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Do you fear you are an imposter? Join the club

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I was reading another delicious hacker news thread, this time on a psychology question. How do you work with the fear of your own incompetence?

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It’s a great question. I’ve had this suspicion for years, and it was only after stumbling on psychology books that I even knew it was a thing.

So how *do* you manage this fear?

1. Demonstrate that it is a fear

Fear is a funny thing. It can color reality. You may not even realize it’s happening. When it comes to imposter syndrome, prove yourself wrong. Do the work, and then step back and show yourself the evidence.

You’re a logical rational engineer, so you should be able to weigh the evidence, and see that you made a mistake.

Doing good work is not about perfectionism. It is about knowing you can execute, and delivering quality. That doesn’t not mean there are no imperfections. That means good enough. That means equal to or better than the team you’re working in.

That means you’re improving the bottom line for the firm you’re part of. Help them deliver new features, new code, new product. And help other team members do the same. That’s the name of the game.

Read: How can 1% of something equal nothing?

2. Look at your history

Whenever I have this feeling, I look at my own history. Then it makes me sorta chuckle. I have a list of twenty companies that I worked for recently, and they’ve all been really happy with my work.

How do I know I did good work? They paid me handsomely, paid me on time, and then recommended me to other colleagues.

That’s how I know I’m not an imposter. Am I perfect? Nope. Do I know everything? Nope? But I do good work, and I take ownership, admit when I’m wrong, and play well with others.

If you want to stand out, take a look at these two pieces:

Check out: What do the best engineers do better?

And this: How to think like a senior engineer

Those will help you on your way…

Related: Is Fred Wilson right about dealing in an honest, direct and transparent way?

3. Realize your perfectionism

I think a lot of engineers or bright people have this problem. They want everything to be perfect. They want to produce documents without spelling errors, and code without bugs. They want to deliver everything on time perfectly every time. And they want to feel they know everything.

But it doesn’t play to your benefit. People resent this type of thinking, and it’s unhealthy besides. Take a deep breath, realize we’re all working towards the same goal, and keep your eye on the ball. That means have a sense of humor. You’re probably *way* harder on yourself then others will ever be.

Related: What mistakes did you make when starting as a consultant?

4. Be easier on yourself and easier on others

As you begin to be “easier” on yourself, hopefully you’ll also be a little bit easier on others. Be patient with mistakes. Understand that people have a lot going on in their life. Notice that they are trying.

Sure even after you gain a sense of humor, there will be some people who are not trying, who don’t care or who are really incompetent. But have your default position be patience, and give them and yourself the benefit of the doubt.

Usually if said person is really that bad, others will also complain and the problem will come to management’s attention. It is their job, after all to manage the team as a whole, and keep it productive.

Have fun!

Related: Why did mailchimp fraudulently charge my credit card?

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What do the best engineers do better?

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I’m fascinated by this topic.

I recently found another thread on HN about it What do top engineers you know do that others don’t.

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As always for hacker news, there’s a feisty debate about what such character includes.

Here’s my take.

1. Tackle learning quickly

Whether it means getting up to speed on a new service that AWS has launched, building a new api for an application that has never been built before, or getting up to speed with a new platform. Learning is ongoing.

Top engineers can make this a seemless part of their daily routine. Getting going quickly with new concepts and technologies, means wading into the water at first, to gain the general lay of the land. Now you can talk intelligently about the features, limitations and challenges.

From there he or she can dive in quickly to the specific area required for the project, and move forward with that technology comfortably.

Related: How do I migrate my skills to the cloud?

2. Customer & product perspective

When building code, it’s easy to get mired in libraries, sorting algorithms, and API minutiae. And all of that is very important. But what are you building, and why are you building it?

Understanding your customer, what they do day-to-day is not always easy. It means using the product yourself, and also talking with sales teams regularly to hear what they are hearing.

Then pouring all this into your user stories. For top engineers it will inform their decisions, and help them communicate to product & project managers about what issues their encountering. Tradeoffs about features, coding, performance and technical debt can be better evaluated with more information.

Read: Is Fred Wilson honest about transparency?

3. Dig Deeper

Does your code run slowly? Have you tried to figure out why?

Is it related to:

o latency in production that doesn’t appear our your laptop
o untuned production database queries
o untuned connection pooling
o slow API calls
o weird kubernetes or orchestration issues
o web host issue with memory shortage
o web host issue with slow unoptimized code
o issues on the client side

Top engineers have seen applications slow down or fail in a myriad of ways. This allows them to imagine how a new application might be failing, and investigate those.

