Building a career off-road

Many individual contributors professionals are choosing to create their careers off-road. Instead of climbing the standard career ladder to and through management, they are choosing to navigate tech careers one project and one team at a time. Such professionals often show their leadership without titles, relying instead on creativity, curiosity, and empathy toward their colleagues.

This panel featuring a group of four engineers who have mapped out their careers as individual contributors is designed as a conversation with our audience, a way to encourage others to understand what is possible. Each panelist has learned to stretch beyond assignments while sharing the day-to-day load on their teams. The panel will also include a manager who leads by trusting his people and providing structure when it is requested. One of the panelists spent some hours interviewing other managers, so they can speak with authority about how they balance a team with strongly self-led individuals.

We believe this discussion can help both managers and individual contributors find balance between team needs and individual growth; to navigate the cultures within their organizations; and understand the value that is derived from professional freedom with intent.

While we all work together now, each of us has worked at other companies and in other circumstances where we thrived mainly because we were able to balance autonomy with a deep sense of collaboration and adventure.

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Cal Pratt

Cal was new to build systems and C++ when he joined Bloomberg Engineering’s Foundations, Build and Intelligence / Distributed Build team. Navigating what he calls the ‘slope of enlightenment and the valley of despair,’ Cal learned to ask questions about everything, and then ask more! Finding documentation unclear, he rewrote it. When he found a hole in the build process, he decided to fill it. The result is an open source project called BuildGrid, which executes build jobs remotely on a grid of computers, speeding up build times massively.

Where

Toronto

When

July 20-23, 2025

LinkedIn

CppNorth Group