He gave me one last tip. If I ever want to have a career in a management role, like CTO in the future, I must emphasize more on “taking credits” from the beginning of my career. He said being humble or modest is overrated and it would not do me any good for my career.

I don’t really know if any of this is true, or what the context is. Maybe this is how it is in American Corporate culture, but it’s not really how I experienced it.

If you’re a beginner programmer, sure, you can brag about how cool your code is, and how much you’ve build. But if at some point you become a lead developer and you’re still doing that, it seems kinda toxic.

As lead developer in the standup or reports I’d usually downplay what I did - like instead of saying “I build this cool new feature” - present it as “The backend team build this cool new feature”. If someone else build something cool, I would specific say something like “Bob build a really cool feature”

I must emphasize more on “taking credits” from the beginning of my career. He said being humble or modest is overrated and it would not do me any good for my career.

A good Team Lead or CTO needs a good team, and the team usually appreciates it a lot more if you’re spreading the credits around instead of taking them for yourself.

Besides that, a random developer in a big company is very unlikely to just become the CTO by not being humble. If you want to become a CTO, you either join a startup or start your own company