Related: What mistakes did you make when starting as a consultant?

4. Great communicators

In startups, your engineers need to communicate to many folks who don’t have an engineering background. Product & UI/UX folks probably are quite technical on their own. But what about sales teams who are dealing directly with customers? Or C-suite folks who watch the business bottom lines, but may not have the same low level technical understanding?

Great communicators can find the right metaphor to explain hurdles and holdups, technical debt, or the latest performance challenges. And explaining those in terms that resonate for others is incredibly valuable to the team and business velocity.

Related: Can Mailchimp fraudulently charge your credit card?

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Is Fred Wilson right about dealing in an honest, direct & transparent way?

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I was just reading Fred Wilson’s excellent blog AVC. While I enjoy & respect his work immensely, I don’t always agree with what he has to say.

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The recent post was titled No Shenanigans.

He writes that these are part of Twiliio’s company values…


Be thoughtful. Always deal in an honest, direct, and transparent way.

While anyone can appreciate the sentiment, and everyone wishes things always worked well, sometimes the world of business can be a bit tougher than these words imply.

To me the words themselves are disingenous, ie they are *not* honest and direct to begin with. They sugar coat things in a Disney sort of way, when we know there are horror stories out there.

Buyer, customer & employee alike beware.

1. Disappearing stock options

In an article How can 1% of something equal nothing I wrote about a guy from Dogpatch lab whose company got bought for 100 million, and who didn’t get a penny.

You might think these stories are anomalies. In my personal experience working in the dot-com era & more recently, I’ve seen quite a few of these unfold. As a consultant I’ve always been on the outside, but I sure do have sympathy for the employees who were dealing in an honest, direct, & transparent way, until they found out four years of hard work got them no dividend.

Ouch!

Read: Why I ask clients for a deposit

2. Not getting paid

I’ve had my own experiences of being slighted. I wrote When clients don’t pay to tell my own story. I’ve learned from scrapes & bruises. And I tend to be more careful now, especially with new prospects.

That’s another way of saying, when I was young & green, I was naive. I was honest, direct and transparent. And because of it I was taken advantage of.

So again folks, buyer beware in this world.

Related: What’s the luckiest thing that’s happened in your career?

3. Aspirational

I think at the end of the day, the words Fred quotes are an aspiration. We would like to shoot for that ideal. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be careful as well.

Protect your own interests, and read between the lines. You never know when things will go south.

Trust is something that is earned, over time. Especially in the business world. And all the company value statements in the world can’t rewrite human nature.

Read: What mistakes did you make when you first started out as a consultant?

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What mistakes did you make when starting as a consultant ?

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I was recently reading a Hacker News thread on mistakes made in consulting. While most of the discussion I didn’t agree with folks *at all*, it did get me thinking about my own lessons.

Join 35,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean.

Since these threads in HN often end up in debate, I decided to blog my answers instead. Here they are!

1. Not getting a deposit

I wrote before about When clients don’t pay. It doesn’t happen often, but it does on occasion.

Most of the time, you have a solid relationship because you’re referred by someone who you have also worked with. And a bad actor will get a bad rep among others in the network. This also by the way keeps consultants honest too, as your reputation is at stake with every new customer.

But there have been a few. And there are other good reasons Why I ask clients for a deposit.

It can be a nominal amount of a few hundred dollars. But it gets you into the finance system, provides a small hurdle that the client must also jump over, and generally provides good will to both parties. It says “we’re serious”.

And that’s important!

Read: What I learned from 10 years of blogging

2. Giving away free advice

In the first few years of consulting, I worked for so many great companies, that I figured they were all great. Then along comes one shady shop, for whom I was called in to help with scaling an application.

For a couple of hours we met face to face to discuss their challenges. What I found was an application that had grown beyond it’s original ambitions. I suggested they evaluate the product, provide new service levels to their customers, at different price points. And then for the higher paying customers, build out new hardware just for them.

It was a great solution, if I do say so myself. The customer thought so too. They went and implemented it themselves, without hiring me! I think they even offered to pay me a couple of hours for the meeting.

Suffice it to say I was pissed. There wasn’t much I could do because we didn’t have any agreement in place at that stage. I had no idea people would do stuff like this.

But I learned the hard way. Sad to say it’s the few bad actors that make us all play more carefully in business. Buyer beware!

