Now that I have decided to stop adding topics to the blog, it feels like the air is slowly being let out of the balloon. What is left to teach? Maybe I should just blow out the list of topics in one long rant and then be done with it. Yes. Let’s do exactly that.
So, let’s tear apart my backlog and give you one final blog post filled with rapid-fire advice.
Have pride in your work – When you ship your products, ensure the little details are handled. Are pixels out of alignment? Are your controls properly formatted? If you have a Date Picker UI control, did you ensure it is clean, or have you left the insignificant time elements with minutes, seconds, and microseconds at the end, with the actual digits word-wrapped out of the display like some sort of insane hobo? If you do not take small amounts of time to ensure your products are shiny, then you are just putting garbage into the universe. Please don’t.
Learn from everyone – Everyone around you has something valuable to teach, not just your boss, not just best-selling authors. Learn from your teams. Learn from your peers. Learn from your kids. This last one is quite serious. Youth sports has taught me so much over several years as a coach, a referee, and a spectator.
How will I teach this to future me? This blog encapsulates a lot of this question. What are the things I can do to help someone who is on my career arc but is several years behind? How do you provide coaching, storytelling, projects, and feedback to people to get them to where you are now, but relatively earlier for them? This is one of the more active questions I ask myself daily.
How do you avoid FOBU? The Fear Of Blowing Up is real. You have to try things, and you have to be prepared for them to fail. You cannot wait until you are 100% confident and have 100% of the needed information. You have to make imperfect decisions. Sometimes, things will blow up.
How do you demonstrate leadership as an IC? I have identified the biggest career gap for most people wanting to be a senior IC and, eventually, a leader. You have to do more than just identify the problems in your team and organization. You must propose credible solutions and spearhead the work to fix those problems. “This is what is broken” is not as effective as “This is what is broken, here are some possible ways to fix it, and this is how I want to fix it.”
Drive-by management – Some of the best managers and leaders I know seek opportunities to grow their people. Delegating your work creates massive growth opportunities for your team. Look for curious and motivated people, and give them interesting work. Discuss how you would do it differently. If there are gaps between what you would do and what they would do, explain them. Make sure you regularly know who is interested in this kind of work, and confidently assign tasks that give room for career development.
Be loudly wrong – According to Amazon, Leaders are often correct. This creates a fear of speaking up and saying the wrong thing. Be sure to give your teams a voice to be heard by letting them know it is okay to share ideas and propose things, even if they get shot down. Whenever I attend large engineering events, the same ten people are always willing to speak up or ask questions. Those people are the people to watch professionally for how fast they will ascend professionally.
Core hours are amazing – When you work from one side of the continent to the other, core hours are a great thing. Knowing that you have a window of time when you can meet with people in a remote-first world helps businesses share information smoothly. It also gives people the freedom to do their IC work and time to think independently.
Know the blast radius for failure – Finally, one of the important things to do as a leader is to understand where you can fail and how. You need to give people opportunities to fail to grow. One of the biggest challenges in today’s engineering team culture is creating opportunities for senior engineers to become staff engineers and architects because of their current engineering leadership. Either the current leadership is unaware that they have put all of their team’s output on a super-safe railway, prohibiting the ability for people to stretch and do more architecture work, or they know and are too focused on day-to-day business results to give their people the space to stretch and grow. Both will cause your best people to churn. Know what projects you can give over completely to your teams to design and build without causing irreversible damage to your business or your customers.
With that last point, the bottom of my monitor is now clean for the first time in four years. It is an emotional moment for sure. It has been a great voyage together. Thank you all for reading along as I do some sort of strange career penance by writing down all these things. I also want to thank our good friends at 3M for their high-quality Post-it Notes, without which I would have had to do some kind of Trello bullshit to track this work.
The last person on this web page, please turn out the lights.
