The Secret to Success: Why Great Engineers ALWAYS Help Others

Many different things make an engineer a great one, and one of the things that truly stands out is the ability to help others. Best engineers know that by helping others, you contribute so much more value than just with your own contribution. You become a multiplier for others. It took me a while in order to understand that, and I'll tell you all about it in this video. So it took me about 5 years in order to understand the importance of helping others. As an engineer growing and progressing in my career, I was focusing a lot on getting better every day and learning as much as possible. I was learning through tutorials, building side projects, or doing freelance work. But what I didn't do so well is to also share what I have learned with others. I remember being the only person on the team who had quite a good understanding of Angular JavaScript framework and also the whole frontend part of the application. But what wasn't so great is that without me, it was really hard to make adjustments. Others wasn't able to understand the, the whole system. So if I could turn back the time, I would much more focus on learn together with others, get others involved earlier, and also continuously share what I did and also what is the mindset behind it, how it actually works. This would ensure that I wouldn't be a bottleneck for others and others could also make adjustments. Without me. So also the important thing to understand is at the same time when you teach others about a certain topic, you also understand what you know and what you don't know so well. You learn a lot from that as well. So learning together with others is so much better because we are all learning faster and we are all progressing much faster as well. But did I really understand how important helping others is? Well, not, not exactly. I needed to become a manager in order to fully understand how important helping others is. When I first became a team lead of the team and also later an engineering manager, I made many mistakes. I tried to be the best engineer. I tried to finish all the tasks, and I also tried to be the best manager at the same time. But this really didn't work so well. I needed to shift my mindset from focusing on my individual contribution to helping and uplifting others. That's where I started to truly see the progression of the team. And not only that, I started to understand that I need to have people on the team who are also helping others because I couldn't do it all alone. It's not possible. I'm not an expert in all the technologies. I have limited time every day and I can't be involved in all of the fine details. It's just not possible. So since then, I understand how important it is to have people in the team that are actively focusing on helping others. And there are two key traits that I look for when I I'm hiring a new engineer for my team. And the first one is drive and motivation for learning. And the second one is the willingness to share the knowledge and also help others. These two are very, very, very important to me. So how are the best engineers helping others? Let's get into that next. Well, there are many, many ways that engineers can help others. And helping doesn't only mean one-on-one helping. It doesn't only mean that you need to jump on a call with another person, but there are many ways that the best engineers are helping others. We will go through the 8 things that the best engineers are doing. So first one is they ensure that the team is building the right things. They understand that everything that we make, everything that we build at the end of the day will be used by our users. And building the right things is a lot more important than building the things right. They challenge requirements and they try to understand all of the details behind it. They think like a product manager. Let's go to the second one. The second one is they're focusing on unblocking others. As soon as they see someone is being blocked by something, someone is not being able to progress, they will do their best to resolve it as soon as possible. That could either be some missing information, alignment with another team, or just help and support that colleague with the implementation. The third one is they do code reviews swiftly. The more time passes when a PR is open, the less context both the author and reviewer still have. They understand how important it is to move quickly when the context is still fresh, and they don't leave PRs to stale. The faster we can merge PRs, the more productive the whole team is. The benefits are, are immense. Let's go to the next one, and that is they give feedback when they see fit. They understand how important it is to give feedback. That can be both the praise feedback for doing a great thing, or feedback for improvement. They give praise publicly, and they give feedback for improvement on a one-to-one call. The fifth one is they focus on providing a good onboarding experience to new people joining the team. They understand that onboarding new people swiftly helps the whole team to progress so much faster. They're always looking for ways to improve the onboarding process and they make the experience better. The next one is they create documentation to align all the people together. That can either be creating style guides or guidelines. It can also be creating technical specifications or team documentation. They understand how important it is to align everyone together and that everyone can get the context easily when needed. The seventh one, they are mentoring others. They're taking every opportunity they can to provide mentoring for others. That can be PR reviews, that can be pair programming sessions, discussions about which approach would be the best, or just jump on a call and help out their colleague. And the last one, but not least, they're doing their best to share their knowledge across the organization. They understand that sharing their knowledge is equally important than getting it. When you share your knowledge, you cement it in your head and others are also learning. It's a win-win situation. I'm curious to hear how are you helping others. Make sure to share it in the comments. To learn more, you can subscribe to my newsletter. It's called Engineering Leadership, where I share similar tips and advice on how to be a great engineering leader. There are more than 100,000 people already reading it, and I publish 2 new articles every week. Thank you for watching, and I'll see you on the next one.