Related: 6 Devops interview questions

3. Billing hourly

Billing hourly is how many start out. Some think of it as an industry standard. Lawyers do it, hey why not?

But hourly billing can be very confusing to customers. If you work 10 hours to solve a problem one week and 60 the next, they will find these invoices confusing and frustrating. What’s more on the 10 hour end of the spectrum you’ll be answering questions why the work was so “easy” and on the 60 hour end, what did you do wrong?

Customers often just want a problem solved. They want you and they want your availability. And the value of that may vary quite a lot. If you can figure out a way to bill weekly or monthly such that the client is happy with the value you’re providing, this will simplify your life immeasurably. Customers will be happier, and so will you.

I also recommend keeping daily notes and providing progress reports to your client.

Read: High availability what is it and why is it important?

4. Don’t step on toes

As a consultant, you will often be working with a team of fulltime folks. Not always, but sometimes there can be a tiny bit of resentment. Maybe because you’re outside opinion is threatening, or maybe for a million other reasons.

So I recommend treading carefully. Try to reassure your teamates that you aren’t trying to outshine them. Inevitably you’ll be in meetings with folks smarter than you. Certainly they will know more as they have boots on the ground, but sometimes, they are just plain & simple smarter than you. 🙂

Feel things out, and don’t step on toes. Some need to be right. Let them be that.

Read: High availability what is it and why is it important?

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Mailchimp fraudulently charged my credit card for spambot activity… Really!

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Wait seriously, you ask? Isn’t Mailchimp in the business of identifying, and protecting us from spam? Uh, yes indeed they are.

Join 35,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean.

I’m still in disbelief myself. And while I got the problem cleared up in the end, I really have to share the story.

1. The precipitating event – a charge to my credit card

I love when I pay for a service, and their method of communicating with me is to charge my credit card. Of course I pay attention to when someone is taking my money, and I perk up.

At first I thought they were raising the prices again. They’ve done that recently, so I thought it was odd.

But sure enough I got an email with the following message:

Your account has been adjusted to another billing tier. Old plan $22.49, new plan $31.49.

Wait huh? I add about 2-3 new subscribers per day. How could this be?

Read: What I learned from 10 years of blogging

2. After digging I found spam emails

After looking at my list, I found that I had added 600 new subscribers last week in three days. How is that even possible? I wasn’t mentioned on BBC. That must be spam, I thought.

So I emailed support. They sent me all sorts of links, but didn’t seem to understand the issue. So I emailed back again and they said they were working on it.

Related: 6 Devops interview questions

3. Mailchimp communication – a warning

This *warning* is problematic. For one thing is it buried through various menus and pages. Only because I was looking for spam did I find it.

Plus Mailchimp doesn’t take responsibility.

In fact they kind of imply that I’m a bad actor here. Seriously? Is that how you communicate with your customers?


Warning

We noticed a 0.55% abuse rate on your campaign “Welcome Message”. This is above industry standards, so we strongly recommend you review your collection process, audience management, and sending frequency.

Internet service providers set strict limits on unsubscribe rates, undeliverable mail, and abuse complaints. Mailchimp is required to observe these limits. If your emails continue to generate high rates of unsubscribes, bounces, or abuse complaints, we may need to review or restrict your account. Please take the opportunity to address this now.

Read: High availability what is it and why is it important?

4. Can’t get someone on the phone

I did some google searching because I could not find the phone number. Turns out you *CANNOT* call Mailchimp. A lot of these services internet companies are going this route. Sure it saves them lots of money, but the customer service goes straight to the trash.

So I begrudgingly jump on a chat session. It took

Read: Service Monitoring – what is it and why is it important?

5. The chat transcript in full

Sean Hull
I've been hacked.

THEN MAILCHIMP CHARGED ME!

This is strange.

Does mailchimp protect me?

