Building a career off-road

Sherry Sontag, Marek Paska, Daniel Kiss, CB Bailey & Callum Piper

⏱ 90-min-workshop

beginner

intermediate

advanced

11:00-12:30, Thursday, 3rd April 2025

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.

🏷 career; individual contributor; team lead; manager; autonony;

Sherry Sontag

Bio: Sherry Sontag came to Bloomberg Engineering after co-authoring “Blind Man’s Bluff,” a New York Times bestseller about submarine espionage during the Cold War. Hired by Bloomberg 17 years ago for her ability to talk to anyone and actually listen, she recently has been working to create community consensus among developers as part of the Code Governance Solutions team. She is a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Barnard College, Columbia University.

Marek Paska

I'm developing software infrastructure at Bloomberg, in C++.

Daniel Kiss

TBD

CB Bailey

CB is a senior software engineer at Bloomberg. She works in infrastructure on libraries and tools for building easy and efficient cross-application communication.

CB is a proponent of good design, effective source control practices, reproducible builds and excellence in all parts of the software development process.

Callum Piper

Callum Piper has been writing C++ since 2000. He has spent five years as a Senior Software Engineer at Bloomberg, working on Derivatives Pricing services. Prior to joining Bloomberg, Callum was a consultant for more than 10 years, during which he worked on a wide range of different teams across a number of financial, tech, and retail companies -- with vastly different experiences and results. He started his career at a small robotics company outside Cambridge that did work in the pharmaceutical industry. Callum is very interested in both understanding and improving how teams solve problems and deliver high quality software solutions for clients.