Gergely Orosz - Growing as a Mobile Engineer: Breaking the Mobile Engineering Glass Ceiling

I have been building native apps for more than 10 years, six of these full-time. I was a principal iOS engineer at Skyscanner, then joined Uber as a senior Android engineer. I became an engineering manager, initially managing a team of five mobile engineers. Over the years, my team expanded from five engineers to close to 30, almost half of them mobile engineers.

This book is follow-up content Building Mobile Apps at Scale . While that book looks at engineering challenges of building large mobile apps, this book focuses on ways you can grow your career as a mobile engineer or engineering manager, while working on these kinds of apps and challenges.

share advice for iOS and Android engineers to grow to senior levels and above. These are the suggestions I gave to people on my team, and the approaches that helped them level up. This growth was both professional people becoming more effective engineers and measured in levels; people getting that promotion to the next level. At Uber, these levels meant promotions to the L5 (senior) or L5B (senior 2) levels, as well as working with a few people on crafting a path to the L6 (staff) level.

is advice for mobile engineering managers. I have always found managing a group of mobile engineers to be seemingly more challenging, mostly as much of the business does not always understand the complexity of mobile engineering challenges at scale. For larger mobile organizations, you almost always realize the need for mobile platform teams, but how do you make this business case? And can staying in mobile slow your career growth in engineering management?

(177 million). After working there for more than four years, I have insights to share that can be applicable at other high-growth companies.

Most advice in this book is more applicable for Silicon Valley-like companies. This means companies which work more like Silicon Valley-like companies and have a healthy engineering culture . It is companies that put parallel manager and engineer career paths in place, so that there are levels to grow beyond the senior engineer. The advice will apply far more to mobile-first organizations which invest heavily in mobile engineering, as well as to companies growing at a healthy pace.

Regardless if you are just starting out in mobile engineering, or if you are years into this field, some advice is universal. Figuring out what growth at your company means, balancing focusing on titles versus gaining more experience, mentorship or changing jobs, are all this type of advice. In this part, we go through each of these topics.

What is the career progression at your company for engineers? How clear is this? At good tech companies, you find all of these elements:

• A career ladder with levels and expectations at each level. You can read several of these career ladders on Progression.fyi . Most large companies do not share these publicly, see the next section for an example on how such a ladder worked at a high-level at Uber.
• A parallel individual contributor (IC) and manager career track, where a senior engineer and a manager are typically of the same level and compensation. Engineers can get more pay and a higher level without moving into management, with tracks that lead to staff or principal engineering levels.
• A clear promotion process with clarity on how the promotion process works and how often this process happens. Most promotion processes include creating a promotion package reviewed by a group of managers, sometimes with senior engineers. The promotion package usually includes writing a self-review, nominating peers for promotion feedback, and the manager writing a review.
• Getting regular proper professional feedback on areas in which you can grow as an engineer. Better companies put in place feedback mechanisms where you not only get patted on the back, but you get constructive criticism about how you can grow better. What could you focus on more, to be a more efficient and better-rounded engineer?

If you have all of the above, figuring out how to get to the next level is a lot easier. Even so, as a mobile engineer, you can often find it hard to demonstrate the impact that the career ladder demands beyond the senior level. We cover how to spot and tackle this in the following sections.

If you work at a place that does not have this clarity on career, ladders, parallel tracks, or transparency in the promotion process, you will likely find both growing and getting promoted more challenging. A few things can still help with speedy growth:

• Do you have a supportive and competent manager? Someone who has been an engineer before and understands mobile development. Do they have a track record of helping people to grow and get promoted? Even if your company does not have all the clarity around levels or promotion processes, a good manager can help navigate this more ad hoc environment.
• Do you get to work with one or more senior mobile engineers who are both officially at a level above you, and you find that you can learn from? Are they approachable people who can mentor you? Having someone to learn from and a role model to work towards makes growing easier.
• Do you work at a high-growth company, growing the mobile engineering team fast? High-growth places can be disorganized early on, lacking much of the career structure that more mature organizations have in place. With growth comes opportunities to make a large impact, though. Many of these places tend to recognize and promote engineers driving this impact. The longer your tenure, the more you will be able to figure out how to make this kind of large impact. However, pay attention to whether you are growing professionally and learning from others, instead of just being the most impactful developer in a small bubble.

If you have none of the above, you will find it very difficult to grow or get promoted. In those environments, you will probably find much of the below advice of little use. You might also want to consider jumping ship to a company with a better professional environment.

At Uber, the engineering levels were defined as below. I am summarizing each level and in practice, each of the levels comprised three to four pages of definitions and examples, in order to bring the definitions to life.

• Software Engineer (L3): Accomplishes well-defined tasks, with guidance, where needed. Makes use of established best practices such as coding standards, tools, and processes the team uses. Eager to learn and try new things.
• Software Engineer 2 (L4): Independently completes projects within the team that could take up to a few months. Collaborates across teams and stakeholders in building solutions. Proactively addresses technical debt, issues, and inefficient practices. Helps more junior engineers.