Use every opportunity to grow personally as a software engineer

Tom Sedlmeier
Sep 5, 2018 · 4 min read

A lot of people focus very hard to find their best T-Shape skillset and try to sharpen stuff they already know (depth of skills). That’s fine, but you should also ask yourself from time to time

What skills can I not master today?

What’s missing in my personal T?

I’d like to give you a few impulses and suggestions beyond basic stuff like reading books or watching online video courses, maybe there’s something for you.

“geen plant sprout” by Stanislav Kondratiev on Unsplash

What’s missing in my skill set and resume?

We are all very proud of what we can already master today. This serves as motivation and drive on a daily business. But we should also think about what we have not mastered yet and set ourselves goals: What do I want to master in six months, a year and so on. Write a simple checklist to your note’s app and revisit this list quarterly.

See diverse teams as a real opportunity

Think one moment about this question:

Do you only want to work with colleagues who think/act exactly like you?

The truth is that you don’t can learn from people with the same attitude, mindset or skill set as you. Different people help a team to perfectly work together and have a wide knowledge and working attitude — like a puzzle that fits perfectly together at the end.

In a diverse team you can grow much wider and faster than with a boring pressed together clichéd development team who have attended the same college like you and grew up in your neighborhood. With different I mean a real mix of heterogeneous people, e.g. male/female, singles/family people, younger/older, from other countries and so on.

Your colleagues are your coaches and mentors

In a good working agile team one goal should be really that you have the oppourtinies to learn from each other.

It doesn't matter if you working together with super experienced engineers or starters — you can learn from everybody something. And it’s not all about the hard skills, often you can “borrow” other skills like communication, negotiating talking, documentation methodologies or self-organisation approaches. This is also a reason why teams should be well balanced — it’s not the simple summation of individuals that makes a successful team, but the interconnection/interaction of all (only if you put all jigsaw pieces together a nice picture arises).

For the actual hard skills there are a lot of oportuinties in the day-to-day business: Pair programming to learn from each other and to think about other approaches to solve a problem, lighnting-talks or team meetings to get in touch with some libraries/patterns or the classical code reviews to improve your self continously. Personally I really love good feedbacks/advices in code reviews because I am open to any comment/disuccsion, you should take your time and really take these processes seriously in software development (the reviewer and you).

And the best of this is: You grow and others grow with you. That means in a good working team all team members participate in the growth of individuals. I think it’s a little bit working like the snowball effect.

Teach others, transfer your knowledge

Don’t worry about it: Teaching somebody really helps you to improve on two different levels: content itself and didactics. You can consolidate/sharpen your skills through your own explanation to others (verbally or visually) and come up with new ideas or unknown areas in the discussion with other people. And second, you will also learn how to impart/transfer knowledge in a good way that other people really get the idea behind something.

As described above, this acts a little bit like a cycle — you teach, others improve and you improve as well.

Are web conferences really helpful for you?

I love going to conferences! You see the people behind you favorite libs, can talk to your colleagues from other countries, get in touch with new libraries, hear other people best practices or have a great party in the evening. No question, going to conferences is fun!

But does this help your skill set in your current situation? As always, there’s no black or white answer. In my opinion, this depends (among other things) on your personal level and working experience. As a junior, I would tend to disadvise and focus on workshops where you can take more with you (= get skills and discipline on some stuff that you really need) and immediately use what you have learned (hands-on).

If you are more advanced and have some experience then I personally would recommend to visit conferences regularly — the efficiency of the time spent at the venue is then much higher! You should attend not to get new skills or to code more confident — it’s more about having a look behind the curtain, exchange with other people, get feedback about your current approaches or strenghen your blue sky thinking.

In a long run maybe it’s also your goal to go to the stage and talk about your experience and share you knowledge. But that’s another topic (btw: start with a short lightning-talk first).

Also a lot of conferences start to have own workshop days or tracks — keep your eyes open.

Money shouldn’t play a role in personal development

Don’t see money as an incentive to learn some technology. Yes, money can motivate in the short term, but not in the longer term. Really put the money in the background!

If you just think about that you get paid for doing something (“I swap my work/time for money”), an interesting tasks or project could really fast become a boring duty task. You should rather focus on self-determination, the joy of experimentation, fascination of something new and skill perfection.

I can recommend you very much the book “DRIVE” from Daniel H. Pink if you want to read more about (personal) motivation.


That’s it for now — don’t forget to write your simple skill-checklist, now!

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