I have been accused by a number of people who like me of “asking good questions” and of asking difficult questions by people who don’t.
I sucked at school until someone opened up the idea for me around third grade that how the curriculum is taught is just the teacher’s opinion, not a law, or a religion. If you can reframe the material in a way that makes sense to you then do so. I ended up spot-tutoring a bunch of people over the years because I would hear them complain about how the material made no sense and I would swoop in and say, “yeah how they teach this is bullshit, have you tried thinking about it this way?” Which validates their frustration and then gives them a life raft.
That kind of reframing to keep up can become reframing to get ahead. I went from Problem Student to grade school “valedictorian”, to polymath. Years ago we were all fixated on the trap of Expert Beginner and I would half-joke that I was instead an Expert Journeyman - able to quickly get to adequate instead of mediocre in a new discipline. And these days I think that may be what “polymath” is most of the time. Just knowing what the next question is to ask to keep going. The big breakthroughs come from people who become experts in most fields, but these same sorts of people also get pretty good at music or painting or writing as a hobby. As good or better than mediocre professionals.
The first time this happened to me in a professional setting, a coworker was stuck on a SQL problem and insisted I pair with them to help debug it. I told her I’ve never touched SQL, just worked on some bespoke data processing. She didn’t care. Come here anyway. And I’ll be damned if I didn’t help her find her problem by just asking her what this part does and that part does. Why does this work that way? And I started writing SQL a couple weeks later, substantially off of just that interaction, bolstered by what first generation search engines could scrape together.
And the thing is when everyone asks you questions and you don’t break their trust, you quickly learn where all the bodies are buried in the project/org. Which is a valuable asset for someone wishing to become a lead or staff engineer. I became lead by popular vote most times, rather than an actual game plan to get promoted. I just did what thought needed to get done and was within my abilities, which looks a lot like leadership, especially if management doesn’t have that quality. Port in a storm, that’s me.
But I’ve never ever completed the most stories or features. I’ve occasionally fixed the most bugs, the most performance issues, or workflow problems. Is calculated I saved forty man hours a week for the team on code-build-test-push ergonomics and my shitheel boss was still made about my productivity those two quarters. I could not show up to work and still be contributing 8 hours a day, dummy.
I sucked at school until someone opened up the idea for me around third grade that how the curriculum is taught is just the teacher’s opinion, not a law, or a religion. If you can reframe the material in a way that makes sense to you then do so. I ended up spot-tutoring a bunch of people over the years because I would hear them complain about how the material made no sense and I would swoop in and say, “yeah how they teach this is bullshit, have you tried thinking about it this way?” Which validates their frustration and then gives them a life raft.
That kind of reframing to keep up can become reframing to get ahead. I went from Problem Student to grade school “valedictorian”, to polymath. Years ago we were all fixated on the trap of Expert Beginner and I would half-joke that I was instead an Expert Journeyman - able to quickly get to adequate instead of mediocre in a new discipline. And these days I think that may be what “polymath” is most of the time. Just knowing what the next question is to ask to keep going. The big breakthroughs come from people who become experts in most fields, but these same sorts of people also get pretty good at music or painting or writing as a hobby. As good or better than mediocre professionals.
The first time this happened to me in a professional setting, a coworker was stuck on a SQL problem and insisted I pair with them to help debug it. I told her I’ve never touched SQL, just worked on some bespoke data processing. She didn’t care. Come here anyway. And I’ll be damned if I didn’t help her find her problem by just asking her what this part does and that part does. Why does this work that way? And I started writing SQL a couple weeks later, substantially off of just that interaction, bolstered by what first generation search engines could scrape together.
And the thing is when everyone asks you questions and you don’t break their trust, you quickly learn where all the bodies are buried in the project/org. Which is a valuable asset for someone wishing to become a lead or staff engineer. I became lead by popular vote most times, rather than an actual game plan to get promoted. I just did what thought needed to get done and was within my abilities, which looks a lot like leadership, especially if management doesn’t have that quality. Port in a storm, that’s me.
But I’ve never ever completed the most stories or features. I’ve occasionally fixed the most bugs, the most performance issues, or workflow problems. Is calculated I saved forty man hours a week for the team on code-build-test-push ergonomics and my shitheel boss was still made about my productivity those two quarters. I could not show up to work and still be contributing 8 hours a day, dummy.