Mailchimp Support
We apologize for keeping you waiting and appreciate your patience. Our operators are busy at the moment. One of our agents will be with you as soon as possible.
Sean Hull
Thank you ... waiting patiently.
Mailchimp Support
We didn't forget about you. We apologize for keeping you waiting and appreciate your patience. Our agents are busy at the moment. One of our agents will be with you as soon as possible.
Sean Hull
thank you robot person...
how is the progress?
7 more! :)
4 more!
we are almost there!
Neo joined the chat
Sean Hull
hi neo
Neo
Hey there Sean, thanks for reaching out to Mailchimp support. Give me just a moment while I pull up your account.
Sean Hull
ok thank you
Neo
Alright Sean, what is the exact issue you are facing within your account?
Sean Hull
mailchimp charged me for fake subscribers.
if you look at my email list, you'll see it typically grows by 2 or 3 maximum per day
recently a hacker dumped 200+ per day into my list.
Mailchimp didn't monitor things, and then CHARGED ME to my credit card.
Does mailchimp protect me?
hi Neo, are you still there?
Neo
I'm still with you Sean. One of the main ways that Mailchimp prevents spam signups is through the use of ReCAPTCHA. This is a setting you can add to your embedded form from the "Audience name and defaults" page, which you can read more about here: https://mailchimp.com/help/about-fake-signups/#How_we_prevent_it
Sean Hull
ok. that is helpful. for the time being i enabled double opt-in.
but I also see that mailchimp has a WARNING.
about recent activity on my account, and possibly shutting it down. do you see that?
Neo
Are you referring to the "Account issue" that is referenced in the bar at the top of the screen?
Sean Hull
Warning

We noticed a 0.55% abuse rate on your campaign "Welcome Message". This is above industry standards, so we strongly recommend you review your collection process, audience management, and sending frequency.

Internet service providers set strict limits on unsubscribe rates, undeliverable mail, and abuse complaints. Mailchimp is required to observe these limits. If your emails continue to generate high rates of unsubscribes, bounces, or abuse complaints, we may need to review or restrict your account. Please take the opportunity to address this now.
This is what it says...
so to explain more...
first off this is fraudulent activity.
so I'm concerned that mailchimp would just charge my account, without warning of some problem.
and further, it seems that mailchimp *monitors* to INCREASE BILLING and monitors to DISABLE YOUR ACCOUNT, but they don't monitor to protect their customers.
Is that correct? Because if there is some type of monitoring I can enable, that would certainly be very helpful.
Also is it possible to DISABLE AUTO PAYMENT on my credit card?
Neo
For the sake of clarity, let's tackle your questions one at a time. I'm getting some more information for you at the moment and will follow up with you shortly. Thank you for your patience.
Sean Hull
thank you Neo.
you're awesome !
do i need *both* double-opt-in and RECAPTCHA? or is RECAPTCHA enough?
Neo
It certainly couldn't hurt to use both. Using double op-t in will help ensure higher engagement rates overall and less likely to present warnings such as what you've seen. Here is some more information on double opt-in: About Double Opt-In: https://eepurl.com/dyij4v
Sean Hull
i mean the warning is a mistake from mailchimp isn't it?
because these automated systems just sent that because of the hacking.
i feel mailchimp should be protecting me, so I'm confused by that.
I am a paying subscriber of the service. and the price has gone up in recent months. so i think we can agree there should be protection from spambots.
is it possible to disable AUTOPAY on my credit card? BC i don't want to get further fraudulent charges from mailchimp, because of a spam problem.
does that make sense?

Neo
The method of protecting your account would be through tools provided to avoid spam signups, which would be double opt-in and ReCAPTCHA. Additionally, our teams, such as Compliance and Billing, would be happy to look into your account with you to help resolve any issues you may be experiencing.

I would also like to let you know that I understand the situation you are facing is frustrating, so I will be submitting feedback on your behalf internally.
Sean Hull
anyway, could you scan my account for further spam signups? I think around july 19th there was a bump in signups of 80 people. I tried the segment method but couldn't find which day they were from.
Neo
Sure thing, allow me a moment to take a look.
Sean Hull
thank you Neo, i do appreciate that.
i mean at the end of the day I'm not an email spam expert, so that's why I pay for a service like mailchimp. to avoid problems and run a really clean list.
so for example that RECAPTCHA thing should be ON BY DEFAULT. probably that would have avoided all this to begin with.
also mailchimp should SCAN FOR SPAM FIRST. not charge customers first, then realize there is spam and charge back. Because that is a fraudulent charge. which i find super frustrating. I do realize these are all automated systems. But mailchimp should be more sophisticated to protect good customers like me.
Neo
I can certainly see how that is frustrating and would be useful to users such as yourself, so I would highly recommend leaving feedback on the matter via the "Feedback" tab at the right side of your screen.
Additionally, I’ll certainly be routing your concerns and feedback to our internal teams.
Sean Hull
Is that part of "chat comments"?
i left a good review of your help :)
okay thx again Neo.
I'll see if I can find that feedback tab
have a nice night :)

Neo
You can find it within your Mailchimp account on any page on the right side of the screen. Please don't hesitate to reach back out if you have any further issues, and have a great rest of your night.
Sean Hull
thx
laters

The remedy as you can see above was the enable recaptcha and also double-opt-in. That was fairly easy once I knew where to look.

