Struggling to stay motivated with long term engineering goals? This guide shows how SMART goals and tiny experiments together create progress that actually sticks.
I’m taking a bottom-up approach, not because the question is fuzzy, but because I don’t know the exact path to my goal.
> Do I want to be a manager? Do I enjoy architecture work?
I’m pretty convinced that if you don’t know what you want, your top priority is to figure that out. Before you do that, doing any experiments is just burning time, so you feel you are progressing.
I like that idea! I don't think our current selves know better than our future selves, so it's better to remain open to adjusting direction as we learn
Isn't this really more about finding the right combination of up / down pathing, right-sizing it for oneself, and then applying it flexibly with others? The binary breakdown helps but after 20+ years as a software engineer I have never seen it applied so uniformly.
Great overview, Fran!
I’m taking a bottom-up approach, not because the question is fuzzy, but because I don’t know the exact path to my goal.
> Do I want to be a manager? Do I enjoy architecture work?
I’m pretty convinced that if you don’t know what you want, your top priority is to figure that out. Before you do that, doing any experiments is just burning time, so you feel you are progressing.
I like that idea! I don't think our current selves know better than our future selves, so it's better to remain open to adjusting direction as we learn
Isn't this really more about finding the right combination of up / down pathing, right-sizing it for oneself, and then applying it flexibly with others? The binary breakdown helps but after 20+ years as a software engineer I have never seen it applied so uniformly.
Yes, that was the idea behind the post. To use bottom-up to get started and top-down to have a sense of direction.
Of course, I wrote about what an ideal scenario would look like and what I strive for. But in reality things are messy