Have you had to pull extra hours to get work done because you didn’t want to disappoint your team? Perhaps you even felt a little disgruntled. Your work interfered with your personal life — yet again — and took time away from friends and family, from traveling, and from everything else you wanted to do.
Have you ever worked months longer than you expected you would on a project, only to see it fail to launch? Or even if it launched, maybe your work didn’t move your team’s metrics nearly as much you expected?
Do you sometimes find that you’re spending so much time fixing bugs, fighting fires, and wrestling with technical debt that you have no time and energy left to spend on new projects that actually challenge you?
You’re not alone. I've been there too.
For the past ten years, I've worked with and led some of the best engineers in Silicon Valley at places including Google, Ooyala, Quora, and Quip.
What I've learned is that good intentions — even for strong teams — don't always lead to good results. That’s a lesson that took me years of working 60-80 hour weeks to figure out.
Ever since I discovered that working hard isn’t always enough, I’ve embarked on a quest to figure out how the most effective engineers and leaders get things done.
What mental models do they use to make decisions? What language do they use to articulate problems, and what techniques do they use to solve them? What costly mistakes do they know to avoid?
Imagine if you could have access to decades of collective insights and experiences from engineering VPs, directors, and managers from companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Airbnb, Lyft, Square, and more. How much faster would your career grow? How many months of mistakes could you avoid?
Well, now you can. While doing research for my book, The Effective Engineer, I interviewed and grilled leaders of top tech companies with hard questions:
- What separates the most effective engineers you’ve worked with from everyone else?
- What’s the most valuable lesson you’ve learned in the past year?
- What’s the ONE investment you made that paid off the highest returns?
And I'm excited to share the answers with you. Discover the stories and lessons that I've already taught at workshops and seminars at Google, Pinterest, and other companies.
Get started with the single, most valuable lesson I’ve learned in my professional life. Learn how great engineers deliver significantly more value, with fewer hours of work.
I'm happy to connect if you're doing something interesting. You can reach me at hi <at> effectiveengineer <dot> com.
