How to Get Ahead of 99% of Software Engineers (Starting Today!)

Key Takeaways

I have seven tips for you today my life took a surprising turn when it was one of the biggest acquisition at the time I became a multi-million there sort of overnight opportunities just don't fall into your lap because what's considered Cutting Edge right now may be completely Obsolete and I have seven tips for you today these are tips to help you get ahead of your competition in your 20s so that you can achieve success in your software engineering career hello I'm Jean a formal software engineer probably like many of you watching this a lot of people have been asking me about my background something a little bit different about my background is that a while back my life took a surprising turn when the startup that I was working at got acquired by Facebook for $19 billion you may have heard of the company called WhatsApp it was a well it still is a mobile messaging app and this meant that by the time I turned 29 I became a multi-millionaire sort of overnight so today I'm going to share my journey but I also want to talk about the lesson that I have learned to hopefully also help you stand out in your 20s as a software engineer what did I do in my 20s to get to where I am today a lot of people will probably attribute My Success to luck and I won't deny that luck played a big part especially in becoming the 19th engineer to join WhatsApp and being part of the 55 original members of whatsa before the acquisition I think I read that it was one of the biggest acquisition at the time of the acquisition and while luck certainly open doors for you making luck work for you often involves stepping out of your comfort zone silken Valley really offers a wealth of opportunities this is where you find the multi-millionaires the CTI Millionaires and billionaires and I am actually just one of 12,890 multi-millionaires in silkon Valley and it might make you wonder why is there so many millionaires in silk and Valley well silk and Valley is a tech hub it's where startups take root and money flows if you're seeking high paying jobs or a chance to work on a groundbreaking project this is where you need to be it is where I discover my path to success and I believe you can too when I joined WhatsApp it had a significant following in Europe and in India and South America but not so much in Asia or America where most of my family and friends are from so when I told people that I got a job at whatsapp people would tell me you know shouldn't you pursue a better paying job or a more prestigious better known company but that was a point in my life where I felt like I'm done following the rules if you haven't seen my other video go watch that it's called shatter your shs so I had already been out of college for a while started working um at multiple jobs and I decided I want to go back and work at a startup and I saw a lot of potential in WhatsApp I thought the founders were really experienced the product was pretty interesting but most importantly I thought it was an exciting opportunity and a new challenge that I could tackle and that seemed really fun for me so what I want to say is that opportunities just don't fall into your life you need to be in the right place at the right time and you want to also surround yourself with the right people Tech is always evolving really fast and staying ahead of the curb requires a lot more than just embracing challenges and taking risks it's also about continuous learning Tech is always rapidly changing staying ahead of the curb obviously requires more than just taking calculated risks and embracing challenges so let me share another story back when I was in college studying computer science smartphones did not exist and it never really crossed my mind that something like smartphones could be a thing in the future we never talked about it in class in one of my classes we talked about 3D printing and how that's the future and like 3D cameras was a thing but we never really talked about smartphones which is interesting because WhatsApp was a mobile messaging app when I started working at whatsapp I knew nothing about smartphones I had just started using smartphones actually for my personal use just about a year before I started working at whatsapp I am not an early adapter generally so I was basically stepping into the world of Android and iOS with no prior education or experience or knowledge pretty much along the way I had to teach myself and learn things as I was working on projects at work I was always reading online documents and reading books in Tech things have always been changing really fast and people are always really surprised think about when the internet first came out smartphones first came out and you will always encounter new challenges that you've never even thought of before and you're going to have to learn to tackle new projects new technology and dive into things that you have no clue about because what's considered Cutting Edge right now may be completely obsolete in a few months or a year and I know this process can can be a little intimidating for a lot of people but I do believe that's not just about tech as AI develops more Industries are going to start changing and even if you don't work in Tech I do believe that technology will be bringing changes to all Industries across so changes are pretty inevitable unfortunately so if you're going to have to learn new stuff to survive in the future anyways why not be in Tech because Tech is where Innovations come from Tech is where the money is Flowing right now and Tech is where um people get to make decisions about the