The Effective Engineer by Edmond Lau has caught my eyes these past months. This is kind of #WhatIWishIKnew book. Knowing that Growth Mindset is one of Cermati Engineering principles, I decided to present the second chapter on the Cermati's biweekly techtalk
2. How we view our own intelligence, character, and abilities profoundly affects how we
lead our lives; it largely determines whether we remain stuck in our current situations or
achieve what we value.
How we view our own effectiveness impacts how much effort we invest in improving it.
3. A Fixed Mindset
believe that “human qualities are carved in
stone” and that they’re born with a
predetermined amount of intelligence—either
they’re smart or they’re not
A Growth mindset
believe that they can cultivate and grow their
intelligence and skills through effort
Dr. Dweck, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University
◆Failure indicates they’re not, so they stick
with the things they do well
◆They tend to give up early and easily, which
enables them to point to a lack of effort
rather than a lack of ability as causing
failure
◆They may initially lack aptitude in certain
areas, but they view challenges and failures
as opportunities to learn.
◆They’re much less likely to give up on their
paths to success.
4. The mindset engineers adopt shape them
The mindset we adopt about our effectiveness as engineers drastically
shapes whether we learn and grow or let our skills plateau and stagnate.
Or do we direct our efforts and our energy toward
improving ourselves?
Do we treat our abilities as fixed quantities
outside of our control?
5. Box’s Engineering Manager
In just two years, Bercovici had risen to become a staff engineer and
manager at Box. But prior to joining Box in 2011, Bercovici hadn’t even
done any full-time web development. She came from a theoretical and
math-heavy background at an Israeli university. The interviewers
assumed that she didn’t enjoy coding, that her PhD provided few
practical advantages, and that she didn’t know enough about
engineering to ramp up quickly.
Someone with a fixed mindset might have concluded from those
assessments that she ought to stick with her strengths and do more
theoretical work. But rather than let those preconceptions define her,
Bercovici adopted a growth mindset and took control of the parts of her
story that were within her sphere of influence. She studied new web
technologies, distilled relevant engineering lessons from her PhD, and
practiced for the whiteboard interviews common at many engineering
companies—and she got the job.
6. 01
Accepting responsibility for
each aspect of a situation
that you can change rather
than blaming failures and
shortcomings on things
outside your control
04
Investing in your rate of
learning
02
Taking control of your own
story
03
Optimizing for experiences
where you learn rather than
for experiences where you
effortlessly succeed
7. The power of compound interest
1.Compounding leads to an exponential growth curve
2.The earlier compounding starts, the sooner you hit the region of rapid growth and the faster you
can reap its benefits
3.Even small deltas in the interest rate can make massive differences in the long run
8. The earlier, the better
The earlier that you optimize for learning, the more time your learning has to
compound.
Big difference
Due to compounding, even small deltas in your own learning rate make a big
difference over the long run.
Knowledge = foundation
Learning follows an exponential growth curve. Knowledge gives you a
foundation, enabling you to gain more knowledge even faster.
9. • We tend to drastically underestimate the impact of small changes on
our growth rate
• When we spend our work hours on unchallenging tasks, we are:
• boring ourselves
• missing out on chances to learn
• paying a huge opportunity cost in terms of our future growth and
learning
10. When companies
pay you for cushy
and unchallenging
9-to-5 jobs
“What they are actually doing is paying you
to accept a much lower intellectual growth
rate. When you recognize that intelligence
is compounding, the cost of that missing
long-term compounding is enormous.
They’re not giving you the best opportunity
of your life. Then a scary thing can happen:
... [y]ou get complacent and stall.”
-- Stephen Cohen, the co-founder of
Palantir
12. Reid Hoffman, Linkedin Cofounder
• treating yourself like a startup; initially
prioritize learning over profitability to
increase their chances of success
• Similarly, setting yourself up for long-
term success requires thinking of
yourself as a startup or product in
beta, a work-in- progress that needs to
be invested in and
iterated on every single day.
