Why reading whitepapers takes your career to the next level (and how to do it)
Guest post by L6 Staff Engineer & Tech Lead at Google
Hi everyone 👋, Jordan here.
I’m excited to feature , L6 Staff Engineer and Tech Lead at Google, and author of , a blog with recurring deep dives on technical topics.
Micah attributes a large part of his growth to reading technical whitepapers. In today’s guest post, he will share the value he’s experienced and how you can see similar results.
Hi everyone 👋, Micah here.
As a tech lead at Google, one of the highest-impact activities for my growth has been reading cutting-edge academic computer science papers.
For me, this practice led to redefining our team’s strategy in work I presented at the top industry conference on systems reliability, and repeatedly receiving Google’s top performance ratings.
The rest of this post talks about why and how you can apply these ideas to accelerate your own growth as an engineer.
⭐️ Why reading whitepapers will accelerate your growth to a senior+ engineer
There are 3 main reasons reading computer research benefits you:
Scaling your impact by providing novel insight, like in team design reviews
Creating a personal-growth flywheel. The more time you spend learning, the better and faster you learn in the future.
Future-proofing your career and helping you stay on top of industry trends.
1) Scaling your impact
Reading academic computer science will open your eyes to novel technical insights that you can use to level up your work within your team.
One personal story is from reading about Meta’s system for automatic software deployment, which discusses supervising new server releases based on business metrics and changes in user engagement. Because I had read this paper and others, I advocated for a new system designed by our team to gate all changes based on whether the new changes were negatively impacting users.
At more senior engineering levels, many organizations expect you to scale your impact.
In fact, being a technical subject matter expert is often a prerequisite for promotion. This expectation exists because it means you’re scaling your impact beyond yourself and your own projects.
Reading whitepapers is one of the best ways to build your expertise.
Understanding existing industry patterns means that you can save time by directly applying them to your team’s projects. For example, many papers outline specific techniques for designing a scalable system. Building on a published approach avoids recreating existing concepts, which de-risks your engineering work.
Even without directly implementing ideas from industry research, internalizing their lessons will build your creativity and pattern-matching abilities. This comes into play most often when reviewing designs from other engineers in your team. You’ll know about common problems already solved by others, so you’ll be able to anticipate whether they would happen in your scenario.
2) Creating a personal-growth flywheel
Diving deep and applying lessons from cutting-edge technology improves your ability to do so again in the future.
I used my knowledge of cutting-edge research from companies like Meta as an input into our team strategy. This allowed us to land high-impact projects that prevented and detected significant outages before they happened.
Based on this success, I grew my own scope, and received more leadership opportunities in our organization, forming a positive feedback loop.
Going forward, I was able to process new information faster and generate even more insights, accelerating my growth even further in a “flywheel” effect.
3) Future-proofing your career
Another reason to stay on top of academic research is that the tech industry is always changing—fast.
Reading computer science papers from the top conferences exposes you to new ideas and allows you to understand where the industry is headed.
I’ve used this approach in learning about the technologies that power modern AI applications. Because I was known for being on top of industry research in AI and had expertise in preventing outages, I was given a lead role in the reliability team launching and scaling Generative AI in Google Maps.
📚 How to find and read papers
It can be intimidating if you’re approaching academic computer science for the first time or haven’t read a whitepaper in a while.
To make it easier, you can use this 3-step process: