😎 My strategy to become a TOP 1% engineer

Avoiding the TOP 1% sleep-deprived

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.

📚 Studying and learning

Most likely at work you have some recurring meetings for demos. Start sharing there what you learn.

If it has a big audience and only robust presentations go there, start a demo session with just your team.

This forces you not only to learn the first time but to structure in a way you can communicate with others.

I apply this at work and here with the newsletter. I have to think about how to transmit an idea, make it relatable, and find other examples.

Become known as the person who shares, rather than the person who knows things and stays silent.

Last week I found a cool tool allowed for internal use. The next day I was sharing it.

People I hadn’t talked to reached out saying thanks. This is what creates a good impression, a positive social capital in your emotional bank accounts. Over time it compounds.

💬 Meetings

When there’s no clear owner of the meeting, moderate the conversation. Ensure it stays focused on the objective.

Even if there’s an owner, take meeting notes and share them. The person driving the meeting is too busy talking to take notes that they can share afterward.

In 1:1 meetings, take action items and follow up on how you took action on them.

And pay more attention to the other person's problems than thinking about what to say next. Treat the information they give you as action items to follow up in the next meeting.

👀 Reviewing code and documents

Don’t fire-and-forget comments. Follow up with the person promptly to keep the conversation moving forward.

Dedicate time to read references and come up with a proposal rather than just commenting.

I found value in this last one. A conversation was stalling in the comments and we were not close to any action.

I read a couple of wikis of best practices, wrote in another document the decisions we had to take, and made a proposal for each.

Of course, you can’t reach this depth of engagement as a reviewer in all reviews.

But for the ones where you notice it will make an impact, go the extra mile.

🎯 Conclusion

Being the best is not about competition.

In a zero-sum game, for me to win you have to lose.

Growing your career is an infinite game. There’s no start or end. There’s no winner or loser.

You don’t have to compete to be the best in the activities everybody does.

Instead, find the ones that make an impact but people ignore.

Doing them, when 99% doesn’t, makes you the TOP 1%

👏 Weekly applause

Quality content I checked during the week:

• The Making of a Senior Engineer 💡: Guest Post by

  Addy Osmani
  (in
  High Growth Engineer
  ) → Too many learnings from this post. I wrote here after my first read. I just read it a second time and got more insights.

• Engineer's Guide to LinkedIn by

  The Hybrid Hacker
  → I consider it a red flag to see people with fewer LinkedIn connections than professors they had at university. Even if you don’t want to be a content creator, take care of your LinkedIn image.

• Uploading Instagram Videos with 94% LESS CPU by

  Byte-Sized Design
  . Alex shares here a super concise and clear summary of the problem, requirements, and solution for this problem. Learning was never easier.

• How to level up as a Software Engineer despite having setbacks? - Part III (Staff to Principal Eng) by

  The Curious Soul's Corner
  . The higher the seniority, the more their impact is not reflected through an individual action but the waves their actions leave at their back. Read this one to start operating with that mindset.

• How to Debug and Fix Software Without Making Things Worse by

  Bitsy
  . We identify and understand a bug with experiments, finding reproducible behaviors. Taking notes of these brings a better understanding. Only then we have the knowledge to go for a solution.

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