The Effective Engineer

How to Reclaim Missed Opportunities with More Effective Communication

2017-05-03T00:00:00-07:00

I blinked away the tears.

Team morale was crumbling. Co-workers, many I considered friends, were leaving the company. I was at a meeting with senior leaders, and I had just expressed concern that the way the company ran projects might be hurting the team — a team that I cared so much about and where I had invested years of my life.

I had expected the leadership team to support me and say, “Yes! Edmond, you’re right! We need to address this.”

But instead, they challenged my diagnosis and my ideas with cold questions.

“Where’s your data?”

“How do you know what you’re saying is true?”

“Why are you doing this?”

In hindsight, they were probably just doing their due diligence — these were the same types of questions that I might ask if I were engineering a solution to a technical problem. But this wasn’t a technical problem. And in the moment, their line of questioning put me on the defensive. I felt attacked and misunderstood — that despite my years of dedication, they still mistrusted my motives.

I had entered the meeting feeling determined to help fix things, but I walked out feeling dejected and powerless. A few months later, I left that company.

It seems like a lifetime ago since that meeting took place, but the failure still stands out in my mind. Both sides came into the meeting with good intentions — we all wanted what we thought was the best for the team. And yet, no one won in that conversation. I was unable to convince the leadership team to take action on what I cared about. And the senior leaders lost a valued employee who only 60 minutes prior had been heavily invested in the team.

What happened here? How did the conversation go so wrong? And how might things have turned out differently?

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The 3 Keys to a Remarkable Career

2017-03-14T00:00:00-07:00

For the past few years, I’ve been coaching an engineering leader at Google on how to think about growing her career. She had been with the company for many years and was ready to play a bigger role.

She didn’t just want to be another engineer who could deliver quality code in a timely manner. Google already had an abundance of those. Instead, she longed to make her own unmistakable mark.

How could she stand out among the 20,000+ engineers at the company? How could she create a meaningful impact on her team and the product she worked on?

Our conversations around her career development generally centered around three main themes:

What team she ought to work on. What teams were core to Google’s mission and company priorities? Where could she build products that directly contributed to meaningful business value for the company?
How she could get more energized and motivated about the work she did. What did she enjoy working on the most? What projects would provide opportunities for her to learn new things?
What she considered to be her differentiating strengths. Whereas many engineers tend to be heads-down, focused on coding, she had a fearless ability to manage complexity across multiple teams and systems. She could effectively keep projects on track and quickly figure out the cause of things that went wrong.

Having built clarity around each of these dimensions, she then sought out opportunities that aligned with them and grew to become a tech lead and manager at the company. She earned the respect of her peers, regularly presented key initiatives to senior leaders in her organization, and started to represent the company at external events. She built a remarkable career for herself.

By working through similar questions, you can find your path to doing the same too. In this post, I share a simple but powerful framework you can use for distinguishing yourself and creating a remarkable career.

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What’s Possible Here?

2017-01-04T00:00:00-08:00

This story captures for me what’s possible in 2017.

A shoe factory sends two marketing scouts to a region in Africa to explore opportunities for business expansion. One reports back, “Situation hopeless. No one wears shoes.”

The other writes back enthusiastically, “Glorious business opportunity! They have no shoes.”

The exact same observation. Two very different interpretations.

This story, related by Rosamund and Benjamin Zander in The Art of Possibility, illustrates my biggest lesson from 2016: We invent many of our own limitations. And by doing so, we inadvertently become the biggest obstacle to our own success. Only by reframing those interpretations into what’s possible can we create more options for ourselves.

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Stanford Tech Talk on The Power of Leverage: How Quip’s Small Engineering Team Built a Product on 8 Different Platforms

2016-12-15T00:00:00-08:00

What investments have engineering leaders made at top tech companies like Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, and Instagram that provided the highest returns for their teams?

What enabled the engineering team at Quip to ship its productivity tools to 8 different platforms with only 13 engineers?

How do the most effective engineers make their efforts, their teams, and their careers more successful?

Recently, I had the opportunity to share some of the stories and insights behind these questions at a talk on the Stanford campus. The Stanford ACM organization invited me to speak with college students and engineers in the area. Even though the live event was oversubscribed, Richard Chen graciously recorded the talk, so I’m excited to share the video with you as well.

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Taking Ownership Is The Most Effective Way to Get What You Want

2016-11-15T00:00:00-08:00

In 1967, American psychologist Martin Seligman discovered that our perception of control greatly shapes our choices and behavior.

In an oft-cited study, he subjected two groups of dogs to electrical shocks. In the first group, the dogs could press a lever to end the shock. In the second, the lever did nothing; the shocks appeared to continue for random durations, and the dogs in this group could do nothing to escape the shocks.

Seligman then placed dogs from the two groups in a partitioned box, where all they had to do to escape the shocks was jump over a low barrier from one side of the box to the other. Those in the first group quickly learned to jump the barrier. Those in the second just gave up and laid down — they had previously learned that they could do nothing to affect the situation.

