Being a senior engineer means having strong technical skills, the ability to communicate well and navigate ambiguous situations, and most important of all, the ability to grow and lead other people.
The difference between being an engineer and being a senior engineer often has to do with the ability to mentor and grow your teammates. Mentoring is all about teaching and delegation.
Growing up, I was taught by my grandfather how to dress for the job I wanted, not the job I currently had.
As a new manager, I put more of an effort into my appearance, and it definitely had a positive effect, especially when interacting with customers and clients outside of the organization.
You want your work and reputation to speak for themselves, but don’t let your appearance get in the way of that.
Whether you are creating an API or consuming someone else’s data, having a clearly defined contract is the first step toward a good working relationship.
The best thing you can do during a conflict is to focus on the facts.
Speak only for yourself. Avoid saying things like, “We all think… ” or “You’re just saying that because….” Instead, talk about your experience, your knowledge, and the facts at hand.
When people feel they are being heard, they are more likely to compromise because they feel like their perspective is being taken into account in the decision.
If you pout and phone in your work because you didn’t get your way, people will notice and they will remember—and that will make it even harder to get your way in the future.
I work with a team of 18 amazing technologists, and it is my job to judge their performance. Only recently have I realized that in many ways it is nearly impossible to do so.
When you are willing to dive in and learn new skills, it puts you ahead of the game; and when you are strategic about what skills you learn, it can help you grow your career even faster.
Think about how each of these people functions in the organization and what your relationship to them is. Your relationship with each of these people matters and will influence how receptive each is to your ideas.
Don't underestimate your power to influence anyone in your organization—even if you're relatively low ranking in the company—through good relationships.
To build those relationships and influence, however, you have to start working on them before you ever need to pitch an idea to anyone.
By taking a Bayesian approach, you can increase your empathy by performing error correction on what you hear and increase your emotional intelligence by inserting redundancy into your communication. One way you get that error correction and redundancy is through peer feedback and 360 reviews to train your neural net continuously.
Over thousands of years, armies have figured out how to get things done and achieve their goals in an environment that is really chaotic and completely unpredictable. That is the environment we live in as developers as well.
If you read the U.S. Marine Corps Warfighting manual, and replace the word war with software, everything in there holds true.
You need to make sure that the candidate has a really great experience while visiting your company (after all, people talk and you want them to be saying good things—since this candidate may not be your next hire, but someone he or she meets may be…).
As a manager I often offer to be the interviewee for my team to test out new questions; after all, isn’t it fun to turn the tables and interview your manager?
When you are truly exceptional at something, you build career capital, and you can trade that capital for bigger paychecks, more flexibility, or even fancy job titles.
What worked really well for one person in one environment doesn't always translate to a new place. That is why adaptability and flexibility are important traits to look for during the hiring process, not just past successes.
While it is true that misery loves company, no one loves working for a leader who doesn't portray confidence in the team's trajectory and success. People want to be inspired, and as their leader, it is your job to give them the motivation and vision to perform.
This means that even when things are bad, or you feel frustrated, you don't let it show. You need to be the person who is positive and who helps motivate people to do their best. If you don't, then who will?
Nobody comes to work to do a bad job. Most of us are doing our best.
Even so, it's rare that we hear how our work is being received. We assume if we hear nothing that it means we are not in trouble, which is good. But it's not great.
What you reward and recognize is what you get. If you don't recognize anything, the bar will lower to see what gets noticed (or what they can get away with).
When you do praise and reward your team, you raise the bar based on what gets praised.
If you have an idea, try discussing it with your peers (particularly the creative ones who get excited and can help you transform it, rather than the closed-minded friends who tend to see only the risks or problems).
When you are new to a team, you have no career capital built up with this organization. Career capital is your currency at work; when you provide a lot of concrete, visible value to the team or the organization, you have more leverage to do the things you want, such as work on the most exciting projects or get more flexibility in your schedule.
Crossing things off your to-do list gives your brain a happy little dopamine hit, even if the tasks are tiny—it keeps your motivation up and your excuses down.
In this video interview conducted by Terry Coatta, Kate Matsudaira discusses key architectural choices in the design of systems and data partitioning.
Leveling Up - Taking your engineering & operations role to the next level
In video games there is always a clear route to take it to the next level, all you have to do is find a special item, like a mushroom (a la Mario), or gain enough experience points to super charge your performance. In our careers the path to success can be a lot less clear cut, and in some cases downright overgrown to the point it is hard to tell which way is forward. The path to success in any engineering career is very much like a video game that has more Koopas than Power-Ups…but there is way to find the Princess…even if she is in the other castle.
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