my lead engineer advices in my 1 on 1
This summer, I am doing an internship as a backend engineer. Each month, engineer in my squad need to do an one on one with the lead engineer. Here are the core advices I got from my lead:
Try to understand the business more than the technical side of it
As an intern, I am still not really handy in the tech stack and the codebases. So I often ask to the lead engineer about it. He said that it is good that I asked when I got technical hurdles, but I should’ve not only ask about the technical side of the task. He encourage me to ask more about the business part of it, like how does my task correlate to the user need, or how does my task end up presented in the frontend.
I need to be more curious in the whole picture of the task rather than only care about the itty bitty of the implementation. As he told me, “You need to carve out more the business side of things here, because technical side of your tasks can be found easily on the internet, but the business side of it can’t be found anywhere else”.
Communication over speed
His other core point is that he prioritize communication over speed. He won’t be worried of an engineer that does tasks slowly. He will be worried of an engineer that don’t communicate their progress and neither ask when they found hurdles. This is problematic as the next flow of the task (e.g. QA testing, UAT testing, other task in the epic) can be blocked.
He pointed out that an engineer with high speed can be a stellar engineer and be used everywhere. But good communication make people work together efficiently, and solve complex problem better.
Long road ahead
I do feel that I am lacking that genuine curiosity to the business part of my tasks. I try to find the solution of how to grow the curiosity. I found How to spark your curiosity, scientifically by Nadya Mason on TED youtube channel. She encourage the audiences to do hands on experiments by ourself. By doing hands on experiments, we will gain our curiosity to the subject.
Well it means, I need to try things out from the company services, clicking things and explore its features. Then, backtrack it to the backend and try to understand the logic it does.
I still have a long road in my engineering journey, and I am always ready to improve.
Originally published at https://www.averrous.xyz.