This “learned helplessness” — a learned belief that you can’t do anything to affect negative events — has subsequently been confirmed in human studies as well.

How we explain negative events to ourselves therefore plays a huge role in our own behavior.

When we believe that negative outcomes in work and life result from external factors outside of our control, we feel helpless. We fail to see solutions that might just be a short hop away. When we instead take ownership for elements of the situation that we can influence, we empower ourselves to effect change.

We can use this idea to become significantly more effective at getting what we want.

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How to Transition from Average Engineer to 10x Engineer

2016-10-18T00:00:00-07:00

Can an average engineer develop technical skills that surpass 10x the abilities of his or her peers? Unlikely.

Can an engineer of average technical ability develop into an individual contributor who produces 10x the impact of his or her peers? With the right mindset and skill development, absolutely.

The key to making that transformation is understanding the distinction between those two questions.

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The Trouble with Trying to Win at Everything

2016-08-29T00:00:00-07:00

I like to argue.

In fact, I liked it so much that during my high school and college days, I competed on the debate team for over five years. On weekends, we’d travel to tournaments at nearby school campuses and debate other students on important social issues.

Is human genetic engineering morally justified? Is it moral for the United States to use economic sanctions to achieve foreign policy goals? Do colleges and universities have a moral obligation to prohibit hate speech on campuses? Should violent juvenile offenders be treated as adults under the criminal justice system?

Debate was the single, most valuable activity I did during high school. It taught me how to clearly articulate my thoughts, how to speak in public, how to organize my writing, and how to use logic and rhetoric to persuade my audience.

But debate also taught me a bad habit — one that ironically made it more difficult for me to communicate effectively at home and at work — that took me years to unlearn.

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When Pride Gets in the Way of Your Best Work

2016-07-14T00:00:00-07:00

Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s founder and CEO, wanted to bet on an idea called the “Bot Team” to solve one of the company’s most pressing product challenges.

A year and a half after the company’s beta launch, over 500,000 people were using its team messaging product every day. But to maintain that rapid growth, Slack needed to expand to new audiences and reach beyond early adopters in the technology sector.

But how do you convey the value of Slack to a new user who hadn’t used an enterprise communication product before? How do you explain the benefits of having direct messages, channels, and service integrations all in one place, before someone has even signed up their team?

That’s where the Bot Team idea came in — new customers could try out Slack by chatting with a team of computer-controlled bots. Through the simulation, they’d get a clearer idea of how the product worked. It was a reasonable hypothesis — after all, what better way to learn about a product than to use it?

The engineering team estimated that building good-enough bots capable of basic interactions with new users would take at least six months of effort. Plus, the more time they could spend on it, the more believable they could make the bot team. There was a risk, however, that the fake team might confuse users — who are these bots, and why are they here? And after half a year, the team might be so emotionally attached and invested in the idea that it would be hard to change directions even if the idea didn’t work that well — would any problems rest with the idea or would they be solved with better bot quality?

So — should the team take the bet?

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The One Key Question to Ask When Measuring Your Own Productivity

2016-06-23T00:00:00-07:00

In his book The Dilbert Principle, Scott Adams re-shares a cautionary tale from one of his comic strip readers on measuring productivity.

An engineering manager wanted to incentivize his team to find and fix software bugs and instituted a program to reward strong performers. To encourage the quality assurance team to find bugs, he rewarded $20 for every bug uncovered. To encourage engineers to fix more bugs, he rewarded $20 for every bug fixed.

It’s not difficult to imagine what happened next. Engineers started to purposefully introduce bugs for testers to discover and for themselves to fix. One engineer even established an underground market for his bugs and earned $1700 after one week. The well-intentioned program shuttered soon afterwards.

This amusing little story illustrates a critical point: how you measure your productivity changes how you behave. Whenever you’re measuring productivity, ask yourself this one key question, “What’s the right metric that will incentivize the behavior that I want?”

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The Five Key Mindsets to Master If You Want to Be a Successful Programmer

2016-04-26T00:00:00-07:00

Dave Cutler, at age 74, still goes to his office at Microsoft every day to write code.

I first heard of Cutler when he was honored as a Computer History Museum Fellow for his five decades (!) of work in the computer industry. Based on his lifelong dedication to engineering alone, many would consider him a “hardcore” programmer.

What’s even more awe-inspiring than his long tenure, however, is that his work has influenced the computing experiences of over 2 billion people. Among his many contributions, Cutler built critical pieces of Windows NT — the basis of all major versions of Windows in the past twenty years — and gave Microsoft a huge market advantage in its early days by making the operating system backwards-compatible with earlier software. He’s been called the “key technical brain behind the Microsoft Windows operating system.”

So what makes people like Cutler successful programmers? And how might we aspire to achieve even a fraction of his level of impact? What separates the strongest programmers — and those who bring about the greatest positive impact on people’s lives with their software — from everyone else?

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