Having sound technical skills is vital and lays the cornerstone for your success, but technical skills alone do not put you in the fast lane. If you want to accelerate your career advancement, then you need to go »beyond the code«. That's what my book, Beyond the Code, is designed to help you do.

Determine
Your
Destination

To begin, let’s start our journey to become a highly successful software engineer by considering a familiar but powerful analogy. Imagine that it’s your birthday and you’ve received the best present ever: a brand new airplane! It’s a big, magnificent plane with a living room, a bedroom, and a separate kitchen. In fact, it’s big enough that you can bring your family, friends, and even your household pets.

Most likely you are imagining a place right now that you’ve always wanted to go visit. A faraway place you have pictured to yourself time and time again. A place that you just can’t wait to see and experience. Chances are you have been dreaming and fantasizing about that certain place for a long time. Can you feel and sense the excitement you’ll feel when you finally arrive at your destination?

Do you have a specific place in mind? Great! Envisioning and picturing this special place shows that you have the ability to visualize and determine your destination. So, what would you do next? Most likely you wouldn’t waste a minute and would let the captain know exactly where you want to go, right?

Oh, I forgot to mention, the captain is part of the package, too. This is a special captain, one you have not encountered on any commercial airplane. The captain is »YOUR« captain, available and ready whenever you want to fly someplace new.

Your captain never needs to rest and is standing by twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Whenever you want to fly, your captain is already waiting for you in the cockpit warming up the engines. You can take off anytime, day or night, summer, spring, winter or fall. Wow!

Now, let’s come back to our defined destination – you still have that place in mind, right? For the purpose of this book let’s pick Silicon Valley, a world-famous hub for technology companies and home to some of the world’s best software engineers. With your destination in mind you might say: »Captain, can you please take me to San Francisco?«

With that simple statement, you would communicate clearly where you want to go. It’s not a vague description, but a clear and precise definition of the destination.

Now let me provoke a thought experiment and ask you a different question. Would you ever say something like the following to the captain of your new plane? »Captain, let’s take off right now and then let’s just float in the air till we have decided where to go. We’ll simply cruise around in circles till we have determined our destination. If we happen to run out of fuel, then so be it, we crash, but that’s totally fine with me.«




It’s fair to assume that no sane human being would ever want to run out of fuel and crash their brand new airplane.

Yet, quite often when software engineers come to my coaching sessions and I ask them where they want to take their career, they initially cannot provide a precise answer. Oftentimes I hear them say that they are not sure, that they will just wait and see what happens. They don’t know what their destination is!




But if you don’t know where you want to take your career, then it is essentially the same as telling your inner captain to take off with the plane and then see what happens. It is like hoping that you’ll figure out where you want to go while already flying at cruising altitude. What I have realized as an engineer and manager is that truly successful software engineers know where they want to go. That’s one thing exceptional engineers have in common and that sets them apart from all the others. They know that having a goal and a clear vision for their future is crucial for their success. They know that having a well-defined destination is like owning a mental map that enables them to navigate even when the going gets tough.

Once you have clarity, then every decision you make from this point forward will be aligned with your mission and bring you closer to your destination. You won’t take one step in the right direction and then another step in the opposite direction. Your inner captain, or inner compass if you will, will make sure you get closer to your goal and will prevent you from getting lost on the way.




Of course, the weather won’t always be sunny throughout your journey, there might be rain and gusty winds. However, your inner captain can adjust to situations while in the air and will prevent you from straying off course.

Once you have logged in the coordinates of where you want to go, that inner captain will take the fastest route possible and navigate directly to your destination.

Please note: believing in yourself and trusting that you are on the right path does not mean you are completely certain about everything. Rather, it means that you are generally heading in the right direction. That you don’t constantly change your mind every other day based on a new outside stimulus or what other people are doing.

Making adjustments on your way is natural and expected, but having a clear destination enables you to ignore all the distractions on your journey.

Once you have clarity, you will feel energized, you will feel like you are in the captain’s seat and you will start to have greater control over your journey. In fact, having a well-defined goal allows you to bear pretty much anything along the way. Perhaps most importantly, once you know where you want to go, you can enjoy the flight. Making progress every day towards a goal you have defined brings not just success but true happiness.

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Through 12 highly effective, hands-on lessons, my book Beyond the Code is intended to help you accelerate your career advancement and become highly successful as a software engineer. See full table of contents: