Career Progression and Beyond

💬 Testimonials

As a serial community builder, I am fortunate to get to know some of the great talents like Trung Vo. I invited him come to our office to share about his tips on time management for software engineers over a lunch & learn session. He has candidly shared his professional journey over the past 10 years in Singapore to some of our team members.

Trung started as a front-end engineer then progressed to lead front-end engineer, staff software engineer then engineering manager - his current position. It’s quite a linear career progression, which is pretty amazing.

Here are some key takeaways:

• If you are a software engineer transitioning into product engineer, start by building apps on the side. Build lots of app, build more and you will learn more. (1)
• Don’t have to force yourself to set aside like 2-3 hours / day to build, you can burn out quickly. Start small and be persistent.
• Observe for areas of improvement in your work. (2)
• Try to seek feedback from your direct manager, at least once a quarter.
• You own your career.
• Go deep then go broad.
• Produce -> Organize -> Publish are good mental model with how you align your activities at work for career progression form a junior to a senior postion in the career ladder.

I highly recommend Trung for anyone who wants to pick his brain on the pathway transitioning from an IC into an EM in 10 years. — Son Le, Educator & Builder

Super grateful for the invitation from Son Le to share my tech career journey and some lessons I have learned along the way during a Lunch & Learn with the GoNetZero engineering team. It was great connecting and discussing career growth!

I have known Son since the COVID days—he is well known in the community for driving several initiatives to bring people together. One of his most impactful efforts has been the Viet Engineers Stories, which he has led for the past four years.

During the session, I reflected on my own journey and covered these four topics:

• Own Your Career
• Do Not Just Focus on Coding
• Produce, Organise, Publish
• Go Deep, Then Go Broad

Career progression is a vast topic, and there is still so much more to explore—hope to be back! Thanks Thu Thao Le, Paul Tham and Eugene Teh for attending and for all the great questions after the session.

For more details, you can check out my slides and resources here: https://trungvose.com/go25