How to Get Ahead of 99% of Software Engineers (in 2025)

there are exactly six things you need to do right now if you want to get ahead of 99% of software engineers in one year if you're new hi my name is s I'm a big tech software engineer I have a master's in computer science from Georgia Tech I have experience at top companies like Amazon I landed my first $220,000 software engineering job at the age of 20 and now I help over 600,000 people break into Tech every single day and I'm so glad you're watching this video right now because you don't want to be mediocre

and I'm not going to let you be a mediocre software engineer are shooting for the top 1% so here is how you are going to get ahead of the 99 coming in at number six is steal the 10,000 and no this isn't illegal just hear me out in order to become an expert in any domain you need about 10,000 hours worth of experience in that subject for example Michael Jordan the best basketball player of all time probably has 10,000 hours of experience shooting dribbling and passing a basketball Gordon Ramsey the best chef in the world

has at least 10,000 hours of experience cooking baking dishes and calling people idiot sandwiches that's how these people became Professionals in what they do similarly if you want to get ahead of 99% and be the best software engineer or Master a subject like AI or machine learning you need to spend 10,000 hours working in this discipline but guess what you and I both are way too lazy to do that so instead we are going to steal these 10,000 hours from someone else while you're working as a software engineer you are going to be around a

lot of talented individuals some people with 10 to 15 years of Industry experience some people who have created really awesome projects and research Publications I need you to network with them set up coffee chats with them talk to them and learn from their experiences learn what actually helped them for example grow from a junior to senior level position at the company or maybe you want to ask your manager why they decided to go from being a simple engineer onto the managerial track is that a career path that interests you a little more do you need

to pick up a certification or pursue an MBA at this point in your career you don't know what you don't know so you need to pay down ignorance debt ASAP and you do that by networking and having coffee chats with people and effectively learning and stealing their 10,000 hours on the job think of it like you're surrounded by a bunch of Gordon Ramsay and you need to learn different bits and pieces about cooking and baking so you become a better Chef similarly you need to network with all the different engineers at your company so you

can get ahead and become a better software engineer yourself I recently got promoted and prior to that I networked very well well with a principal software engineer on my team who taught me all the little tips and tricks she learned throughout her career she told me the story of how she went from entry level to mid-level to senior level to principal level software engineer I learned so much from that and hence I got promoted quickly there's a famous quote by Linda Hill a Harvard business professor success in life is about relationships success in work is

about delivering results through others and as weird as it might sound you do need to leverage other people in order to be successful especially in Tech number number five is Master Ai and machine learning as Nvidia CEO Jensen Hong recently pointed out you're not going to lose your job to AI you're going to lose your job to somebody who uses Ai and ideally if you're ahead of 99% of software Engineers you won't be replaced or you shouldn't be replaced and it's actually becoming insane now back in 2020 learning Technologies like reactjs or typescript which are

typically front-end oriented Frameworks were super super impressive and would often be the reason you got a job or an interview now in 2024 and going forward these things are no longer super impressive they're almost a baseline requirement why is that well because there are tools like cursor AI for example in which you can create a prompt or feed it an image of a design of a front end and then boom just like that it will spit out the frontend code you need in fact I know a startup CEO right now who literally told me that

because of cursor they decided not to hire any more software Engineers onto their team because why do they need to hire a software engineer and pay him $100,000 when cursor can do it for them for free it's not actually free but it's much cheaper in fact it's to the level now that 25% of Google's new code is written by AI so what is a solution for you the first thing I need you to do is learn how to use these Technologies whether that be Chad GPT Gemini Claude become a heavy consumer the second thing is

to learn and master the art of prompting it might sounds simple at first like I asked Chad GPT to code up my computer science homework but there's a whole lot more to it there's AAS reason prompt engineering is up and coming as a career in which they pay people $130 to $200,000 per year because writing exact efficient prompts at scale is difficult to start on this there is a free Corsair course by Vanderbilt University and it'll make you an efficient consumer of AI and hence you'll be a more effective software engineer I fundamentally think that

we have only scratched the surface when it comes to Ai and ml if you really think about it AI has not fully integrated into society it still very much is just a tool and truly the next way of billion dollar startups unicorns are going to be one in which they have a great software product that is backed by AI not only will it be written by AI but it'll utilize AI to make further predictions and advancements in the software itself the people behind all of this will be AI Engineers or at least software Engineers that

are ahead of 99% and have an understanding of AI typically you do need a masters and PhD to become an ml or AI engineer but just to start out in this realm I do recommend Google's machine learning crash course by Andrew and G coming in at number four is adopting a customer Centric mindset and not a developer Centric mindset honestly this is one of the biggest mistakes I was making early on in my career I was so focused on just learning a bunch of different programming languages like hey let me pick up Java JavaScript react

C every single skill just so I can seem more impressive and even on the job I would try to focus on pushing the most amount of code possible completing Jura ticket after jir ticket just so so I would have the most amount of code contributions but this is actually far from what makes an actually good engineer you might be a great coder doing this but you're definitely not a good software engineer and certainly not ahead of 99% of software Engineers with this mindset so how did I learn to build a customer Centric mindset well I

decided that every single task that I took up going forward I would consciously think how would the End customer use this if I was developing a UI feature on Gmail for example I would be like okay if I was a customer and I was going through the layout of this web page would I first of all understand what's going on would I feel overwhelmed with the color scheme uh you want the site to appear vibrant but too many colors are offputting plus is everything on the site that is important and necessary easy to access if

