3 High-Leverage Career Skills (From a Principal At Amazon)

if I told you you could get more output and higher performance with less effort would you do it of course you would if you're a programmer like me duh you understand this concept we make computers do things while we sleep this is the concept of Leverage more and more output and value for less and less input and effort let's take this concept and apply it to our careers in this video I'll give you three High leverage things you can start doing immediately to amplify your career welcome to a life engineered where we take an engineering approach to your software engineering career my name is Steve Quinn AKA meta Uncle Steve or the Steve Meister I'm currently an L7 principal software engineer at Amazon where I've spent the last 16 years I don't sell anything on this channel I just give you all of the information and ideas I wish I had when I was coming up all for free well I take that back if you find my content useful you can buy me a drink if you see me in real life I like the good stuff don't come at me with a well drink the ideas in this video are a synthesis of two concepts leverage and the idea of career Capital that comes from Cal newport's book so good they can't ignore you Cal is a personal hero of mine absolute Legend affiliate links to two of my favorite books of his are in the description below the thesis to this book is that you should focus on attaining rare valuable and high demand skills otherwise known as career Capital because of the law of supply and demand if you have these skills you will be in high demand which will bring with its success because if people want you they will do what they can to get you you'll be so good they can't ignore you skills can be rare and valuable because they are difficult to master or they can be rare because everybody does them wrong or simply doesn't leverage them not everything needs to take years of deliberate practice and a teacher of the Arcane arts for each of the following skills I'll call out the common pitfalls and anti-patterns so you can avoid them because if you don't the skills can easily go from high leverage to high burden or high tax okay enough of that high leverage skill number one is that you need to effectively document your accomplishments and impact the tree falls in a forest does it make us sound if you do impactful work but don't document or record it it may as well never have happened during end of year review time do you ever struggle to remember what the heck you've done this past year if you tried to refresh your resume and feel like it's light even though you've done a ton of stuff are you trying to put together a promotion packet and feel like you're starting from scratch I see this all the time people are really bad at remembering things even the most important and impactful things they've done the technique I use is called a brag document it's so simple and effective it feels illegal and I'll show you exactly how to do it by sharing with you an actual entry from my own brag document here's how to get started just create a simple text document you can access from anywhere I create a new document for each year you can use notion Evernote Google Docs Apple notes it doesn't have to be fancy it just needs to be durable because if for some reason something happens to your computer or you end up switching jobs you still need to have access to it every time you do something impactful write a paragraph with details about when it happened what it was and who is involved that's it here's an entry from my own personal brag document in April I led and organized a successful patent drive for my organization I worked with blankety blank from the legal team to give a presentation at the kickoff meeting so that everybody understood the process and split the XXX participants into teams with a person experienced in the process in all XXX ideas were submitted and so and so patents were filed I personally filed so and so patents from this event and this many people filed their very first patent as a result done that took what like 30 seconds it's high leverage because for such a tiny outlay you can remember all of the impactful things you did throughout the year for the rest of your career recording your achievements may be no joke one of the most important things that you do with your time not only is this document incredibly useful during annual performance reviews if you keep it up over the course of your career You've Got A Greatest Hits mixtape for your life all in one spot it's great for promo motion documents your resume or CV and as Source material for preparing for interviews ever have to write a bio and don't know where to start it's like having an existential crisis what have I been doing my whole life grab your brag documents for the past couple of years and you'll have all of your accomplishments in hand your bio will sound impressive the existential crisis though that still may be there but Steve Meister what's the Innovation here you're telling me to write down what you did look at this Guru write down what you did here's the thing before I discovered the brag document I tried a ton of things I did work journals where I summarized what I did every day I tried summarizing my week or month tried archiving impactful emails and chats into a special folder tried creating several boil the Ocean Master planners that categorize my tasks and help me track my goals on a yearly quarterly monthly weekly and daily basis none of it worked all of these systems suffer from the same fundamental issue that your accomplishments are unlikely to come at a regular Cadence brag document entries on the other hand are created on demand if your process requires a ton of bandwidth and has a lot of overhead you're going to stop doing it I've got a graveyard of work journals where the entries stop right around February 1st not because I'm weak-minded and lack discipline but because I need my brain power to do impactful things once things start to heat up the first thing that goes is your heavyweight self-documentation mechanism don't record anything that isn't noteworthy or impactful or can be easily looked up at the end of the the year you can look up your commits anytime you need to so don't spend your time recording all of them in your brag document but if there's a piece of code you're proud of take a couple of minutes to update your brag document your future self will thank you thank you so much past Steve you're welcome future Steve High leverage skill number two you need to get good at interviewing and not let your interviewing skills lapse I've done 850 technical interviews at Amazon I've taught thousands of Engineers how to conduct technical interviews and I'm a bar racer most people treat interviewing like a chore and in a sense it is for me an interview is about two to two and a half hours of work you need to prepare questions you need to do the interview you need to write up feedback and debrief nobody has an extra two and a half hours just lying around but getting and staying good at interviews is a high leverage activity because you acquire and maintain other high leverage skills in the process the biggest benefit from taking interviews is learning how to actively listen and communicate active listening is the act of being present processing what is said and responding and it's the key to being a good interviewer but also an effective Communicator when you conduct an interview you become attuned to whether someone has actually answered your question if someone answers a different question then you have to ask the question again maybe in a different way if they go in too detailed you have to pull them back up if the answers lack critical detail you have to ask follow-up questions the person being interviewed asks a clarifying question or doesn't understand what you've said they deserve a clarification in all cases you have to listen and respond in Kind real time this