future not just for tech industry but for everybody in the world which leads me to my next tip being a good programmer is just the starting point the ability to execute and communicate and work well with others will also be really important in your career even with really strong coding skills you still cannot foresee everything that's going to happen to the project that you're working on sometimes there's going to be setback or unknown bugs or things that you couldn't have thought about this means that you need to understand the broader impact of your work and be able to communicate it well with other people so that other people also understand the context and the impact and the significance of your work many software Engineers say I want my work to speak for itself but the reality is different to illustrate let me ask you a question do you know exactly what everybody else at your company work on unless you work for a really tiny startup you probably cannot answer that you probably don't know what Bob from whatever Team Works on you cannot specifically know what every single person that your company is working on this means that everyone else at the company also has no clue what you're working on if you want to be recognized at work you need to be able to talk about your work in a way that makes sense to other people and also in a way that other people would care about how is your work impacting everyone else at the company and as you progress your career in Tech the coding skills will be less and less important and the ability to manage the perception of your work and the impact will get more and more important and if you feel like your coding skill is the most important thing in your career right now it probably means that you're not senior enough yet keep that in mind as you progress your career there might be a point in your career where you think about my advice but that being said you still need to work hard which is my next TI developing a strong work ethic and embracing discipline is one of the most critical influences of your success and how you can get ahead of others this is a little controversial but I don't really believe in the conventional idea of work life balance especially when you're learning something new or starting out your career achieving the perfect balance when you're growing and you're trying to learn something new is really difficult and it's probably not going to be realistic for a lot of people unless you're a Super Genius maybe but I mean how many Geniuses are there in the world and there will be times where you work a little bit more and then you work a little bit less and that's okay you don't always have to have perfect balance all the time and I do believe if you aspire to be successful in your life you do have to put in a lot of work especially in your 20s when I was working at whatsapp I poured in a lot of hours I would work late at night you know sometimes I have these dreams where I'm debugging my code at night time sometimes I wake up and I'm like oh I know how to solve that code or I know how to solve that bug that was my 20s and I'm really proud of that because I mean I don't know if you can see the background right now but um maybe I can show you here I'll flip the camera I'm working in Maui right now and this is my view it's been pretty lovely working here I know it's kind of kind of weird to be saying that you need to really really work hard as I'm sitting here in this beautiful view but I guess my point is that I believe there is a time in life where you work hard I have worked through the night sometimes I have done my 60 80 hour weeks and I am really grateful for the luck and the opportunities that I have had and where it has landed me in my life but I wouldn't be where I am today if I didn't take on these risks if I didn't work really hard if I didn't Embrace learning and I think all of those things combined have set me up for better success in my life and I'm really grateful to be reaping in the rewards from my efforts from the past I do believe you work hard and as you advance your career work will inevitably become easier over time because you're just going to get really damn good at it and you'll have the opportunity to strike a better balance in your professional Journey eventually now as you're working really hard sometimes you will make mistakes and you will fail being afraid of making mistakes or failing is something that we're all familiar with it's a natural instinct to want to protect ourselves from feeling hurt and feeling crummy but instead of letting fear hold you back you still want to try things out for yourself many Engineers are drawn to math because it usually has one correct answer that's how it was for me but the ironic part is that in the world of software engineering there's actually often no one correct answer there are seemingly infinite ways of solving the same problem and people argue about which way is better are you supposed to use tabs or spaces and you can't just follow the rules because there is no rules really so to say because everything's so new and nobody actually knows anything and you kind of have to figure things out as you go by definition because you're experimenting you will make mistakes and you will fail by doing that you'll learn what you feel passionate about what you're good at what you're bad at and all of these information it's going to build like a database for you kind of like how AI needs a lot of data input the more data it has the better it gets right your life is similar the more you fail or succeed um those experiences will all add up to help you become a better human and a