Why Coaching is Crucial to Your Advancement

The effectiveness of rubber duck debugging can offer preliminary clues to the effectiveness of coaching.

(If you’re unfamiliar, rubber duck debugging is a method of debugging code by articulating a problem in word or in writing. The name is a reference to a story in the book The Pragmatic Programmer in which a programmer would carry around a rubber duck and debug their code by forcing themselves to explain it, line by line, to the duck.)

What makes rubber duck debugging so effective?

Describing the problem out loud forces you to articulate your thoughts clearly and logically. By externalizing your thoughts, you can move beyond internal mental loops and see the problem from a new perspective. This deepens understanding and leads to fresh insights and solutions.

What makes coaching more effective?

The added benefit of coaching is that your “rubber duck” can talk–and ask powerful questions. These questions support your discovery and naturally expand your thinking. 

Having to explain your reasoning to someone else creates a higher bar for decision making. Better decisions help you achieve your goals faster and with fewer mistakes.

Coaching helps you make better decisions.

Better decisions result in sound plans. But the best plan in the world wouldn’t amount to anything in the world without effective and sustained execution.

Coaching holds you accountable to sustained execution with timely course corrections, leading to transformative results.

How Coaching Works

A coach collaborates with you to design a personalized action plan targeting your specific strengths and areas for improvement. 

Trust is at the center of your coaching relationship. In your coaching sessions, you speak to your coach honestly and openly. Your coach truly listens without agenda, bias, or judgment.

Asking questions enables the coach to challenge your thought process in a deeply supportive way. This deep work is often uncomfortable. But it’s essential to your growth and making lasting change.

Additionally, coaching provides you with unbiased feedback, accountability to your goals, and motivation through setbacks.

Benefits of Coaching for Software Engineers

Concrete benefits and financial rewards

Imagine the ROI of getting your next promotion a year earlier.

Or being leveled in a higher band after your next job interview.

Or transitioning to a more suitable role faster.

How about landing your next job a month quicker in this challenging job market.

An experienced coach can help you pursue these milestones faster, enhancing both your career satisfaction and overall happiness.

Think about the financial progress you’ll make in each scenario. Promotions and new job offers often come with increased equity and higher bonuses based on the new salary. Being in a higher band accelerates your timeline for the next promotion, so the returns keep compounding.

Building skills quickly

To move from mid-level to senior engineer, you need skills like project management, cross-functional collaboration, stakeholder communication, and leadership.

For senior to staff promotions, you need strategic vision, influence, and the ability to provide an engineering perspective.

At every career level, you also need to differentiate yourself and advocate for your hard work to get promoted.

Instead of slowly picking up these skills by observing others, an experienced coach can help you master them quickly.

Extensive interview preparation can make you strong in coding and system design rounds. In this competitive job market, the differentiators are project deep-dive interviews and behavioral rounds. A coach with senior IC experience can help you excel in these areas, increasing your chances of landing a job faster and in a higher band!

Dangers of doing it yourself

As software engineers, we pride ourselves on doing things independently. Self-reliance fulfills our deep-seated tendency to “solve problems” and feel accomplished.

Yes, we can learn the necessary skills through trial and error, but this comes at the expense of lost time, increased frustration, and lower financial rewards. Do you want a trophy for proving it to yourself, or do you want a satisfying career you can be proud of?

The behaviors that got us through college and situated in our initial jobs are not enough to advance our careers. This realization is central to bestselling books like "What Got You Here Won’t Get You There" by Marshall Goldsmith.

While self-learning and reading management books can help, they won’t yield the same results as receiving advice, networking, and learning from others' mistakes. We have only one life to make all the mistakes possible. Do you want to spend it making mistakes or thrive doing it right by getting guidance?

Even fictional characters have help, so should you

Even heroes in movies have steady mentors to guide them through confusion and doubt. Each of us is the center of our own universe.

Why deprive yourself of an experienced coach?

Storytelling is how we advocate for our promotions and secure new jobs. Why not leverage professional help to reach key milestones faster and write a more compelling story of your career and life?