Grow Fast by Going Slow
Dear new engineer,
Welcome to the first day in your profession! Hopefully the great parts of being new - a fresh challenge in front of you, an electric excitement - don't ever go away. You're going to be inundated with information pushing you to ramp up quick and charge forward. This is great advice, but it can be detrimental to you when blindly followed. When everything around you is telling you to move fast, here are the places you'll grow faster by taking it slow.
🗺 Redraw your map
You have a map towards becoming a successful engineer in your head. I'm sorry to tell you that map is almost certainly wrong or, at the very least, incomplete. I could've easily tunnel-visioned on my original plan in leaving for grad school a year after joining Facebook - a plan which I now am confident would've made me miserable and been like walking right off a cliff.
Your map may be too narrow a path (design/PM/people responsibilities can also be engineering), too hesitant (be bold!), or too straight (growth is often circuitous). It's worth your time to examine and redraw it. If there are written expectations for you, start from there. Look at situations that arise and compare them to those definitions so you can understand them more deeply. Ask your manager and mentors how they walked the path before you. Discovering your own map is worth your time and energy.
🙋♀️ Ask too many questions
I remember being perpetually worried that I was asking too much out of my mentor. I'd sit there mustering up the courage before finally trying to get his attention. With his headphones blaring music, I would wave my hands more and more violently until he noticed. The whole process felt so awkward to me that I didn't want to ask more questions.
What I didn't realize was that it's part of the job of the people around you to help you grow quickly. My mentor actually found it rewarding from both a personal and career standpoint to guide me. He was able to learn what advice he gave was or wasn't helpful, as well as take some of the credit of my engineering output!
You do your mentor a favor by asking questions, especially the ones that feel silly or awkward to ask. Those are likely the ones that are most critical. In many years of mentoring others, I haven't yet met a new engineer that asked too many questions - you should aim to be the first.
A quick formula for asking great questions to get you started:
- Check you're asking in the right place
- Describe your higher-level goal first
- Then the specific step you're stuck at
- Then what you've already done to try to solve it
- Follow up, give thanks and closure to those helping you
🗼 Build a solid foundation
There's a natural inclination to hurry through tasks to prove yourself. You want to get right into writing as much code as possible and landing impact for your team! However, rushing this will be a disservice to you in the long term.
Investing that bit of extra time in fully understanding solutions instead of charging forward will help you build a stronger base of knowledge from which to tackle the next problem. A heuristic you can use on what's enough is getting to a place where you can teach others the problem you just faced.
💵 Small improvements compound
Look to be 1% more efficient every week. You don't need to necessarily grow by leaps and bounds. Thanks to the magic of compound interest, if you can consistently keep that up you'll be twice as effective 70 weeks later.
With a 40 hour workweek, that's just a 24 minute improvement. So for coding, a technique you've internalized instead of having to look it up or an insight that prevents a gnarly bug can save you that time. For project planning and communication, this can look like figuring how you could've avoided needing one meeting or a long email thread. Just one win like this a week is all you need to be sure you're growing at a good pace.
Ten years later, I still feel uncomfortable, but it's now a feeling I've become more accustomed to and welcome as a friendly signal that I'm being challenged. Chances are you're going to deal with feelings of impostor syndrome and other difficult emotions. Know that this is normal and there can be a great power in talking about it with others as well as seeking help if you need it.
At the end of the day, remember to trust yourself. The person you are has gotten you at least this far, haven't they? Don't hesitate to discard advice that doesn't resonate with you, including what's written here. Take the time to slow down, listen, and be kind to that voice inside of you.
So that's it. I hope this is useful to you (and that you'll tell me if it isn't).
Best of luck to you, new engineer, I'm sure you'll accomplish great things.
