The road to engineer growth: How can engineers break through the bottleneck period after working for 1-3 years?

Introduction: High-availability architecture sharing and dissemination of typical articles in the field of architecture, including thoughts on the growth of technical people. This article is contributed by Lei Guoguo to the high-availability architecture to introduce his thoughts on the road to technological growth over the years.

The road to engineer growth: How can engineers break through the bottleneck period after working for 1-3 years? Lei Guoguo, joined nice in November 2014 and is responsible for the server-side online business. He is good at PHP. He has spontaneously translated the book "Extending and Embedding PHP" and some modules of the official PHP manual. I like to use what I have learned to build my own tool chain and think about system and architecture design issues.

sequence

On March 02, 2013, I wrote a blog "From 1.5K to 18K, a programmer's 5-year growth path" (see the reference link at the end of this paragraph, the same below), which was recommended by CSDN. Later, the CSDN Community Star column did an exclusive interview with me②.

Because of the great influence of CSDN that year, this article and interview are more popular, with a lot of comments. As of now (2016.09.28), there are a total of 1262 comments under the two links.

There are many friends who support, there are many friends who oppose, and there are many friends who only see "salary". I have not responded positively because I believe that this article will definitely help some people and make them find the right ones. direction.

Now that I have been working for 7 years, I originally planned to write something that can help young engineers who are just entering the industry after I have worked for 10 years and have more accumulation. However, on April 29th and September 8th this year, I received two thank-you private messages on CSDN.

This article three years ago helped two young engineers to strengthen their belief in continuing to work hard in this industry. Three years later, they have achieved something and built up their own self-confidence. Send me a private message to express my gratitude. And from the blog of one of them, I saw very positive values, and I was deeply touched.

It happens that in the past year or so, my main work has been on team building, and I think more about this issue from the perspective of engineer growth. There are some gains in this area, so I want to share my insights in this area, hoping to help more people.

PS. I think this article should also be suitable for other professions' career development reference, but because I don't understand other professions, I only use the engineer's career development proposition.

Reference link:

Four stages of engineer career development

In my opinion, the development of an engineer can be divided into four stages:

Newcomer period

Hard skills: theory conversion practice
Soft quality: develop a basic professional outlook

Maturity

Hard skills: accumulate business knowledge, accumulate technical knowledge
Soft Qualities: A solidified career outlook

Development period

Hard skills: clear and detailed career development direction, in-depth research on "possible technology, possible management, and possibly both"
Soft quality: gradually summarize and form your own methodology

Business period

Hard skills: release yourself and create value
Soft quality: output methodology and influence others

I am currently wandering in the development period, and the problems I can see are limited. On the other hand, as the saying goes, "the older you are at the age of three, and the older you are at the age of seven." To a large extent, the first two stages of career development have determined the future career development path.

Therefore, this article mainly focuses on some problems in the newcomer period/maturity period and analyzes.

Phenomenon: growing slowly

This is a very common phenomenon among the engineers I have contacted. And this phenomenon mostly occurs in classmates who have worked for more than 3 years.
The road to engineer growth: How can engineers break through the bottleneck period after working for 1-3 years?

This picture is a career development model that I understand.

First of all, the career development process is stepwise, step by step to go up, rather than linear improvement.
Secondly, in the early stage of professional development, it takes less time to step up, that is, the growth rate is faster.

What makes this phenomenon?

I think there are two main reasons for this phenomenon:

With the increase of professional level, the basic qualities required have become more and more abstract: they have not adjusted in time from "accumulating specific knowledge" to "improving abstract thinking";
With the increase of professional level, the required driving force has become more and more internal: it has not adjusted from "passive growth" to "active growth" in time;

First, it did not adjust in time from "accumulating specific knowledge" to "improving abstract thinking"

Go back to the four stages of career development and see what the ranks are doing at each stage:

Newcomer period: complete a specific task.
Maturity: Complete the overall control of a project.
Development period: lead the development of a professional direction.
Career period: A team that leads one or more professional directions and transforms skills into actual productivity.

It is easy to see that with the development of a career, the basic qualities that need to be possessed become more and more abstract.

Combined with the above career development model diagram, a person's growth can be divided into two directions:

On the one hand is the horizontal accumulation of knowledge/experience at the same level
On the other hand, it’s higher-level abstract thinking

I think this is the first key point that caused this phenomenon.

Many people only focus on the accumulation of knowledge at the same level, and the total amount of knowledge at the same level that a person can hold is limited.

Therefore, after two or three years of work, the relevant things will be accumulated, and it is difficult for you to find something that you "cannot".

Then the problem comes:

I feel growing slower and slower
Don't know what to learn
Should I consider doing management?
......

Suggestion: Use the next professional level thinking (or beyond the current perspective) to think about the problem in advance.

Second, it failed to adjust from "passive growth" to "active growth" in time

Or looking at the four stages of career development, what drives you to do things at each stage?

Newcomer period: According to the leader's arrangement, 1, 2, 3 steps, complete one thing.
Maturity period: According to the arrangement of the leader, disassemble a big thing into a specific thing and complete it independently; or cooperate with other people to complete it.
Development period: While completing the established affairs arranged by the leadership, it is also necessary to actively discover and solve problems from a professional perspective.
Business period: It is necessary to independently start from the company or product strategy and find the problems to be solved in all aspects.

It can be seen that with career development, the driving force is increasingly converging to itself.

In the first two stages, it is the company's things that drive you forward, and passively gain growth through the company's driving force.
In the latter two stages, it is more necessary to take the initiative to drive things forward. In this way, take the initiative to gain growth.

So from this perspective, if a person wants to get better career development, he must cultivate his own initiative well. On the one hand, he must take the initiative to grow, and on the other hand, he must take the initiative to undertake more in the company. Problems, so as to get more opportunities for thinking.

How to avoid mediocrity?

The phenomenon mentioned above, if you don't pay attention to overcome it, it will easily lead to mediocrity.

In the above analysis, there are some suggestions. What I want to share here are three specific conclusions.

study method

I have an abstract summary of the learning method, which I summarized in One-On-One with team members after reading the book "How to Read a Book".
The road to engineer growth: How can engineers break through the bottleneck period after working for 1-3 years?

In my opinion, the transfer of knowledge and the network communication model are similar.

From the perspective of knowledge sharers, for example, a well-structured book should have several clear and abstract basic ideas. All other content revolves around these basic points of view, layer by layer to concretize the problem, helping readers understand the final abstract points layer by layer.

(Ps. does not apply to all books, such as novels, which may be more abstract and obscure)

From the reader's point of view, you must first understand the specific examples before you can gradually get to the abstract point of view that the original author wants to express. Through this process, learn the knowledge shared by the original author.

Therefore, in terms of learning in the technical field, I think there are two key points:

Start from practice, because most of the effective information transmission is done through this layer. So a lot of practice will allow you to get more information directly delivered by the original author.
With abstract ideas as the goal, all practical purposes are to get as many abstract ideas as possible from the original author. Only when you understand abstract ideas can you use it to guide yourself to solve a large number of similar problems, and even propose to the original author The concept is extended to form its own methodology.

work method

Looking at a problem from a work perspective, I think there are three stages:

Receive demand
Implementation requirements
Fulfill the requirement

I have seen quite a few engineers, but in fact there is only the "execution" stage.

After getting a demand, I glanced at the MRD hastily, and then started coding. This is not responsible for myself, the company, and other colleagues.

On the trade-off between the design and implementation of a system, I have this view:

Think about the variables of 1-3 years, design the architecture from June to December, and only realize what is needed now.

Therefore, I think that when an excellent engineer receives a demand, the first thing he should do is to read the demand carefully and think about the logic behind the demand from a product perspective. Only after truly understanding a requirement can we consider the variables that may exist in the next 1-3 years, and then it is possible to design an architecture that meets the needs of business development from June to December.

Let's look at the often overlooked "demand completion" phase. Usually, engineers are only one link in the entire project development process. To make the entire process run smoothly, each link must be notified in time to the next link.

