d be surprised how many people know what they don’t want in their careers but at the same time don’t know what they want. I was one of them for a long time. And no, “more money” is not enough if you are looking for a fulfilling career.
Set aside a few hours this week (I find weekends to be better for long-term planning) and clearly outline what you’d want to achieve in your career. I wrote an article Career Progression For Software Engineers: How To Own Your Success, which contains steps and questions to help you with this assignment.
There is one more benefit of having a defined career plan: By focusing on the steps you should take to achieve your goals, you can make your 1:1s with your manager much more effective and targeted.
The Power of Diverse Perspectives
Engineering is, by nature, rich in specializations. Whether we’re talking about frontend, backend, data, infrastructure, or ML, these specializations are required because those fields are huge and growing even more every year.
However, staying within the confines of your technical specialty can become comfortable and stale. You write code, debug, repeat. But engineering isn't just about lines of code. It's about creating products that make a difference.
Therefore, to reignite your passion and see the true impact of your work, consider stepping beyond your usual role.
Cross-functional collaboration breaks down the walls that keep you in your comfort zone. When you start interacting with other teams, design, marketing, or customer support, you see how your work fits into the larger puzzle.
By seeing multiple perspectives, you begin to understand the real-world impact of what you build.
Asking "Why does this feature matter?" means you're considering user needs, business goals, and market context. This transforms you from a narrow specialist into someone with deep expertise in one area and a broad understanding across multiple domains.
This transformation doesn't dilute your skills. It amplifies them. You bring valuable insights from different perspectives, making you more adaptable and effective.
You're not just coding. You're contributing to the product's success.
Actionable Takeaways
This week, schedule a time to engage with someone outside your team. Ask them about their work, challenges, and how it intersects with yours. You can join a demo session of another team, an architecture review, or sit in on meetings with product or customer service. Understand their challenges and how they relate to your work.
Learn about the underlying problem your product solves. How does your work influence revenue, user retention, or growth? What are the areas that cause the most customer pain? Are there some 80/20 tasks (aka. low-hanging fruits) that would greatly benefit users?
The Hidden Assets
In engineering, technical knowledge (hard skills) is often prioritized over soft skills. However, skills like emotional intelligence, storytelling, negotiation, persuasion, and leadership are very much needed for career advancement and work satisfaction.
Improving my soft skills in the areas mentioned above has been a highly motivating activity for me over the last year and has brought me a considerable amount of fulfillment.
The opportunities for learning in the soft skills space are infinite. I want to discuss one concept I’ve been focusing on for some time now. This area is often overlooked, but it’s one of the best ways to influence your work and align it with your values and goals.
Communicating and "Selling" Ideas
You might have the most innovative solution to a problem, but if you can't communicate it effectively, it will be as good as nonexistent.
Effective communication, persuasion, and idea-selling isn't about manipulating others. It's about clearly articulating your vision so that others understand its value.
Why does this matter? Because every project lives or dies by the buy-in it receives from stakeholders. Whether you pitch to management for resources, collaborate with other teams, or convince clients, your ability to convey the importance and benefits of your ideas determines their fate.
There are three main aspects you should pay attention to when presenting and pitching your ideas:
Understand The Problem: We are returning to the idea of perspectives. Problems are rarely single-faceted, and you can bet that if you consider only one perspective (which in software engineering is usually a technical complexity), you’ll find it very hard to create a compelling argument.
Understand Your Audience: Tailor your message to goals and level of technical understanding of your target audience. Not adjusting the message to the audience is the biggest mistake I have seen SWEs on all levels of seniority make.
Ask yourself:What problems do they face?
What do they hope to achieve?
Is my idea aligned with their goals or going against it? Or even worse, are they completely indifferent to it?
Should you communicate more details or strategy?
Craft a Clear Message: Based on the two points above, create the message you want to present. It should be clear what the problem is, why it has occurred, how you propose to solve it, and what the outcomes and benefits will be.
Of course, your idea can still be declined. However, improving your ability to articulate your vision clearly and make others listen with attention is something you will benefit from in the long run. It’s a skill that will help you when you search for your next job, apply for promotion, or decide to start a company and build your own product.
Summary
You might have noticed that most of the advice in this article can be summed up to:
Understand what you truly want and then take action in that direction.
In my case, and I strongly believe it applies to many of you, both the understanding and the action are rooted in looking at work and career more holistically. Career plateaus are not so much about the external elements as they are about discovering who we are, where we want to go, and what the best ways to get there are.
So what are you waiting for?
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