My strategy to become a TOP 1% engineer
Avoiding the TOP 1% sleep-deprived
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How do you become an outlier?
Doing things other people don’t.
You don’t need to come up with big innovations.
It’s about having positive side effects on anything you do. Midas’ golden touch.
It’s about under-promising and over-delivering.
We all have a promise of expectations based on our role and level.
Let’s audit our work as engineers to find opportunities to over-deliver.
In this post, you’ll learn:
How to make an impact when writing code and documents
How to improve your team’s life when being on-call
How to turn meetings into a fun game (at least for yourself)
How to earn trust by over-communicating
Writing code
Apply the boy-scout rule: Leave it better than you found it.
Refactor, add tests to untested functionality and contribute to the readme.
This is not about doing work outside of your scope.
But about improving the files files you have to modify them.
Writing documents
Doesn’t matter if it’s a technical design, an investigation, or a decision-making doc
Create a template for this type of document. People will love you, everybody fears the blank page.
Craft your document with a clear purpose. Communicate it when asking people to read it or inviting them to a review meeting
Answer all comments in the doc, even if you answered verbally. You earn trust when all can be traced with a link to a comment
Working on-call
Improve your runbooks and document any new procedure. Make others able to replicate your actions.
If you can’t execute some improvement in your shift, create tickets with clear descriptions and references. Make anyone able to execute it even when the freshness of the situation dies.
And when the improvement is doable in time and complexity, do it.
In operations the priority is mitigation. But things don’t stop there. Make sure you can prevent, detect earlier, and mitigate faster in the future.