How I became a CTO in 3 years

Disclaimer

This is not a guide. There were many things out of my control in my career history, so I need to express my gratitude to God and all the people He has put in my way to help me walk my path.

However, there were some things under my control that have also helped me to achieve my goals, and this is what this article is all about.

Learning

This one sounds obvious, and it is, but it's truly worth mentioning. You won't be able to go from point A to point B in your career without expanding your knowledge.

From day one, I acted like a sponge, absorbing everything I could around me. I was not selective about what to learn, and especially in a startup environment, this is very impactful.

My first job was network support. After successfully migrating to development, I went deep into frontend, which then led me into UI design. After that, when the company needed some backend tasks done, there I was. Mobile development came right after. DevOps? No problem, I can handle that.

All of a sudden, I had general knowledge about everything related to tech product development. More than that, I started having an idea of how the code I produced was affecting other areas of the company, like marketing and sales.

Not being selective about what to learn has its trade-offs, though. Time is a finite resource, which means I never really specialized in a particular area of interest. This probably means I couldn't be a top-tier Frontend Engineer by the time I reached the CTO position. I would lose to most people who decided to focus their time solely on developing frontend skills. But life is made of choices, and my choice then was to reach a tech leadership position.

Teaching

It's been just a few weeks since I committed to intentionally sharing knowledge publicly. However, I've always shared knowledge internally at the companies I worked for and tried to mentor personal friends pursuing similar career paths to mine.

Complementarily to the previous section, teaching is one of the best ways to learn. How many times have you thought you understood something, until the point you have to explain it to someone, and you realize you didn't?

Furthermore, when you help someone, you're most likely to receive help from that person in the future. This small act can open up infinite possibilities. From being assisted with specific issues to seizing an opportunity you would never know existed if you didn't have that connection to the person you helped.

Being top-tier at whatever

Everybody wants to be a top-tier worker. We tend to think about that in a distant future. Once you earn enough competence and knowledge to work on that top-tier project, or at that highly respected company, or with that world-class team, then you'll consider yourself top-tier.

Okay, I know that saying you can be a top-tier developer doesn't change your current level. Sadly or not we all have to climb that long ladder. What I want to convey in this section, though, is that you can be top-tier at anything, especially in areas that people usually don't care about.

When I was an intern, most of my work involved writing emails. Most people would look at that and casually write emails like everyone else, hoping some day they could do something more exciting. But I had the ambition to be the best email writer in the company.

If you think about it enough, you'll find many things that people don't really care about where you can easily be the best today. Most things that people don't care about are what the corporate world calls soft skills.

Being top-tier at arriving on time, being top-tier at making annotations about an important meeting, being top-tier at organizing my work, being top-tier at communicating with my leaders. Being top-tier at those small things no one cares about for 3 years has led me to a CTO position. Start being top-tier at what you can, and top-tier things will happen.