I send emails every day I want the compos new button to be on the top left if I want my inbox to refresh I should be able to do that instantly it's subtle psychological things that make the biggest impact and in order to really improve on this because this is certainly skill you need to learn you need to have regular conversations with product managers ux designers and customers themselves talking to product managers is essential because their whole job is understanding customer requirements and Business Essentials talking to ux designers is crucial because their whole job is

understanding customer psychology I personally have learned so so much from my ux designers things like what colors are destructive what colors are constructive or how to properly operate a case study demo of a web page onto a customer at the end of the day the customers are the ones who pay your salary I mean you as a software Jer don't get necessarily paid for the code you rate you get paid because you have contributed to a feature and that feature is then paid for by a customer in millions of dollars and you get a portion

of that a couple hundred thousand so the top 1% software Engineers really know how to appease customer needs as for number three now this is actually going to be a big game changer because not a lot of people are good at this and that is articulating well and mastering the art of communication there's a huge stereotype that is true to a certain extent that computer science and software engineering students thought it suck when it comes to communicating they're viewed as these geeky introverts that just code all day and have no human to human interaction and

if you're living this scenario please change your life immediately I can confidently say that I have been afforded so many opportunities simply based on my ability to communicate whether that be with behavioral interviews my ability to persuade and convince that I'm an ideal candidate for this position even if I was just a freshman in college or I had no experience I also had to communicate very well to show off my accomplishments to my manager and director to prove that I'm worthy of getting promoted from entry to mid-level in under 2 years but communication is definitely

an art there's a method to do it a top 1% method to do it you want to be assertive and confident but not arrogant and cocky you want to be clear and concise but still very detailed in what you do and here are two things that I did to improve this for myself one more practice I've been giving speeches publicly since e8th grade so I have about a decade's worth of experience under my belt my first couple speeches were horrendous compared to the type of talks I can give now and this translates to work whether

it be a simple project demo to giving a presentation companywide to all the new interns two establish yourself as a communicative leader I took on the scrum Master role for my software engineering team and I've been playing that role for the last 2 and a half years so every single day I lead a standup meeting in which everyone presents their work status updates I understand what everyone is working on and hence I can communicate with more people about what they're working on if someone has a blocker I can assist them with it and so naturally

I have the spotlight shining on me and once again I can confidently say that the first couple stand-ups that I led were probably not as good as the stand-ups that I can lead now number two and this one is a little bit of a curveball but that is mentoring to master a lot of people think that mentorship and helping people out is something that you do once your super experience for example I'm a software engineer so I give software engineering advice on this channel but a lot of people don't realize that mentorship is actually a

tool for Mastery itself there's an old saying that you don't truly understand something until you can teach it so mentoring not only solidifies your own knowledge but it also builds up your leadership skills which are crucial as you advance in your career as a software engineer anytime someone joins my team I tried to take on a mentorship role I help them out with the setup of their laptop virtual machines or just learning about the company product as a whole this way not only do I understand the product a little bit better but I could also

prove my leadership and Authority in this domain and once again the spotlight shines brighter on me also last summer I served as a mentor for the two entrance that we had on our team not only did I help them with coding in reactjs or python but I also offered career advice on how to land a return offer or how to excel early on in their careers this made me an effective engineer plus leader think of it like this you can tell me that you're good at math or you can prove it to me by passing

a really difficult sat type math exam or you can prove it to everyone that you are a top % in math intelligence if you can mentor people to get better at math and then they end up going to ace that difficult sat type math exam so overall think of it like instead of stealing 10,000 hours giving away the 10,000 hours all right up until this point this has been how to get ahead of 99% of software engineers in one year the next portion I'm going to be talking about how to get ahead of 99.99999% of

software Engineers because this one I'm going to be talking about not a lot of people will do a lot of people will be satisfied with just becoming an excellent software engineer but this one thing will transform you from being a great software engineer into becoming a top software engineering voiced Authority coming in at number one is building a personal brand around software engineering this is what I've been doing over the last year or so and I currently have over 600,000 followers across all platforms you should be posting about any accomplishments that you have in this

field or any input advice mentorship that you can offer whether that be on platforms like YouTube LinkedIn Instagram or even Tik Tok for that matter and you don't even need to be the smartest person out there for people to view you as having this Authority and it's very rewarding through my experience in building my brand I've had the opportunities to fly around the country to go to Tech conferences interview multiple million doll CEOs interview sea level Executives at top tech companies like GitHub for example and the reason I've been afforded these opportunities is because people

trust me for my software engineering advice I mean if you made it this far into this video you trust me in some way shape or form for software advice but this can also in turn help you within your own career I was talking to this one engineer a couple months ago and he mentioned to me how for the last two jobs he had he never had to interview around why is that because he regularly posts about his coding projects on Twitter and the two startups he's been a part of the founder has actually reached out

to him via Twitter based on seeing the Amazing Project that he's been posting because why would anyone have to evaluate you for your technical aptitude if you can prove that you can show your technical aptitude via the projects and your online presence and I can make a whole multiple hour long video on how to build a personal brand but for the large majority of people who are just watching this video just start by posting videos don't worry if you're not getting the views don't worry about followers sometimes it's just about putting the Reps in as

a point of reference it took me nearly 200 videos before I got my first viral hit in the software engineering Niche so until you make 200 videos I don't want to hear any complaints that's about I have in this video I really hope you guys enjoyed it and if you did make sure to hit the like button subscribe if you haven't already and if you are interested in 7 years worth of software engineering advice put into one video you might like this video right here