better software engineer to tell you a little bit more about my personal story again back when I was in college I actually interned for a tiny startup with three people and I want to say um I really believed in the company but I actually interned there because it was the only company that would hire me for that summer J of junior year and we were working on a product that was sort of like a YouTube competitor it was around the time when video sharing was really popular and YouTube had hadn't really like took off and became the number one dominant player yet sadly it didn't stick around none of those companies actually stuck around um but this experience working at an early stage company gave me a data point to think that I want to pursue a more stable company and this is also when the economy was really bad in 2008 there was all these um economic crisis with the housing bus and all that so I thought okay I'm going to go for something big I'm going to go for stability and I went for IBM it was one of the biggest companies at the time and I thought oh there's so many learning opportunities and mentorship and growth but then I didn't realize I would be feeling like a cog in the machine it was sort of like the goldie logs and the Three Bears this combination of experimenting right trying things out sort of guided me to find what's at where I found the perfect well sort of it wasn't perfect it had its own flaws but it helped me at least find the right balance of autonomy and mentorship and stability so embracing these triers help you discover um more about yourself so if you're not really sure what you feel excited about or what you feel passionate about I recommend you try things out see if you like it maybe you do maybe you don't and you can collect those um data points to help you better guide your decision-making process which leads to my next point about setting your own path so tech industry is constantly changing I've been saying that over and over throughout this video this means sometimes your interest May align with the market trends and sometimes they may not the trends go up and down and it keeps changing so if you just blindly follow the trend whatever is really popular like for example a couple of years ago crypto was really in and if you were on that bandwagon it didn't really go anywhere so you want to try as much as possible to stay true to your own path Steve Jobs is often quoted for having this Visionary ideas of where he wanted to take the product and not really listening to customers and it led him to make really great Innovations Warren Buffett is also known for his long-term thinking and approach avoiding short-term Market fluctuations and I think you can apply those ideas to your career as well like Steve Jobs you know don't listen to what other people say but if you have a vision follow that and also like Warren Buffett think about the longterm more than the short term of what is just in front of you right now this means that there is no one size fits all perfect solution for all software engineering careers the ideal career path or the time frame or the settings it depends on who you are where you are you need to think about you know your personal goals your own experience on top of the current job market situation and I'm often asked for advice and my first question is always what are your goals because I can't just blindly provide you guidance without knowing who you are and where you're trying to go so I want you to start practicing thinking about about what is your North Star what are your goals where are you trying to go and start thinking longterm before you start taking immediate actions do you have an idea where your Northstar is please drop them in the comments I would love to hear from you or if you have questions and need advice also ask me in the comments and maybe I'll make videos about them I think this is my next is this my last tip I think it's my last tip building a network building a network is not just about you know having people to ask for help people who study happiness often say things like having a community that supports you is a key part to longevity in life because life isn't just about individual achievements and Milestones but it's also about relationship with other people and when I talk about networking I think people often think about superficial connections but that's not what I'm talking about I'm talking relationships that are rooted in genuine care and mut mutual respect this type of community can be a safety net certainly when times are challenging but also a source of joy in life but building relationships can also be risky there can be occasional failures in our pursuit of finding connection but I do want to believe that most people are well-intended hopefully you would also be able to find your network of friends and colleagues that are there to help you offer you mentorship collaboration and hopefully even inspiration and I think this YouTube channel is part of building Community for me again I have been incredibly Lucky in my career and I'm really happy to be giving back to the Tech Community to really help out the next Generations of software engineers and that's why I have started my YouTube channel I hope that we can support each other in both personal and professional growth through our Channel together so that's my story now is your turn to take on those challenges step out of your comfort zone and keep learning and hopefully you'll reach the height of your software engineering careers soon so if you have time take a moment to reflect on your goals and the steps that you want to take to get to where you want to go