Quando Eu Crescer Quero Ser Igual A Você

Being someone worth looking up to takes more than just success

A lot of people, especially younger ones coming into the field, say when they're older they want to be like someone else. I get it. When I started out I literally had a mental checklist of traits from senior engineers I admired — calm under pressure, clear with documentation, willing to walk away from a bad design. But the honest answer is that trying to copy someone else's career path rarely works the way you think it will. I hear this kind of thing all the time in interviews and on forums. Someone posts about how they want to reach the level of a particular senior dev, a staff engineer, or someone leading a well-known project. The problem is most people skip the part where those individuals spent years doing unglamorous work nobody sees. You don't just wake up with deep institutional knowledge. You accumulate it through failures, dead-end projects, and being wrong publicly multiple times. What actually helps isn't admiration. It's deliberate observation. Pick someone whose day-to-day work you can study — their commit history, their RFCs, the way they respond in code review, how they communicate decisions to non-technical stakeholders. I once spent three weeks just reading a principal engineer's internal design docs at my old company. Most of it was irrelevant to my current tasks, but I learned how they frame trade-off analysis differently than most people. That habit of documenting reasoning before diving into implementation changed how I approach problems significantly.

The thing nobody tells you is that people at the level you're aiming for often stopped caring about being impressive years ago. They care about shipping reliable systems, mentoring the next person, and avoiding unnecessary complexity. If you chase the image instead of the habits, you'll burn out fast. I watched two junior devs on my team try to mirror my workflow exactly — same tools, same meeting habits, same commenting style. One of them quit six months later because it didn't fit his actual working rhythm. The other stayed but wasn't productive because he was performing rather than working. Build your own path instead. Identify the outcomes you actually want — impact, autonomy, technical depth, leadership, or something else entirely — then reverse-engineer what skills those require. Nobody needs another carbon copy. The industry already has too many of those and not enough people who can think independently about hard problems. There's also the practical side most guides skip. Seniority in engineering doesn't map linearly to either skill or compensation. Some people get promoted to staff because their company needs a title for a contractor role. Others stay mid-level for years and ship more production value than their managers. I worked at a place where the VP of engineering couldn't merge a pull request without asking someone two levels below him for approval. Title inflation is real and it's not going away.

If you want actual advice that translates to results: pick one skill you're weak on right now and spend three months getting genuinely good at it. Document what you learn in public. Find a mentor who is two steps ahead of you, not ten — someone whose recent trajectory matches what you'd realistically achieve. Say no to projects that don't build toward your actual goals even if they look impressive on paper. And stop measuring yourself against curated LinkedIn posts or conference keynotes. The people you admire probably have moments of serious impostor syndrome, unresolved technical debt in their codebases, and relationships with colleagues they haven't fixed yet. You're seeing the summary, not the raw data. Treat your career like a system you're iterating on rather than a biography you're trying to write. That approach will serve you better than any role model ever could.