How to Grow

I’ve been in the industry for four years, and at this stage, it’s crucial to offer real value for my work. Being unable to handle debugging, ensuring quality, and making technical decisions isn’t an option. I can’t afford to make high-impact mistakes, go through hasty trials and errors, or show frustration in collaboration.

Developing has lost its fun compared to the past, and it’s more enjoyable to contribute to business and products through various means. It’s interesting to use my available resources to the maximum extent possible, regardless of whether they’re directly related to development or not. From this perspective, my engineering identity is weak. I’m a company employee and a member of a team that pushes for business. The difference is that I mainly think from a product perspective and contribute to the present and future of the product. Also, I need to maintain the capacity to handle high-intensity and dense engineering work (which I’m currently doing).

From this perspective, my plan for personal growth is as follows:

At least 90% Correct Decisions.

Assuming that 100% correctness is practically impossible because it requires predicting the future, the goal should be 90%. Even if my opinion doesn’t drive through, I aim to pinpoint the best direction even when the future is unseen and uncertainty is high.

My investment in learning and time revolves around increasing the decision hit rate. I don’t study things that don’t significantly contribute to the company’s business. However, I enjoy my weekends more to maintain good condition and continuous performance for better decision-making.

Another contribution to improving the decision hit rate is “not doing unnecessary work”—not doing things that don’t need to be done and not doing things I don’t need to do myself.

Diligence

Diligence is essential for making accurate decisions. Diligence here does not mean waking up early but the attitude of actively diving deep into particular situations or contexts surrounding work.

While working, there is a resistance line where I want to avoid learning more about the context or knowledge or going deeper into certain layers. It’s needless suffering if I delve deeper. I fear that I might not understand well and fail, making it hard to take responsibility.

I will constantly try to overcome these repeated reluctances and anxieties, grasp the context quickly, and almost always voice meaningful opinions. I’m learning a lot from a colleague right next to me who is good at this.

Respond to Continuous Feedbacks

Meeting an organization’s growing expectations is similar to overcoming gravity. As I grow, my mass increases, and so does the gravity acting on me. As my influence grows, expectations and feedback become more varied and abundant.

Feedback certainly helps me grow, but the uncomfortable situations within also increase. Even if my outward attitude is positive, I tend to think, “I’m really stupid for not thinking about that,” whenever I get feedback, making feedback sometimes becomes a dot damage. However, I need to accept this more willingly.

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The sight of me doing better at work is not that of a person who designs products well and writes clean code but a person who can withstand more extreme business/product situations.

What if I had to make 10 or 100 product decisions in less time without making a single mistake? What if the context is so vast that it’s too difficult to get to the essence of any of them? What if expectations keep rising as I receive strong feedback from all around? Suppose I can endure all this and deliver in the organization. I would already be good at writing code or designing products in that case.

I don’t know about the future, but I prefer it if my work became more complex. Only when dealing with extreme difficulties casually, like eating or brushing teeth, can true excellence and serenity dwell within. I can do better. That’s what growth is.