We’re all Builders: From Legos to Code to Teams
When we choose to be engineers, it’s often a career choice of people who love to create. To build. Whenever I ask someone about when they first decided to be a software engineer, they usually tell me about a formative experience they had in their teens or at college (aside: best answer I’ve heard yet — compiling gorilla.bas).
When I ask someone about the first time they ever built anything and felt proud of what they’d done, they usually tell me about a time when they were a child. For me, I can remember from when I was about 6 and building a small house-like structure. My tools were Legos. I thought my house was the greatest possible thing I could build, and I was amazed that I could touch this thing in the real world that resembled what was in my head just moments earlier. I sat there, staring at what I’d created, simply smiling to myself. Beaming with a pride of creation I had never felt before that moment. That’s when I fell in love with the idea of building.
Maybe for you it was a different set of tools. You may have expressed your creativity using wooden toy blocks, erector sets, crayons, paint brushes, not to mention the hundreds of others toys from around the world I’ve never heard of. Take a minute to think back to the first time you ever created anything and felt that pride of creation. That feeling is what I want to talk about.
At the end of the day, we work in this industry because we all love to build. It’s what drives us every day and we should all remember how fortunate we are.
If you think about it for a minute, we get paid to come to work every day and do the same thing we used to do as a child: build based on our imagination. Sure, we use different tools and, yes, not every day is a walk in the park, but when you add it all up, this is a great time to be working in a great industry. Unless your team/project/manager sucks and it makes you dread going to work everyday. If that’s the case for you, there’s a link at the bottom of this story to help you out.
If there’s a downside to all of us being builders from early on, it’s that we can get completely caught up and focused on the daily progress towards our goals. Building and delivering features to our users, fixing bugs, prioritizing the backlog, monitoring production, and so on. While all of those things are important, more often than not, we forget to spend time on building the most important part of our success: our team. Building a team is not the recruiter’s job; it’s all of our jobs.
Everyone has a role in constructing our team. This starts from helping to get the word out about how kick ass your company — sparking a potential candidate’s attention — to their first interaction with an engineer already working there during an interview, and then every day during their entire tenure with the company. You are in charge of how amazing your team and your company will be. Why wouldn’t you take charge of that and surround yourself with other people that have the same passion and drive to work together and deliver great products for your customers?
“But I don’t know what to do”
A typical response is that you don’t know how to do this recruitment thing, or you don’t know anyone who’s looking right now, or you aren’t extroverted enough to reach out to someone you barely know, or it feels sleazy to ask a friend for other references.
You have to get this straight in your head — you are trying to do them a favor. You’re not selling them a used car or a bag of beans. You’re trying to help a friend take a step forward in their career, work on an exciting project, and work with a great team. You’ve picked this company for your own career, so I’ll assume you think it’s pretty damn awesome. Why wouldn’t you want to share that awesomeness? By telling others about the problems your team works on and the great company you work for, you are helping others understand what makes your company so unique and fantastic to work for. When other talented engineers hear your enthusiasm, it’s contagious. And maybe they’ll be interested and ask how they can join. Or maybe they’ll tell their three friends that are miserable working at another company down the street. Educating people on what makes your company great is the same as someone else sharing why their boss sucks and they hate their job. There’s nothing wrong with it, and if someone is interested in joining your team, then everyone wins.
You help your new teammate learn and improve their skills and build something new. They get to teach you and your other teammates new skills they’ve picked up along the way. And, these new skills help everyone build better, faster, cooler, new software that delights your customers. And that’s why most of us got started in this industry in the first place, because we love to build and we beam with that pride of creation when we get it into our customers’ hands. The time you invest in bringing others into your team reaps exponential returns. By strengthening your team, customers get a better product and everyone on the team gets better by helping and teaching each other.
Something else to remember — this is YOUR team. Not your manager’s team, not her manager’s team, not the CEO’s team, but YOUR team. It’s your team because you have the ability to help your teammates and they have the ability to return the favor. You have a say in who joins your team, you have a choice in how you welcome new people to the team, and you shape how the team acts simply by being an exemplary practitioner each and every day. Your team collectively makes the choice to succeed as a team, or fail as individuals. Inviting another great engineer to join your team strengthens it and helps both of you succeed.
So Now What?
You work at an awesome company on an awesome team with the opportunity to build amazing products for your customers every single day. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Don’t you think your friends deserve an invitation to join you on this exciting adventure as everyone gets to learn and grow together? And your friends of friends? And that guy that sat next to you at the meetup last week? And that amazing engineer who taught you everything in your first job who’s stuck working in some shitty job? It almost seems selfish not to invite all of them in. So go ahead and do it. Tell your friends about the cool stuff you get to work on everyday. Tell them about the great environment. Tell them about the last time you got stuck on a problem and you just popped a question into the slack channel and a flurry of help came back at you. Tell them about how you have the power to build the team and make it stronger. Most importantly, ask them to join you and work side by side on the journey.
Let’s all go build great teams and incredible products for our customers.
Oh, and if you don’t work on an awesome team at an awesome company building incredible products for your customers, my team is always looking for people to join our team and come to work every day and build. Please reach out to me directly (twitter.com/bdove99) or check out our jobs site (skyscanner.net/jobs).
