How to be an Effective Engineer

Want to increase your impact? Get promoted quickly or more quality time? Learn to have the mindset & execution of an Effective Engineer.

Transcript

1. How to be an Effective Engineer Aditya Satrya Data Engineering Tech Lead at Mekari linkedin.com/in/asatrya #isiTalk #EngineeringCultureSeries | Oct 2020
2. 2 Why?
3. Increase your impact? Staff engineer → making a whole team better Principal engineer → making the whole company better Distinguished engineer → improving the industry 3
4. Get promoted quickly? More quality time? 4
5. Outline #1 Mindset Prioritize regularly & focus on high-leverage activities Optimize for learning #2 Execution Measure what you want to improve Solve problem in structured manner Approach problems iteratively Invest in Iteration Speed #3 Long-Term Value Balance quality with pragmatism Invest in your team’s growth 5
6. My Favourite Books (top 3, in this topic) 6
7. 7 #1 Mindset
8. #1.1 Prioritize Regularly & Focus on High-Leverage Activities 8
9. Opportunity cost of working on wrong ideas can set back growth by years. 9
10. Focus your effort on leverage points 10
11. Ask yourself regularly: “Is this the most important thing I should be working on?” 11
12. Adopt a goal-setting & execution framework • OKR • Scrum 12
14. Be focused Learn to say “no” Preserve blocks of focused time Limit the amount of WIP 14
15. #1.2 Optimize for Learning 15
16. Adopt the growth mindset 16
17. Invest in the rate of learning. Learning compounds. 17
18. Make sure you are working on high priority/impacting projects. 18
19. Preserve a constant portion of time for learning 19
20. Find/build work environments conducive to learning 20
21. Look for culture with curiosity. Where everyone is encouraged to speak up and take a risk. 21
22. Autonomy. Freedom to choose how to achieve a goal. 22
23. People smarter than you. 23
24. Increase team’s learning Practice code review and post-mortem 24
25. 25 #2 Execution
26. #2.1 Measure what you want to Improve 26
27. Use metric to drive progress. If you can't measure it, you can't improve it. 27
28. Pick good metrics. That reflect real value, not just activity 28
29. Pick good metrics. That drive the right behavior. 29
30. Align everyone around metrics. Your manager, peers, subordinates, clients. 30
31. #2.2 Solve problem in a structured manner 31
33. #2.3 Approach problem iteratively 33
34. Evaluate your effort early and often. Not evaluating early leads to wasted efforts. Don't delay getting feedback. 34
35. Find low effort ways to validate work. 35
36. Power of small batches. Helps you avoid making a big mistake by stopping the flow. 36
37. Reduce risk early. Do the riskiest task first so that you can mitigate biggest risk early. 37
38. #2.4 Invest in Iteration Speed 38
39. Find out the biggest bottleneck to optimize. Engineering cycle Communication overhead Organizational process 39
40. CI/CD is high leverage Implement it as early as possible, even if your team consists only you. It improves speed, quality, and peace of mind 40
42. Invest in time-saving automation. If you have to do something more than twice, write an automation the third time. 42
43. Examples to automate • Testing, • ETL, • Detecting spikes, • Deploy servers, etc 43
44. Debugging is hard. It's time-consuming. Upfront investments to shorten debugging loops are worth it. 44
45. Examples: • High test coverage • Fast and incremental compiles and reloads • Logging • Clean code, refactoring • Coding standard & naming convention • Dockerization 45
46. Non-engineering bottlenecks: Cross-team dependency 46
47. Anticipate the misalignment of priorities • Shared OKR • Regularly asking for updates 47
48. Projects fail because of under-communicating Not over-communicating 48
49. Non-engineering bottlenecks: Approval/feedback from decision-maker 49
50. Don't defer approvals until the end. Don't delay feedback. 50
51. 51 #3 Long-Term Value
52. #3.1 Balance Quality with Pragmatism 52
53. Balancing benefits vs trade-offs Instead of right and wrong, look at things in terms of works and doesn’t work to achieve our goals. 53
54. Establish a culture of reviewing code Catch bugs and design problems early, sharing working knowledge of the codebase. 54
55. Manage your technical debt Accumulating technical debt is fine as far as it is repaid within time. Focus on the debt that incurs the most interest. 55
56. #3.2 Invest in your team’s growth 56
57. Help everyone around you succeed. The higher you climb up the engineering ladder, the more your effectiveness will be measured not by your individual contributions but by your impact on the people around you. 57
58. Avoid heroism. Shared ownership of code. Share knowledge. 58
59. Invest in mentoring 59
60. Create a great engineering culture Optimize for iteration speed. Push relentlessly towards automation. Build the right software abstractions. Focus on high code quality by using code reviews. Maintain a respectful work environment. Build shared ownership of code. Invest in automated testing. Allot experimentation time, either through 20% time or hackathons. Foster a culture of learning and continuous improvement. Hire the best. 60