The above is considered from the perspective of the company.

On the other hand, from a personal perspective. A review of what you have done is often the best opportunity for growth. Because when you finish a thing, you have a complete understanding of it. At this time, looking back at this matter is a ready-made opportunity to "look at the problem from a higher perspective."

What are skills?

Skill = technology + ability.

Technology is made up of your knowledge system plus your experience. It can be directly improved through the accumulation of volume. However, it can only be used to solve known problems.

Ability is formed by your abstract thinking ability and your existing methodology. It cannot be obtained directly through accumulation of quantity. On the one hand, it will be partly determined by the natural intelligence quotient and emotional quotient; on the other hand, it must be obtained after in-depth thinking on the basis of quantitative accumulation, searching for the essence of the problem, and triggering qualitative changes. Ability can be used to solve unknown problems.

Technology and capabilities are complementary. I share this point because in my opinion, if you can recognize the difference between the two, the application and improvement of the two will be more handy.

Analysis of common problems in the newcomer period

Here are three soft-quality problems that I often encounter during the One-On-One process with my team members, as well as solutions that I think are better, for reference.

How to deal with parallel tasks?

Have you ever encountered a situation where your leader assigned you the next thing when the last thing was not completed? At the same time, several requests from other colleagues came.

Engineers in the newcomer period are usually not bad in terms of initiative. They hope to solve all problems quickly, but they cannot solve them all at the same time.

Therefore, "so annoying", anxiety arises.

Generally speaking, many newcomers will use one of the following two methods for processing:

FIFO: Whoever finds me first will deal with whose problem first, and then look at the following things.
LIFO: Whoever comes to me now, I will deal with whose problem.

Which way is better? All bad!

The first option is to suggest that you check time management related materials and find a solution that suits you.

The following is a solution I suggest (GTD working method):

Devote yourself to what you are dealing with
If there is a new demand, within 2 minutes, judge the importance of this matter.
Deal with important and urgent matters immediately
Otherwise, throw it into your TODO List and set a time to remind yourself to pay attention again.
After finishing the task at hand, sort through your TODO List to find the next most important thing.
If there are multiple important and urgent things that cannot be done alone, expose the problem to the Leader.
Look at your TODO List every morning and have a clear understanding of what must be handled that day
Weekly review review what you have done.

What is the core of the above method? Keep all things in your TODO List and form a clear management of them. When everything is clear to your chest, you naturally know how to allocate your own time slice for these things.

Can't find the most important thing right now?

As mentioned in the proposal of the previous question, we need to find the most important things. How to find the most important thing?

From my past experience, in the newcomer period and the mature period, you only need to ask one question to judge whether most things are important.

"If you don't do this now, what will be the consequences?"

such as:

Will cause this version to not be released as scheduled
Will cause online service failure
...

However, usually the answer we get is "no impact".

It is easy for newcomers to fall into the predicament of not being able to judge the priority, which is a weakness of human nature. We are afraid of the unknown, and then anxiety, and enter a vicious circle.

The idea of releasing this state is to make the unknown become known.

How to accurately assess the schedule?

The manager arranges a project and asks about the schedule. At this time, the newcomer is easily confused and doesn't know how to evaluate it.

The occurrence of this problem is the same as the above two problems. Because for newcomers, they don't know how long a project will take to complete.

Is that helpless?

Imagine, "How much time does it take to read "How Steel Is Made"?" How do you answer this question?

Is the idea like this?

How many pages does this book have?
Experience tells myself that it takes 3 minutes to read a page.
Then calculate the total time required.

Software development schedule estimation is the same idea.

Trivialize.

Major events are not clear, and it is not possible to directly give an estimate of the workload, so you can break it down to the small things you can estimate.

At the same time, after you have evaluated the workload and finally completed it, go to review to see if your assessment is accurate. If there is a deviation, think about the problem. If things go on like this, you can directly evaluate the workload. .

to sum up

Through the above three questions, we can see some commonalities. The three problems are all made by breaking abstract and ambiguous affairs into concrete and clear affairs, so that we can be more informed.

