- A placeholder => to solve the biggest problems your abilities allow, constantly challenging yourself and nurturing your technical and people skills.
- Trajectory => self-study, mentorship, how companies evaluate performance.
- We read to acquire three things:
- Facts we can tactically in your day-to-day jobs.
- e.g., optimizations, libraries, or tools.
- Fundamental concepts we can use to design systems and drive projects.
- e.g., design patterns, algorithms, project management methodologies, and reliability techniques.
- A sense of the landscape of the field's technologies, so we're prepared to choose among them.
- Facts we can tactically in your day-to-day jobs.
- Menu:
- Technical white papers => from academia or companies like Google and Facebook can offer theoretical insight.
- Conferences => a broad, practical sense of what's going on in the industry.
- Newsletters and blog posts => a steady flow of bite-sized practical updates.
- Books => the whole landscape for a technology.
- Reading code => the real patterns in successful projects.
- Online courses => bet for a brand new technical area.
- Podcasts => go-to if you drive to work.
- Discretionary coding => really use the systems you've read about.
- Finding a Mentor
- Seek out advice from a more senior person for mentorship is perfectly reasonable.
- You should ideally come with a specific issue to ask about and perhaps a concrete proposal for an ongoing relationship.
- Explain your goals.
- Suggest that you meet every 2 weeks for 30 minutes
- You will come prepared every time to discuss areas you particularly want to grow, and your mentor will share their thoughts and assign reading in those areas.
- You will come every time with at least two specific questions to ask.
- You will bring proposals/documents/emails for your mentor to review with you.
- Making the Most of Your Mentor
- Think about ways you want to improve; come to every 1:1 ready to discuss them.
- Prepare for meetings by thinking about recent challenges; always come with at least two recent struggles to discuss.
- Maintain a shared 1:1 agenda, and always update that document in advance; it shows your commitment to making the most of the relationship and helps organize the conversation.
- Imposter Syndrome Is Underrated
- Embrace self-skepticism and doubt yourself every day.
- You should advocate for yourself, take risks, and, as you start to build a track record of solving problems, trust your skills and adaptability.
- Having Your Own Project Ideas
- => to conceive of projects by sheer creativity and insight.
- => the people's creativity, knowledge => keep learning.
- Ask your manager, your customers, and your teammates what they think is broken and what opportunities aren't being exploited; maybe they'll put you onto something great.
- The process
- => executives and the board allocating a pool of money and equity for raises and bonuses => further subdivided down the org tree.
- => self-reviews and peer feedback.
- => battle royale-style meetings of managers => calibration => rank employees.
- => engineers receive their reviews in person from their managers.
- A compensation package including some or all of cash bonus, cash raise, and equity.
- A written review structured around a rubric of areas like coding, architecture, and leadership.
- A promotion (or not).
- Self-reviews
- an annual or semi-annual self-review => making argument that you should get a good review and a good bonus.
- Document work prodigiously in a worklog.
- First, it should not just be a list of tasks; you need to construct a narrative that your reader can follow.
- “I managed the inbound bug queue for the store page, including working with stakeholders to prioritize bugs and fixing over 20 bugs.”
- Second, your narrative should emphasize not hust your productivity but your leadership, autonomy, and impact.
- Led meetings.
- Did your own project management.
- Proposed new projects.
- Took the initiative to improve infrastructure.
- Owned a component expecially managing inbound requests, supporting stakeholders, reviewing code for other teams, etc.
- Mentored more junior colleagues.
- Provided design feedback.
- Finally, advocate yourself instead of enumerating your mistakes.
- “I should have led more, I should have taken more initiative, I should have seen the big picture more, that is, aspirations to the next level of execution.”
- Stop Worring About Title
- You need your own sense of the meaning of achievement.
- Because we have the good fortune to build things for a living, skill and achievement create opportunity and fulfillment in the long term.