From there I created a "segment" which is a collection of emails. And I selected the date range for the three days where I got spambot hit. And then clicked UNSUBSCRIBE for all those.

Why didn't Mailchimp do this for me? Read more to find out why I think they don't automatically fix this.

Read: How do I migrate my skills to the cloud

6. What Mailchimp did wrong

o They monitored the account to increase a SALE.
o They monitored my account to warn me about shutdown.
o They did not warn me about RECAPTCHA.
o They did not alert me when I got aberrant signups. When you see a 100x increase in signups, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that's a hacker of some kind.

o Then Mailchimp fraudulently charged my account!

Read: How to hire a developer that doesn't suck?

7. The sinister side

This charge could be innocent. A left over part of an automation system that hasn't evolved with the spambots. But I wonder.

From the help forums, they are clearly AWARE of the problem.

And the company *could* go and FORCE enable RECAPTHA for all lists. They could then email customers about the change, and for those who this poses and problem, the user could then go and manually DISABLE it.

They haven't done that. And certainly RECAPTCHA was not enabled by default.

Please don't call me paranoid when I say that there is a *huge* revenue stream to be had for users who fail to notice, this, get charged, and don't even know their own negligence. Think of all that revenue. My list has under 1500 subscribers, but others have 5000 or 10,000. Imagine how easily a *higher billing tier* could get overlooked.

Yes folks, it's dark.

And I'm not happy with Mailchimp now.

I'm happy to pay for a service, when it is done well. But I'm not a fan of these dirty tricks.

Read: 5 things toxic to Scalability

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Lost and forgotten nuggets of ideas and advice

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I’ve been blogging for so long, sometimes, I forget about all the old material I’ve written.

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And I was just recently digging through some of the old titles, and thought it would be fun to repost some good ones.

1. What is it, and why is it important?

✅ Infrastructure provisioning, what is it and why is it important?

✅ Root cause analysis – what is it and why is it important?

✅ Zero downtime – what is it and why is it important?

✅ Stress testing – what is it and why is it important?

✅ Data spot checks – what is it and why is it important?

✅ Service monitoring – what is it and why is it important?

✅ Decoupling – what is it and why is it important?

Read: What did Matt Ranney discover scaling Uber to 1000 microservices?

2. Thought provoking

✅ Is AWS too complex for small dev teams?

✅ The myth of five nines – Why high availability is overrated

✅ Why are generalists better at scaling the web?

✅ How to hire a developer that doesn’t suck?

✅ What 5 things are toxic to scalability?

✅ Is there a 4 letter word dividing dev and ops?

Related: Can humility help you in your career?

3. Consulting

✅ Can progress reports help engagements succeed?

✅ How do you handle the onboarding of a new engagement?

✅ Why I ask clients for a deposit

✅ How to avoid legal problems in consulting?

✅ How best to do discovery in cloud devops engagements

✅ When you’re hired to solve a people problem

✅ When you have to take the fall

✅ When clients don’t pay

Read: What happened when I offered advice outside my pay grade?

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When can I count time as project time?

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I was on the train looking at a Monday.com ad. I realized that the project management space is not dead and buried, but continuing to evolve everyday. While many of us spent years using tools like Jira, along comes an upstate to make project tracking simpler.

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The trouble is, I never felt it was the project management software that made tracking difficult.

For me there was always endless nuance, around tasks and tracking.

1. Time spent commuting or thinking off the chair

For me, when I get deep into the weeds of a customer and their technology stack, I’m thinking about problems as soon as I wake up. How can I tag those resources so they are region independent? How can I create the right S3 bucket policy so the application can write, but the world can’t?

What’s more if you’re like a lot of people, there’s some slack going on after hours, and emails too. Some of this may get tracked but inevitably there are hours not tracked.

An amount of estimating will probably happen. And creating a team policy on how to handle this ambiguity, is probably a good plan. Each project and company will be different, in terms of where to draw the line.

Read: What did Matt Ranney discover scaling Uber to 1000 microservices?

2. Crossover between projects or even customers

Sometimes there is a task which requires a bit of research, for example what’s the exact syntax in Terraform to create an IAM role, and attach it to an instance? You may spend an hour digging in, and then experimenting, to make sure you have the code right.

