Ask For Opportunities

Engineers often say to me “I don’t get to learn [INSERT_CONCEPT_HERE] on the job. How do I get to practice it?” I say bologna! Ask for the opportunity, or better yet make it!

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Breaking Down Work

Every so often, I come across Merge Request that slowly grow in size. They start out as 100 lines of code change, then 20 commits later it’s 500 lines long! This is a symptom of poor planning and task break down.

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Product Management Is About Budget

Those of you who’ve done freelancing will know if you say to the client “Feature X will take 3 weeks at $1,000 a week… that’ll be $3,000 plus tax” they’re going to have a fit. “We want it cheaper, faster, blah blah blah…”

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OKRs

I find myself not paying attention to epics and discussions unless I know the WHY. I literally zone out. Start checking emails and Slack. Half listening for my name or something critical. Before I work on anything that will take more than a day I want to know who’s “paying” for it (the sponsor) and what are the measurable benefits (metrics).

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Small Units Of Work

As a busy professional, I really appreciate breaking every task down into smaller subtasks. If a ticket has 2 or more things that can be done separately, I prefer to do them separately.

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Personal Problem Solving Template

I reminded the team that it’s important to create and use your own Problem Solving Template. This should be based on your strengths and weaknesses as an engineer. I highly recommend reading chapter 1 and 8 in the book Think Like a Programmer.

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