Lessons for Life from Engineering Teams

New Ways of Working; Actionable Today

Hello my friends. This month I have been actively practicing allowing space.

Space for complex thought, investigation, and exploration.

As the month draws to a close, I have recalibrated my approach to goal setting.

On goal setting, new goals look more dynamic for me.

• I will write a newsletter at least once per week but it might not be a very long article or a very serious one.

• I have challenged myself to create a YouTube Short per day for 30 days.

• We have an exciting new project at TheTechMargin in collaboration with artists. More on this in the coming days!

• TheTechMargin NoRules shop is live and TheTechMargin site is now available in Hindi and I will continue to add translations across TheTechMargin stack.

• Creative play is necessary not recreation. No rules in creativity, and I want you all to embrace this in your design phases, brainstorming, etc. The NoRules shop is about reminding us to let that sh*t go.

Better Measurements

Milestones, deadlines, and clear goals are important so we know where we are going and when we arrive.

However, life is not a zero sum game (I truly do not understand that expression but I think it means what I want it to mean and so I am leaving it there).

Our world does not allow for time to take a step back from our day to day and gain perspective. It is truly a privilege to have this insight if you can make it happen.

Since most of us never have the chance to calibrate our processes by stopping and assessing; we read and listen to and watch the great thinkers and teachers who craft their own path and learn from them what they do.

If we can give back as we gain, I believe we will all be in good shape both mentally and spiritually.

This article contains a few of the game changing realizations gained along my path as a software engineer on teams building everything from IT solutions to consumer and business software.

These lessons can be applied to any profession and outside of professional life too. Enjoy!

Care Enough to Argue About the Problem; Never Make it Personal

The coolest part of being on a team with other passionate builders is the ability to argue through the solution and the best approach without getting hurt feelings.

The design phase is when the bulk of hashing out the solution should occur, but there are always points along the way when a wrinkle is discovered and a slight or significant pivot is required.

The process of productive disagreement is not familiar to most of us in ordinary life.

We are super conditioned to take any argument as personal, a threat, inappropriate, or even disrespectful.

Basically, we are a society (globally) conditioned to be polite followers. This conditioning has been (arguably) necessary to maintain order in hierarchical systems and has built the world we live in.

Today, the world needs new solutions that do not require deep injustice and inequity in order to produce wealth and innovation. A divergence from the path that led us to now.

Tomorrow will require new ways of thinking, departing with the comfortable familiar when discomfort means productive growth, and extreme collaboration across ALL disciplines and diversities.

The New Majority is an excellent name for the sum total of our diverse populations comprising the true majority of our species.

Collaboration Requires Discomfort & Safety

Collaboration is a skill and so is letting go of what is comfortably familiar but not working for you.

Once you start to look for it, you will know the places you are leaning into comfort by default. Default is easy, updates are hard.

Most of us do not even realize we are operating in a heightened state of anxiety before additional inputs are added.

The first step to emotionally safe teaming is to feel safe enough to take risks with our ideas and to be vulnerable with our team.

We cannot do this if we are harshly judging ourselves without realizing we are even doing it.

How can we make a safe space for our teammates, friends, and family members if we are coming from a place of comparison and judgement?

Many of us feel this from our families our whole lives and it may be the first time we have the opportunity to be creatively vulnerable when we are part of a highly functioning team, whether as a software engineer or otherwise.

Once you have felt the good, you see the bad with clarity (thanks to my therapist for that one).

Start with you and how you treat yourself when you get something “wrong” or fail to meet your own targets. Do you give yourself grace and find paths to improve or do you abuse yourself with judgement and comparison?

Numero uno is where everything must begin. Start with you, love yourself, then you will be able to hold space for others.

Action Gives Us Power; Navel-Gazing Be Damned

One of the reasons NoRules is my mantra in tech and creativity is that I know most solutions are going to require a lot of garbage picking until the shiny object is discovered.

I know, I love metaphors.

Garbage picking in this scenario means throwing ideas at the wall, like pasta noodles (another metaphor for you there).

If you get all precious about every little idea and also defensive about them, you are not going to take risks and try out some garbage which means you won’t make space to learn at the ideation phase and you will probably commit to a substandard solution sooner than you should have.

Ideas are common, action is unusual.

Don’t be precious or defensive about your ideas. Someone else will write a book about the same idea you have, but they aren’t you so it won’t be the same book. Elizabeth Gilbert has a wonderful story about this in her fantastic book on creativity: https://www.elizabethgilbert.com/books/big-magic/.

Don’t be afraid to try things and learn what works and doesn’t work early on.

Engineers and designers use all kinds of crazy materials and processes to force themselves outside of structured thinking and get the idea juice flowing.

The Stanford D School is the mecca for this sort of strategic creative play and a wonderful resource for materials and process guides.

Mentor and Mentee at Every Career Stage

Some magic happens when you see a person realize their potential is more then they thought it was.

I was fortunate to begin my mentoring journey some years ago when my kids were small and their elementary school had a program that needed volunteers to teach in the morning before the school day began.

My friend Amanda and I would use Scratch Programming to teach computer science to students as young as 7 and as old as 11. Very young minds.

Scratch is an awesome tool for young and not so young alike to learn programming skills and also build really cool things. I love Scratch because it allows for unlimited creativity while allowing for learning in a structured way.

You can check out Scratch here.

My favorite moments teaching these young students were seeing their lightbulb moments of figuring out how to do something after trying so many times and feeling so frustrated.

The lightbulb moment is also what I call the private victory dance which is celebrated as follows:

1. in front of one’s monitor, generally alone (prior to Slacking teammates), and with great fanfare.

2. Stand or stay seated, move your body to the beat of a silent song playing in your head.

3. Make a smug expression of success with your face.

4. Shout whatever random words come out of your elated self for you have achieved the championship.

5. Slack your teammates and wait for the emojis of shared success as your equally pumped compatriots virtually high five you.

6. No teammates? Join a community like IndieHackers or find one on Reddit etc, good people love to see other people succeed.

This celebration of victory is the prize that comes with solving the problem, getting the UI to work correctly, optimizing the algorithm without breaking it, etc.

I have mentored adults, high school students, and young kids and the reward in seeing someone realize their own ability is beyond words.

Sometimes you just need a person a few steps ahead of you to believe in you a little more then you believe in you to get to that next place.

Having a mentor has been an absolute game-changer for my life.

Val, my first mentor coached me through my first negotiations on salary, through leaving a great job for an even greater one that would cause me to grow, and so much more.

What was new to me was not new to her as she has been in the game longer than I have and knows how relative so much of the negotiations become once you have a proven track record and can articulate your wins.

Find a mentor and be a mentor if you can and in whatever field you are in.

These are human truths not strictly for the tech world.

Nothing is Done Alone

This one is eternally difficult for many of us, myself included.

This one covers everything from building solutions, creating art, raising children, and working through tough times.

Find your people, the ones who celebrate your victories and who call you when they want to share theirs.

Find the builders, the optimists, the tinkerers, the trailblazers, and the curious.

Trust is built over time. Letting ourselves be vulnerable when we don’t know the answer, need to talk it through, or just feel lost is a fast path to figuring out who is good to go through the trenches with and who will have our back as well as trust us when they need the same.

This one goes back to being kind to ourselves.

Cultivating self-empathy builds emotional awareness in ourselves and makes us better collaborators and friends.

Nothing is done alone. We are not built that way.

Until next time, be kind to yourselves!

-Sonia @TheTechMargin