Full Stack Career Advice
Why do some people seem to accelerate endlessly in their careers while others plateau? Over the years, I've noticed patterns, and here's the framework that's helped me make sense of it.
The Full Stack View
In software engineering, we often talk about "full stack" development. There are different reference points for this in terms of different technologies, but the premise is simple: "full stack" captures everything from the lowest fundamental level of a technology offering to the highest abstraction where all generated value from the stack is finally presented.
Likewise, your career is composed of a stack, with different aspects of your work representing its own layer:
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# Public Face # <- Top of your stack
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# Network #
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# Practice #
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# Research #
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# Fundamentals # <- Start of your stack
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- At the very bottom are "Fundamentals", or the ideas that define the existence of your profession from first principals.
- Built on top of that is "Research" which takes the rules defined at the lower level to drive innovation in your field.
- "Practice" is where the rubber meets the road, where the theory of your work meets the practical, and is the most concrete thing to point at when people ask what you do.
- "Network" is the next level representing the interactions and relationships you have with others, where your work influences theirs and vice-versa.
- Finally at the top is the "Public Face" and is what you put out to the world without having bi-directional relationships with other individuals.
Fundamentals
“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who had practiced one kick 10,000 times.” - Bruce Lee
When thinking about your profession - the thing that you do - how do you define the basic building blocks the comprise it? These are the fundamentals, rules that never or rarely every change that guide everything justifying your work. In engineering this is usually straightforward and described as "computer science fundamentals" such as data structures, algorithms, discrete math, and so on.
Fundamentals exist for every profession. Nothing that you do just exists because it popped out of the ether. Marketing is a practice rooted in psychology and economics. Law is anchored in constitutional frameworks. Education is built on principles of learning theory and cognitive development.
It's critical to have a grasp, and ideally mastery, of your fundamentals. It's also not the kind of education or training that is never touched again after a 4 year undergraduate program. Time and time again, you return to the fundamentals to refresh your understanding and see old ideas in a new light from your experiences.
Research
"Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist" - Pablo Picasso
If the fundamentals are about building blocks that never change, research is the combinatorics of those rules to see how they can be bent and ultimately applied.
Research is always changing, and represents a large corpus of efforts from many organizations and individuals to push the knowledge and understanding of your field to new boundaries. Not all of it is always useful or directly applicable to the next part of the stack, but you won't find out until you start doing some homework.
This part of the stack covers a wide-breadth of efforts depending on your profession; in the most technical sense it can involve reading research papers and attempting to reproduce experiments. Many times, it's just trying out new technologies or tools, or simply reading new books. And there is everything in between.
It's surprising how impactful the right investments in research can wield. Every single career advancement I have had is directly tied to efforts I applied in my work directly from new ideas, techniques, and technologies that I jumped on before many others.
Innovate, experiment. Something will break through.
Practice
“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” - Haruki Murakami
This is it - the place where work actually happens. It's the place that you can point to and say, "this is my craft". Writers write. Programmers program. Salespeople sell. You get the idea. It is the easiest thing that others can look at and say that they will give you money to do that thing
Doing good work requires... work. It can be hard and exhausting. And yet sometimes it's the complete opposite. You enter a flow state where you are in a deep trance and everything clicks. This is the place you create something that is novel and your own, flowing out to teammates, customers, and the rest of the world.
Work hard and put in the hours. This is at the center of the stack and is what bridges all the content of your career. Rely on fundamentals and research to take you further with every new effort you put in. Also, recognize that you want to be mindful of how your work then expands out to the rest of your stack.
Network
"Greatness is in the agency of others." - Scott Galloway
Nothing that we create or work on exists in a vacuum. Every field of work, no matter how solitary it seems, thrives on human connection and interdependence. Your network is the connective tissue between your individual efforts and the larger ecosystem of your profession.
Part of your network stack is how your work gets contributed to something which is greater than the sum of its parts. In some careers it can be easy to neglect this because you feel like you can do it all yourself (as a programmer who can just build what I want when I want, I am guilty of this). The sooner you can recognize this "compounding" rule of collaborative work, the sooner you will take it more seriously to surround yourself with great people.
Like anything based on interpersonal relationships, nurturing your network takes care and consistency. It's easy to ignore spending time on professional relationships when things are going well, only to scramble for favors and referrals when things get rough. Find the time to make sure you're checking in and helping others while you can. This is how communities, teams, and companies get built.
Public Face
“You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do.” - Henry Ford
If your network is about two-way relationships, then your public face is about broadcasting your work and reputation to the world at large, without knowing who's on the receiving end. This is what others see of you without ever meeting you.
Your public face exists at the top of the stack because it is the most visible and most abstract component of your career. It's not just about the work you do, but how you package it and present it. Think of your resume/portfolio, public presentations, or articles you write. All of it is captured by what people think of you when they hear your name.
It's not just vanity. Your public face represents your leverage and creates a form of human capital for you. Others know what you stand for, what you can do, and what you're working toward.
Importantly, people value authenticity over pure performance. A post social media world shows us how easily we can become jaded with what appears to be put up purely for show. "Fake it until you make it" might be a useful tactic in some scenarios, but not when building your personal brand.
Be clear about what you're good at, but don't pretend expertise you don't have. The best public personas aren't overly polished but consistent, authentic signals that reflect your real work and values.
Always revisit your stack
Like life, the stack that represents your career is hard to balance. You won't spend equal energy on every layer all the time, and that's just fine. Early career phases are focused primarily on things like fundamentals and practice, building raw skills and proving you can execute. As time and experience progresses, your network and public face require more time invested. And you always should keep coming back to research to understand trends and innovations.
The important part is not perfect balance, but awareness: knowing which layers need more focus right now, and which can run quietly in the background until it's time to revisit them.
What makes the full stack model so powerful isn't perfection, but momentum. As long as you keep moving through the layers, revisiting them and making improvements, your career remains dynamic and resilient.