Learn how to work with other people effectively (not just programmers, but PMs, finance types, legal experts, etc.) Took me like 15 years to be any good at this

Learn how to work with other people effectively (not just programmers, but PMs, finance types, legal experts, etc.) Took me like 15 years to be any good at this at all. Get exposure to customers. Try to get involved with decisions involving them. Many companies actively discourage engineers from having customer contact; this is bad, IMHO. Get exposure to the financial side of whatever industry you're in. You don't need to do official work, but definitely make sure you understand how your company makes money and what its risks are. (Do a start-up or two; this will give you a visceral feel for what money is worth assuming the places you work at are run well). Read a paper a week (e.g., something from usenix or the ACM, or whereever). Sites like The Morning Paper (https://blog.acolyer.org/ https://blog.acolyer.org/) are pretty good; the thing is not to get caught in a rut. If you're doing IT work, get involved in dev work. If you're doing dev work, get involved in IT. These feed pretty heavily off of each other and operational background will boost your engineering skills as much as coding skills will help your IT work. Things I wish I'd studied harder, earlier: Statistics, practical aspects of databases and SQL, at-scale networking [didn't exist when I was a sprout], practical aspects of operating systems implementation (the stuff they didn't teach you in your course at school), maybe the first six months of an EE course . . . I could go on for quite a while. The good news is that there's no way you'll run out of stuff to learn, not in your entire career, and it's all (usually) applicable at some point.