How to become a multiplier?

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From Cloning yourself isn’t an option by Camille Fournier

  • Everyone wants to have clones to help them with certain work.
    • But additive is linear improvements while multiplier is trying to achieve exponential improvements
  • Tech skills are foundamental, BUT
    • Availability bias: the more skilled a person is on a dimension, the more important they consider that activity to be.
    • Be too afaid of being detached from tech is over exaggerated.
    • Gradually in time when your c, the bottleneck of your personal performance is less depending on your tech skills, but more on your focus.

I’m a digital design engineer, therefore I intent to under-estimate the difficulty or importance of verification. And the second point of fear also applies to me very well. I’m sill evaluating whether being a manager helps me more or being a indivdual contributor is more satisfying.

  • 3 virtues: laziness, impatience and hubris, as a programmer

    • Laziness
      • In engineering laziness = automate things so that you don’t need to do it manually over and over again
      • In management laziness = train your replacement so that you don’t need to repeat yourself
    • Impatience #STAR
      • In engineering impatience = make your code flexible and scalable so that you don’t need to come back and change it when envrionment variable changes in the future
      • In management impatience = prune, cut and prioritize: focus yourself and your team on really critical problems
        • Write the first solution that comes to mind, ship it, and move on.
        • Build a culture of “we did the best with what we knew at the time”
    • Hubris
      • In engineering hubris = complaint about the issues you see and FIX it.
        • Be a squeaky wheel, and bring oil.
      • In management hubris = build a culture to allow complaints, guide them into suggestions and finally ship the solutions

  • How to evaluate success? Impact and influence

    • Impact
      • But for this developer, what wouldn’t exist
      • But for this project, what wouldn’t people be able to do
      • But for this person, what project wouldn’t happen, what growth wouldn’t exist
    • Influence
      • Titles are not everything. E.g. managers don’t earn your respect don’t have large influence, because people won’t value your inputs.
      • The go-to person when things are broken is the person that people will follow.
    • Qualitative feedback
      • Leadership = actively engage with other ppl = care about what other ppl think of you
        • Especially the ppl you work with and work for
      • How to break the biases? Maybe just find other places to work
        • Bias = stereo-type based on your race, gender, most of the time your history in the team
      • Even with possible biases, we still need to get feedback

“Yesterday I’m clever so I want to change the world, today I’m wise so I’m changing myself.”

“Growth requires getting out of your comfort zone.”