Soft skills are incredibly important, but so is understanding that not everyone handles "social events" well - as a manager I recognise that members of my team have varying levels of ability to endure social interactions, and use that knowledge to help them on their journey, without overwhelming them
One thing I learnt is that no matter who the engineer is they love to have someone to listen to about their work, so that is 1 to 1 socialization I do as a junior engineer.
One mistake I made that I don't make now that I became a business owner is that you always need to ask yourself -- does what I'm doing generate sales and profits or not. Otherwise, why am I doing it in the first place?
In my limited experience I would say that asking for reason/cause at least one level up can help sort out and prevent a lot of misunderstandings. I think this also relates to knowing your coworkers/(clients/users). There's a lot less friction if people understand how many details and how deep to go when talking to you.
Definitely an underrated skill to know your audience so you understand what level of detail to communicate with. It's easy to discuss too much detail as an engineer when some audiences just want high level updates or how it affects the business/product.
I was going through some of your older blog posts and had a question. As a new member of the Meta team, I'm curious about how to approach tasks that may not directly contribute to sales or profit. If we were to express concerns to our manager about the impact of a particular task, and request a change, it raises an important consideration: someone still needs to complete that task.
What if our manager insists that we must prioritize the original task? How do we balance our desire to focus on high-impact work with the need to fulfill our responsibilities?
I've heard from others that it's important to have soft skills (communicating, connecting with others, etc) with technical skills. Just having technical skills really isn't enough to become great.
Agreed, just having technical skills is not enough to become great since doing things yourself can only go so far. One way to have more impact is to develop the ability to influence others to ship what matters. Communication is a scalable way of influencing others.
Soft skills are incredibly important, but so is understanding that not everyone handles "social events" well - as a manager I recognise that members of my team have varying levels of ability to endure social interactions, and use that knowledge to help them on their journey, without overwhelming them
One thing I learnt is that no matter who the engineer is they love to have someone to listen to about their work, so that is 1 to 1 socialization I do as a junior engineer.
One mistake I made that I don't make now that I became a business owner is that you always need to ask yourself -- does what I'm doing generate sales and profits or not. Otherwise, why am I doing it in the first place?
That is a great point. I feel like as an engineer it's easy to be focused on the code rather than the business impact
In my limited experience I would say that asking for reason/cause at least one level up can help sort out and prevent a lot of misunderstandings. I think this also relates to knowing your coworkers/(clients/users). There's a lot less friction if people understand how many details and how deep to go when talking to you.
Definitely an underrated skill to know your audience so you understand what level of detail to communicate with. It's easy to discuss too much detail as an engineer when some audiences just want high level updates or how it affects the business/product.
I was going through some of your older blog posts and had a question. As a new member of the Meta team, I'm curious about how to approach tasks that may not directly contribute to sales or profit. If we were to express concerns to our manager about the impact of a particular task, and request a change, it raises an important consideration: someone still needs to complete that task.
What if our manager insists that we must prioritize the original task? How do we balance our desire to focus on high-impact work with the need to fulfill our responsibilities?
I've heard from others that it's important to have soft skills (communicating, connecting with others, etc) with technical skills. Just having technical skills really isn't enough to become great.
Agreed, just having technical skills is not enough to become great since doing things yourself can only go so far. One way to have more impact is to develop the ability to influence others to ship what matters. Communication is a scalable way of influencing others.