Work on what matters

notes from the Staff Engineering book

As you become more senior, the number of responsibilities will increase leaving you with less time to achieve higher impact. The things could be social life, mentoring, coaching, leading, and the list goes on. We are expected to make higher impact with less time. There are common pitfalls that we can be aware of and stay away.

Avoid snacking

We can group the tasks into the following impact categories: easy-low, easy-high, difficult-low, difficult-high. What we need to jump on easy and high impact tasks and stay away from snacking, easy-low tasks. The number of such tasks varies from time to time, and depends on the project and organisation. At times, easy-low impact tasks may help you stay motivated as they can be short accomplishments between long accomplishment. So, strike a balance between easy-low and easy-high impact tasks.

• false sense of accomplishments
• tremendous amount of opportunity cost
• easy-low tasks are learning opportunities for less senior people

Stop preening

• A subset of snacking
• low impact + high visibile tasks
• some companies recongizes those tasks or cannot diffirentiate high impact from high visible tasks but low impact tasks
• may help you to achieve short term career growth but prevent you learning and making actual high impact
• stike a blance between high and valued impact and self growth
• important factor when choosing your employer

Stop chasing ghosts

• Snr. people joining a new company may misjudges the challenges in the new place because their judgment may be clouded by the challenges of their former organisation. Consequently, they may be chasing ghosts of the previous work and they may suggest bold, strategy shifts trying to address the ghosts.
• Strategy shifts also creates a dependency on this person making themselves a critical person in the organisation. They may suggest the change that even themselves do not truly believe. This is a indication of evil intention.

Existential issues

• companies may be facing existential issues. So, try to focus on them.

Work where there’s room and attention

• high impact tasks may be swarmed by many people leaving you little space to make a high impact.
• find other focus area where you can find some room
• you can find opportunities the company is not yet focussed, paying attention. you can make rapid progress on it, but when you need support from others, it will be challenging. and your early wins will eroded.
• do as little of it as you can but not less. you have an ethical obligation.

Faster growth

• developing others around you will be your legacy long after your pull requests or tech specs docs.

Edit

• seek for impactful small changes like a conversation, modifications what already agreed upon
• do one quick modifications that unlocks the project as as senior leader you can see the corner and shift the direction.

Finish things

• do the editing helping to get the projects finished that are stalled or waiting
• help rescoping and tweak it to something finishable
• we only get value from finishing projects
• finishing projects: from risk to leverage

What only you can

• work wont happen if you don’t do it
• might be changing your CEO’s mind to pay down tech debt, convincing a great candidate to join, writing tech strategy that folks follow
• these are your biggest opportunities.

What it matters

• while interviewing for a new role, you will be facing subjective practives failing to understand your real impact on your previous place.
• still, deliberately accumulate expiretise from doing valuable work.
• this is the only viable long-term bet on your career: focus on work matters