The Engineering Leader

DRIing Your Career

You are responsible for—the DRI (directly responsible individual) of—your career. Who else would it be? Your career is not a place for passivity—this is a place for clarity and ownership of your decisions and the trade-offs associated with them. This advice is given out a lot, but we also have to remember to take that advice—especially when things aren’t going the way we want them to, for reasons that feel out of our control.

Conflating career growth with promotion is a common failure mode in ICs and managers alike, as promotion is often a political game, out of your control, or is the responsibility of your manager. As a result, defining career growth around promotions is a disempowering and ineffective way to approach your career.

In this section, we’ll work through what it means to be the DRI of your career by figuring out what you want from your career and how your current job fits into that (or doesn’t), making a plan for your own professional development, and recruiting the resources you need to succeed.

I find the mindset of DRIing your own career incredibly helpful, both as an individual who has always felt like the DRI of my own career and as a manager, because I think it makes the boundaries of what you can and can’t do for other people clear.

What does it mean to be the DRI of your career?

• Understanding your career decisions and optimizations

• Setting and executing on career goals

• Becoming more coachable

• Knowing when to move on (and to what) ...