How do you grow yourself to become a great software engineer who is well respected outside of your job?

Question

The benchmarks I am setting here are people like Robert Martin, Martin Fowler, Venkat Subramaniam (known for agile and Java), Guido Von Rossum (developed Python), Jeff Dean, Sanjay Gehlawat etc.

Latter two are Senior Fellow at Google. Up until a certain point, I understand that promotions are about the scope of impact inside an organisation, but how do you grow yourself outside the walls of it so as to be on your way to be extremely good in your craft and among top software engineering contributors in the world.

Would appreciate answers from as many folks as possible.

Rahul Pandey · Accepted Answer

One more thing worth mentioning: there is certainly an element of luck involved with getting to the upper echelons of "great" software engineering (which has an element of fame as well).

For example, Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are hugely successful, famous, and talented. But if they didn't join Google in the early days, I doubt they'd be as famous today. It's very, very hard to predict which companies will blow up and then lead to inventing cutting-edge technologies.

The folks who you can more easily replicate are folks like Venkat Subramaniam or Jake Wharton, who have consistently given great talks that are respected by thousands of developers.

How do you grow yourself to become a great software engineer who is well respected outside of your job?

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