Then you may use that same snippet on another stack that you’re building, for department B and the same company, agile team C, or another customer entirely.

When you think about it, you carry a decade of learning into each new customer you work at. And they get all that learning, which translates into efficiency. And that’s effectively free.

So there is all sorts of ambiguity. And in each case you have to make a judgement call, when you’re tracking time.

Related: Can humility help you in your career?

3. Tasks grow and change

As you continue to work on a project, some tasks have a tendency to themselves unwind. As you dig deeper, you find vast caves yet to be explored. More excavation that needs to be done.

From there subtasks may hatch from the parent, and on it goes. But this will surely blowup initial estimates, and makes tracking progress often more of an art than a science.

Read: What happened when I offered advice outside my pay grade?

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How do we make domain decisions when coding software?

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I stumbled on an interesting discussion over at hacker news about when you have to make a decision in code outside of your domain of expertise.

This is a super interesting topic to me. As the world is more and more powered by computers and algorithms, this seemingly obscure philisophical corner of computing begins to affect us all.

Join 35,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean.

While many programmers are familiar with the experience of stumbling upon an edge case which wasn’t covered in the spec. The truth is you can’t go back and block on every single tiny detail.

Some of the bigger ones can trigger further discussion, but were it not for Falsehoods programmers believe about X the software would never go out the door.

Here’s some more food for thought…

1. Falsehoods programmers believe about names

o They won’t be a *bad* word. Whose bad? i’m not sure.
o All people have names.
o We only have to work with names from English.
o Names are ordered in a sensible manner.
o A name won’t have to change later.

You get the picture. As you start working with the minutae around names, you realize there is a lot of assumptions. Even when you weed out the big ones, there are still small assumptions.

Ultimately, you can’t get to the bottom. There will always be some assumptions, and as software evolves, changes will be required to match the real world. Living systems grow. Software systems must receive *updates*.

Read: What happened when I offered advice outside my pay grade?

2. Falsehoods programmers believe about selling products

o each product has a price
o each product has one price
o each product is one unit
o two decimal places is enough for all currencies
o all currencies have a unicode symbol

There are many more. The point is once you start digging, everything gets fuzzy. Products can be in stock and not in the warehouse. Single product can have multiple prices. It goes on and on!

Read: What did Matt Ranney discover scaling Uber to 1000 microservices?

3. Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses

o two districts will not have the same number
o postal codes will agree across jurisdictions
o a fixed number of characters will work for every address
o roads have names
o buildings are not numbered zero

Addresses are *really* messy. I remember being surprised when I moved to brooklyn. Streeteasy & Google put me in different neighborhoods. I asked my lawyer why this was. He said DOB and the post office use different databases. And google further samples from one or the other.

Never the twain shall meet!

Related: Can humility help you in your career?

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What do senior engineers do differently?

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I recently stumbled up on this piece at Pivotal, The art of interrupting software engineers. It caught my attention because i like to read from a different vantage from my own.

What is it like to interrupt us?

Join 35,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean.

What I really got from the article though, was how different types of engineers will think about problems differently.

1. Under the hood

For junior engineers who are still a bit green, and new to working in industry, they’re downward facing. Focusing solely under the hood, they may not see how their work contributes to a product, or how it fits into the overall picture for the business.

“When asked about their progress on a story, they would make an effort to ensure I understood what was happening under the hood and what tradeoffs they were facing using a vocabulary I was familiar with. ”

For her it was technical competence that stood out – or at least not the only thing – but rather how they were strategizing, and communicating their problems, challenges, and progress.

Read: What happened when I offered advice outside my pay grade?

2. Communicate discoveries

A more intermediate engineer, would sometimes anticipate & communicate better.

“In some cases, those engineers would come to me before I even had a chance to enter the paranoid zone and give me a simple explanation of how the team had learned new information since they first estimated the complexity of a story. ”

She is also speaking of situational awareness. So not working in a vacuum, communicating & incorporating that new information as it becomes available.

Read: What did Matt Ranney discover scaling Uber to 1000 microservices?

3. Anticipate in advance

Senior engineers, she says would really stay ahead of the curve. They were even anticipating what might be a roadblock for her product delivery.


“Some of the very best practitioners would ask me in advance how urgently we should deliver a particular user story and what we were ready to give up in order to ship faster.”

Weighing tradeoffs, and prioritizing is a huge factor in velocity. If you can tame that beast, you’ll go very far indeed!

Related: Can humility help you in your career?

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