13. • Pursuing growth and learning as one of
core values
• Hsieh and his CFO, Alfred Lin, gave a
standing challenge to all employees:
Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO
“Think about what it means to
improve just 1% per day and build
upon that every single day. Doing so
has a dramatic effect and will make
us 37x better, not 365% (3.65x)
better, at the end of the year.”
14. What will you learn today to
improve yourself by 1%?
•You would rather invest your financial assets in accounts that pay high
interest rates, not low ones.
•Why would you treat your time—your most limited asset—any
differently?
•Invest your time in activities with the highest learning rate.
15. Seek
Conducive to Learning
• Because we spend so much of our time at work, one of the most powerful
leverage points for increasing our learning rate is our choice of work
environment.
• When starting a new job or joining a new team, there’s a lot to learn up
front:
• new programming languages
• adopt new tools and frameworks
• learn new paradigms for understanding the product
• gain insight into how the organization operates
19. “If you’re offered
a seat on a
rocket ship, you
don’t ask what
seat. You just get
on.”
CEO Eric Schmidt to Sheryl Sandberg
Fast-growth
20. At fast-growing teams and
companies
◆the number of problems to solve
exceeds available resources
◆providing ample opportunities to make
a big impact and to increase your
responsibilities
◆The growth also makes it easier to
attract strong talent and build a strong
team, which feeds back to generate
even more growth.
A lack of growth companies
◆leads to stagnation and politics
◆Employees might squabble over limited
opportunities
◆It becomes harder to find and retain
talent.
22. Training
• Strong onboarding programs demonstrate that the organization
prioritizes training new employees.
• A solid mentorship program also indicates that the team prioritizes
professional growth.
24. THE EFFECTIVE PRODUCT,
engineering design, or process won’t be
figured out on its first attempt
CONTINUOUS LEARNING
and adapting from past mistakes help the
team to stand a much better chance of
success
CHALLENGE & FEEDBACK
into the future interations are needed
CULTURE OF CURIOSITY
encourage to ask questions, with culture
of openness where feedbacks &
information is shared proactively
25. Pace
• A work environment that iterates quickly provides a faster feedback
cycle and enables you to learn at a faster rate
• Automation tools, lightweight approval processes, and a willingness to
experiment accelerate progress
• Smaller teams and companies tend to have fewer bureaucratic barriers
to getting things done than larger ones
• At startups, the aggressive risk-taking and oftentimes longer hours can
contribute to an increased learning rate -- as long as you don’t burn out
• Do push yourself, but also find a pace that’s sustainable for you in the
long run
26. People
• Surrounding yourself with people who are smarter, more
talented, and more creative than you means surrounding
yourself with potential teachers and mentors.
• Who you work with can matter more than what you actually
do, in terms of your career growth and work happiness.
27. Autonomy
• At established companies, employees tend to work on
specialized projects, but they also have access to more
coaching and structure
• At startups, sometimes you’ll end up wielding significantly
more autonomy over the total surface area of product
features and responsibilities but you’ll also need to take
more ownership of your own learning and growth.
29. What’s next?
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Study core abstractions
written by the best engineers at your
company
Send your code
reviews
to the harshest critics
Go through any technical
educational material available
internally
Master the programming
languages that you use
Write more code
Participate in design
discussions
of projects you’re interested in
Jump fearlessly into
code you don’t know
Take advantages
of the resources
at work
30. Always ask these questions:
• How can I improve?
• How could I have done this better?
• What should I learn next to best prepare me for the
future?
Some skills we learn could be cross-functional
and help our engineering work
Other skills might not translate directly into
engineering benefits, but the practice of
adopting a growth mindset toward them still
makes us better learners and more willing to
stretch beyond our comfort zone.
Research in positive psychology shows that
continual learning is inextricably linked with
increased happiness
