How going for talks improved my common sense

As an engineer, I have always felt that non-technical talks are mostly a waste of my time, and throughout the majority of my life, that has been true.

However, I think my perspective has expanded drastically in the first year of joining Govtech. In 10 months, I given opportunities to attend talks by:

• Gregor Hohpe, ex-CTO of Google / Author
• Mitchell Hashimoto, Founder & Co-CTO of HashiCorp
• Bryan Chua, Co-founder & ex-CTO of ShopBack
• Mark Birch, Regional Director of StackOverflow / Founder of DEV.BIZ.OPS
• Quality engineer team leaders at Facebook

Of course there are also some more technical talks that dive in deeper into the capabilities of the platform that they are building (e.g. Kong gateway). But that’s not the scope of this article.

These are the people that help shape the path that the company takes, and what they have to offer in terms of insight and experience is nothing short of amazing. I highly recommend that you attend these talks whenever possible, and I feel privileged to be able to participate in them.

These talks have given me a deeper insight of how CTOs approach problems that we face in the industry. Unlike many startups that have a solution that’s looking for a problem, these successful companies identifies one problem and develop a solution specifically for it. I feel greatly inspired after each talk, because every single one of them are truly passionate about the problem that they are trying to solve.

I’ve always known in the back of my head that, “In the end, it’s about the people”. But it only really clicked in recently. These people approaches the problem from a multi-dimensional angle, the technology is an enabler, not the solution to everything.

• Is it something that can be solved by talking to other people?
• Is it something that can be solved by policies?
• How many people need to be on-board this idea for it to work?
• How much value does this have to the end user?
• What does each level/tier of the organization value the most? (e.g. telling a director about a problem you have no solution for is meaningless to him)

The insight that these people have boils down to the fact that they have a very concrete end goal always in mind. Because, “if you don’t know what you’re doing it for, then why are you doing it?”. It sounds like common sense, but sometimes, the daily drudges of work causes me forget the original reason that I’m developing this feature in the first place.

Speaking of common sense, that is the greatest takeaway from these talks. You can tell that they have really spent a lot of time thinking about the issue because when they tell you about it, it just sounds like common sense! It is baffling to me because it’s so obvious that it makes me think, “Why have I not thought about it before, why have I not thought about it this way?”

That moment when that idea clicks in, blows my mind every time; and this is how going for talks improved my common sense.
(maybe it’ll help you too!)