How to become a more effective engineer

Know how your org works

Soft skills: these are hard skills!

Implicit hierarchies

Cultures: top-down, bottom-up, and both at the same time

Get comfortable with the “mess”

Look for small wins

Understand organizational constraints

exactly what technical skill you need to invest effort into getting better at, which will actually be rewarded

how to build lasting relationships with other people on your team or organization that ultimately dictate the success of a project

how to effectively pitch projects or improvements to leadership and actually see these through to completion

how to navigate ambiguity

how to manage conflicting priorities or expectations

how to best deal with setbacks

how to weigh the pros and cons of technical choices in the larger context of the organizational realities and needs

how to identify and drive quick wins

how to discern what’s achievable, and in precisely what time frame

how to use this knowledge to judiciously pick battles

and in the worst case, to know when to cut your losses and quit

how best to gather information you’re missing

how and when to get by without doing so

The most important skill for any engineer to possess is the ability to learn quickly

the way your codebase is structured

to the tooling in use

to the way the team tests or deploys a system

to the way the system is architected

to the reason why the team did or didn’t choose a specific technology to work with, or a specific team to partner with

to the reason why some things that seem “broken” are never prioritized

and more.

to be continued ...