It’s been a while since I’ve updated this! This is a warm Saturday afternoon, and I figured the best use of my time would be to start typing some of my thoughts out here.
Since I’m approaching the first milestone of my career soon, I think it’s time to summarize a few of the important lessons learnt, and more importantly find out what to focus on next.
Here are some of the goals I’d like to achieve in the upcoming 5 or 6 years.
Exposure to more large scale system designs
Large scale systems is something I probably have not seen enough of. There are situations where I do not know of good directions to discuss/balance trade-offs of a large scale system because I have not lived through the pain of early design decisions. It is slightly counter-productive to enter these conversations without sufficient battle scars, and I think it’s fruitful to start accumulating some scars now.
Granted, I could have spent some time on this in the first 5 years. But I have dropped the ball on this due to my Masters program, and a bunch of other commitments. Now that I’m clearing my final few classes, maybe this could be a good replacement activity for all the time I have freed up. 🙂
I have several plans to improve – books/videos/projects/discussion with mentors etc. But the main goal for my next milestone is to minimize the occurrences of “don’t know what I don’t know”. I think it’s okay for me not to know things, but I need to actively seek out what I do not know. Maybe the following milestone after the next will be to minimize the amount of times I have a wrong hunch about something, but first I’ll need to feel the pain (or someone else’s pain) of having the wrong hunch.
Sharpen the investigative mind
This part probably complements “Art of seeking help” below pretty well. There are times when investigations need to be done for super ambiguous problems, and I’m still not adept at making these investigations very fruitful before seeking out help.
I’m not talking about simple engineering tasks, or things like “why wouldn’t this compile?”. 5 years of working convinced me that these problems are the most trivial, since they can be answered by Google or StackOverflow. More frequently it’s on translating goals into certain technical tasks. In other words – how do we find out what needs to be done? What code needs to be written?
I am developing some framework to help me perform these investigations better, so that I can reduce the amount of mental overload when these tasks surface. Working on school projects did help me a little bit – especially with paper replications. But this is slightly different, and most likely needs some tweaking.
Art of seeking help
This is perhaps the biggest lessons learnt towards the tail end of these five years. I wish I had put in a bit more effort earlier in leveling up this skill.
Part of this is to change the mentality of “I need to get this job done because I can” into “I cannot get this job done by myself, but someone out there can help me”.
I’ve noticed that when done right, this reduces not only the amount of work done, but also reduces the overall load in my brain. “How can I seek help?” is more often than not a much easier question to answer (sometimes harder, but rare).
Maybe the right thing to work on here is to develop yet another mental framework to seek help when needed, and I can definitely build that.
Writing – technical & non-technical
I have not been updating this blog for a while, but I have been challenging myself to write more frequently. Notion is my best friend, followed closely by Confluence. The pandemic did force me to write more. Since there aren’t many face-to-face meetings, writing things down for discussion has became my default way of getting ideas across.
I do want to challenge myself to write here more frequently, in conjunction with the first goal of exposing myself to more large scale systems. Maybe I’ll start something else here to summarize my notes, or maybe in private? I don’t know, but I’ll come up with a plan to make sure I keep this habit up.
Part of doing this is also the need to get some feedback from folks. Maybe I should be a bit more proactive in getting feedback for what I write, instead of assuming they are clear enough since I get useful responses from it. I don’t think there’ll ever be a time where I am sufficiently happy with this skill, so I do want to continue putting in work to improve.
These are the few goals I have for now, and they look awfully similar to what I had at the beginning of my career. I’d like to think they are slightly more drilled down and focused now. It’s almost like I spent the past 5 years finally understanding what is important, and plan to spend the next 5 to work on the areas that needs improvement.
One last thing I’d love to do is to live a little. Regina spent 3 months here, and life suddenly became so fruitful because I started to touch grass outside. Maybe I’ve been using COVID as an excuse to not head out for 2 years because I’m just lazy. But either way, hope to allocate around 20% of my free time outside of work/school/improvement to just have some fun 🙂
Bili Xu 