Engineering Career Growth: Five Lessons From the Trenches
Early-career engineering is a juggling act. You're absorbing a new codebase, learning the team's workflow, and trying to ship work—leaving little room for deliberate career development. Shopify developer Ebun Segun shares a practical framework for becoming an engineer who grows with intention rather than just going along for the ride.
Find and Fill the Gaps
If you find yourself in meetings where colleagues toss around terms that go over your head, resist the urge to nod along. That moment of confusion is often the most useful signal in your day—it tells you precisely where your knowledge stops. Keep a mental note when certain buzzwords crop up repeatedly; they're likely central concepts worth understanding.
Two patterns help close gaps efficiently. First, seek out teammates who already have the skills you lack and set up pairing sessions. Pair programming lets you absorb not just technical facts but another engineer's problem-solving approach. Second, remember that in engineering, understanding comes fastest through building—raise your hand for the unfamiliar parts of a project.
Own a Slice of the Work
Pick a section of the team's project and make it your territory—full stop. That means driving tasks from start to finish, making the technical calls for that area, and keeping the team updated on status and decisions. This is also a trust-building exercise: when you consistently deliver what you said you would, your lead and peers learn they can count on you.
There's a strategic payoff as well. Taking ownership gives you a clear path to becoming a subject-matter expert before anyone else. In time, your teammates will start coming to you for answers and opinions on that part of the system.
Teach to Test Your Understanding
The best check on whether you actually learned something is explaining it to someone who doesn't know it yet. After you've closed a knowledge gap, share what you know—write an article, give a short tech talk, or demo the work at show and tell. If you had to make tradeoff calls while owning a piece of the codebase, document the reasoning behind those choices. That documentation helps teammates who work with your code later, and serves as a useful reminder for you when you revisit it.
Make Your Progress Visible
Your lead has other reports to manage, and your colleagues likely have their hands full with their own work. Assume no one notices your momentum unless you tell them. At Shopify, the principle is "do things, tell people." Keep a running account of what you're working on, what you've recently learned, and what you've accomplished so that you can bring it to check-ins or performance reviews. A "brag document," like the one Julia Evans describes, is a useful tool for tracking these wins. Peers can become strong advocates for you too if your review process includes peer input.
Mentor to Build a Leadership Muscle
Once you've spent time developing your own skills, volunteer as a buddy for an intern or junior engineer. You'll help them navigate the onboarding process, teach the techniques you've picked up, and nudge them toward the kind of growth you've been practicing. Use regular check-ins to surface issues in their experience that you can raise with your own lead. Doing this work early builds exactly the leadership skills that career growth depends on—and it doesn't require a title change to start.
All of this growth requires deliberate effort. One approach is to write a professional development plan as a roadmap, then treat it as a living document you revisit and use. As Segun notes, a plan with no follow-through is just a recipe you never cooked from.
Her own journey at Shopify since 2019 involved closing gaps in React, Redux, and GraphQL, contributing technical design and documentation, speaking at external events, and mentoring interns and high school students. Growth, in other words, is not a side project—it becomes the work itself.