is such an amazing thing have you ever been in a situation where you've noticed someone in a meeting perhaps with senior leadership where the stakes are high and a specific question is asked and the person that responds does so to a different question or a person that just crumbles during follow-up questions have you ever noticed people who can't keep up with a fast-moving conversation it's really common the problem though is that if you have issues like this it's really hard to get better at it with interviews you'll learn quickly to effectively communicate because you're in a contrived situation with well under bounds you get to choose the questions you ask during an interview not only do you get to exercise your verbal communication you also get to exercise your written communication you spend the interview actively listening and then you have to translate what happened into a piece of writing that expresses your judgment with the justification communication is critical when working on big teams and large projects and I think interviews are the most effective and accessible way to practice and to get better with communication in general interviewing also strengthens your calibration muscle and Amazon greater than 99 of Engineers can be described with four levels we have sdu ones straight out of school or entry level sc2s folks with some years of experience meteors if you will as ce3s are senior Engineers npes like me wherever you work there is likely a leveling system and keeping calibrated in that system requires ongoing maintenance this helps out not only during the interview process but when you're asked for feedback on others such as during performance review times and promotion Cycles it's really hard to provide effective feedback if you've your calibration muscle atrophy finally I always find it interesting to see how people handle differences in opinion some of the best conversations I've been a part of are when an interview Loop is split with half of the people inclined and the other half not inclined with everybody on the fence and open to changing their inclination given a really good argument one way or the other I think interviewing is high leverage just like going to the gym regularly is high leverage most people treat it like a chore it only pays off if you go regularly and do the work and there are a ton of benefits unlike going to the gym if some is good more is not better with interviewing once you're comfortable with them interview on a periodic basis once a month once a fortnight maybe once a week and when your team needs it but don't conflate software engineering interviews with software engineering I went off the deep end myself and did more than 100 interviews some years it wasn't a complete waste of time but it stopped being leveraged and became a tax but the single biggest anti-pattern I see with interviewing is the idea that you're substantially better at being interviewed by conducting interview to a small extent you are better active listening certainly helps but if you don't prepare for interviews properly you'll actively understand that you are tanking an interview ten years ago I was a hot shot senior Dev I conducted so many interviews back then because I was just Minted as a bar raiser and I wanted to move teams within the company I was so cocky I didn't even prepare I had an interview with someone who today is a distinguished engineer at Amazon so two levels above me today but was a senior principal at the time and I bumped I bombed hard and I knew I bombed during the interview I got slapped so hard I still feel it today just because you go to the gym regularly doesn't make you prepared for a bodybuilding competition High leverage skill number three you need to get better at saying no by understanding when you should say yes to things you need to say no more this is true for pretty much everybody including myself the reason is that most work is undifferentiated and not impactful despite this it's still really hard to say no people want to be people Pleasers when you say yes that generally makes people have happy and who doesn't want to make people more happy nobody teaches you how to say no and persuasive people always make it easier to say yes another reason is that you may have trouble disambiguating whether there's true optionality or whether something is mandatory or obligatory something mandatory might be phrased as a question when my wife asked me to take out the trash there's not really an option there even if she says do you want to take out the trash now so this advice only applies to things where you could actually say no okay so when should you say no you should say no 10 times more than you say yes every time you say yes to help someone else out you are stealing time from something that you care about so instead of telling you when to say no I'll enumerate the criteria for when you should say yes one there are situations where there's an outsized benefit from you saying yes compared to the work that you put in if your crush of three years asks you out on a date you should probably say yes even if it conflicts with your regular Dungeons and Dragons game who knows maybe she'd like to create a character even if there isn't an outsized benefit there may be an indirect benefit with a goal or Target you set for yourself two if it represents a big favor for the person asking especially if the person asking is in a position to help you out in the future everything in life shouldn't be a quid pro quo you can do things for others without expecting something in return but it's nice to be able to call in a few favors sometimes but go ahead and say yes if people are in a really bad spot and you're in a place to help it's good for your soul watch out though there are people who are in a bad spot week after week can't save everybody and three every once in a while you have the bandwidth and the request represents a truly low lift this is the case go ahead and say Yes beware though these small requests can add up remember in general the proportion of yeses to no should be an order of magnitude different because most work does not fall into these categories if you say yes too often you can't be unapologetically single threaded your undivided attention is the most precious currency in the universe the biggest anti-pattern I see here is only saying yes when you have something to gain from it that's selfish and people can see right through it not only will people stop asking you for things but you're also training them to stop coming to you altogether even with opportunities your divining Rod should be impact say yes to things that are high impact to your personal prospects to others and to your organization say yes when you can add it to your brag document if you get good at knowing when to say yes and when to say no that's a crazy high leverage skill for your most precious currency so it takes about one minute to start a brag document and about 10 minutes a year to keep it up to date it takes about two and a half hours a month to keep up with interviewing and letting impact be your primary Criterion for whether you say yes or whether you'll say no will take so much off your plate and help you populate your brag document you are now free to accelerate your career probably way past mine these tips are just half of it though you need to watch my video on three career Killers to learn about things that you might be doing right now that are holding you back I've just started this channel this is my 12th video If you want to get it on the ground floor hit that like And subscribe button and we'll go on this journey together if you have a question for me leave it in the comments section and I'll answer it during my office hours and if you don't know now you know

Channel: A Life Engineered

Views: 179,716

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Id: wc9gBBybgLw

Length: 13min 30sec (810 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 26 2022