In my career so far, I have had the chance to work with a variety of people. They have each taught me very different things. Some of these things have now become a big part of who I am. I am going to share some of these things as a thank you to these people (who will remain unnamed). I have tried my best to capture the most non-obvious and important learnings in this post.
1. Balance people and results
When it comes to projects, there is always a tension between optimizing for either people or results. For example, let’s say there is a business-critical task that needs to be completed by a certain date. But here’s the challenge: you will need someone on your team to work through the weekend to accomplish that. What do you do? There are some who will put the engineer first and push back on the date. Others will convince the engineer to put in the extra hours to meet the original date. There is no universally right or wrong approach here. But we each have a default that puts us closer to one end of the spectrum more than the other. Overall, my conclusion was that it’s not possible to balance the two effectively. Or so I thought.
Learnings from “Z”
All this changed when I ended up working with someone (let’s call them “Z”). I couldn’t place “Z” in one of the boxes neatly. Let’s use our original example above to understand this. If “Z” were to ask some engineer to work on the business-critical task over the weekend, they are clearly being “results-first” in that moment and the business stakeholders would see them that way. But after the event, “Z” would also make sure that when new challenging growth opportunities come up, this engineer gets preference over others who have a more proven track record and by doing so, “Z” would be seen as “people-first”. So my main learning from watching “Z” is that it is possible for someone to be both “people-first” or “results-first”. Everything depends on the context and learning to seamlessly switch between the two is a valuable skill for building trust.
2. Say “yes” even when you don’t feel ready
For the longest time, I was very cautious and conservative in accepting new opportunities that came my way. In other words, I chose to stay in my comfort zone and was optimizing for preventing failure rather than finding new ways to succeed. (It’s likely that I would have resented this framing back then. Rather, I would have found some justification for my choices which indicates how we are blind to our own bias). I didn’t realize how much this was holding me back. But working with and observing “B” pushed me to be more open to taking on such opportunities.
Before I started working with “B”, I noticed that they had a consistent track record of being trusted with more and more responsibility. I couldn’t figure out what they were doing that others weren’t. But after working with them, it became clear why. “B” had an incredible amount of self-belief and this manifested in a lot of ways. They would dig deep and try to master new concepts and ideas which were relevant to succeeding at the task at hand. They would also be willing to do work outside of their own expertise since they had this strong belief that they could accomplish anything if they tried. (Of course, there are limits to this but we could all be a bit more bold when traversing some uncharted territory).
Learnings from “B”
It is hard to explain how much of an infectious effect “B”‘s attitude had on me and I started believing more in my own abilities and the results (after some initial hiccups of course). In a lot of ways, working in software development is very different from training for a race. You can’t always slowly ramp-up your speed or your mileage since unlike training for a race there is a lot that is not in your control – both in terms of getting the right opportunities and getting them at the right time. So having the mindset to just take on anything that comes up and working through it is the most reliable way to level up and keep growing.
3. Set high standards by living them
“Q” was a senior engineer who had a certain aura around them. They had no titles or any special access/privileges that made them more valuable than others on paper. So I wondered what they brought to the table that is worthy of such respect. But as I started working with them more, I realized what their superpower was — doing things better than anyone else around them. “Q” didn’t have to tell anyone what the others on the team needed to do better. They just had to show up every day and do things the way they normally did. This can be as simple as writing some code or executing a tricky task. Managers loved “Q” because they showed others what great looked like and what they should aspire to.
Learnings from “Q”
I always knew where I stood by looking at something “Q” did and I used it to figure out what I needed to do better. There is no better motivation to improve than to see someone on your team doing more or less the same things you are doing but doing it better. I feel incredibly lucky that I got to work with “Q” in my formative years as an engineer. I felt “Q”‘s absence when they left the team and the standards did drop a bit. My main learnings from “Q” are:
- always hold yourself to your own standards
- making sure your standards are always higher than what is expected of you
- ripple effect of the above two factors combined is incredibly powerful
4. Balance having fun and working hard
I had always believed that it’s not possible to have fun and to work hard. Mostly because I didn’t know how to do that and no one around me showed me that’s an option. Fundamentally, I believed that to have fun your mind needs to free from other distractions (aka work) and hence the idea of having fun and working hard at the same time seemed incompatible. But all of this changed, thanks to my interactions with “K”.
It is worth noting that “K” was someone who had more responsibility than me. But looking at them, you would never get that feeling. “K” was always joking around with people, participating in social activities and just enjoying themselves without a worry in the world (or so it seemed). They were also really good at carrying out their responsibilities efficiently. I was really intrigued by how they were able to pull this off (seemed almost magical to me).
Learnings from “K”
Here’s what I learned: “K” had a different philosophy to work and life. They believed in giving their best. But not worrying too much about outcomes since they didn’t believe it was something they could control. All they could control was the amount of effort they put in and the rest would take care of itself. By doing this they could decide when they needed to focus on the task at hand (say drafting an email). But at other times, their mind was free after that to have fun and enjoy life! This sounds very easy but is really hard for me to fully embrace this even now. Truly achieving this state of mind requires a lot of maturity and accepting that I don’t have control no matter how hard I try.
I hope to continue learning more from the people around me and also to build more awareness to uncover more such learnings that I have started applying subconsciously. A lot of these learnings are the result of reflecting on some past experiences with the benefit of hindsight. So this is something that I plan to do more often!
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