If you have questions other than these three questions, you might as well try this idea.

Analysis of common problems in mature period

The maturity period is a critical period in the growth of engineers. To step past this hurdle, more spiritual things are needed. So the three common problems in the maturity period mentioned here are all related to the "heart".

How to maintain rapid growth?

First of all, please think again about the reasons for this phenomenon mentioned in "Phenomena: Growing Slowly":

Failed to adjust from "accumulating specific knowledge" to "improving abstract thinking" in time;
Did not adjust from "passive growth" to "active growth" in time

If you study these two reasons carefully, you can see that they are caused by the formation of a comfort zone in a non-challenging state.

For most engineers, taking part in work is the first formal contact with the society, and they are basically free from the constraints of "study pressure". The newcomer period can "easily" (mainly refer to the psychological pressure) through the company to obtain passive growth.

Boil the frog in warm water. Most people will be cooked.

Please think about a question:

Is 20% of what you learned enough to solve 80% of the problems at work?

Please think about one more question:

Is it possible that Google and consulting others can solve all the remaining 20% of the problems at work?

After entering the mature period, there will be very little work soon, and it will not even be able to generate driving force for your growth.

The rest is on your own. Tell yourself two things: "proactively promote" and "actively think about the next level."

This is the core value that I want to convey through this article. I hope it can help some engineers (especially those within 3 years of work) to realize the comfort zone and jump out of the comfort zone.

How to make yourself more confident?

This problem originated from a communication with a team member a week ago.

I carefully considered the source of self-confidence, and then I think: self-confidence is driven by a sense of accomplishment.

Where does the sense of accomplishment come from? I think it can be viewed from two perspectives: internal/external:

Internal: recognition from yourself

Your skills or abilities have been improved, so that you feel that you are awesome.
Apply your skills or abilities to actual projects and make you believe that you are really awesome.

External: recognition from others

Tell your own practice to let others recognize and make others feel you are awesome
Summarize your own practice abstractly to help others become awesome

Because of their different personalities, the main channels for acquiring a sense of accomplishment may be different for each person, but it is an effective method to find a channel for acquiring a sense of accomplishment that suits you based on your own situation, and to build self-confidence through the sense of accomplishment.

However, there is a line between self-confidence and arrogance, so be cautious.

XX classmates already have a monthly salary of 30K, so hurry up and ask for a raise

The temptation of reality is also a point that makes people confused, but if we have a correct understanding of some fundamentals, it can help us make more reasonable decisions.

First of all, a person's salary is determined by various factors such as professional ability, soft qualities, industry experience, company experience, scarcity, network, luck and so on.

Don't recklessly change jobs just because of salary comparison.

Job-hopping will indeed increase salaries with a high probability, because some companies always hire people when they are very anxious to hire people, and they are forced to give higher salaries; at the same time, the salary of your last company will provide you with a certain amount of salary. endorsement. Therefore, if you have good communication skills, you can theoretically get a salary level beyond your current ability through job-hopping in the short term.

However, frequent job-hopping will hinder the long-term development of engineers. Generally speaking, companies will not hand over core positions to people who have just joined for half a year. If you frequently switch jobs, you are destined to be in the front line for a long time. Under current market conditions, the ceiling is more than 20K and no more than 30K.

Not to mention the ceiling of money, the key is to stay on the front line for a long time, your fighting spirit will be worn out, thus shortening your career.

Therefore, from the perspective of long-term development, salary increase through job-hopping is not a desirable option.

If you want a high salary and make yourself good first, then you should calm down and set a few goals for yourself in a company, and then consider leaving after you achieve it. This is good for everyone.

to sum up

The maturity period is the most critical period in the entire career. The fast one may pass in one or two years; the slow one may freeze the entire career in the mature period.

From the above analysis, we can see that these problems are ultimately related to the "heart".

If you want to grow at a high speed, you have to overcome the comfort of warm water.

If you want to improve your self-confidence, you have to think about the emptiness of obtaining channels for your sense of accomplishment.

Having done so much, we can't change jobs and raise salary to marry Bai Fumi.

So if you want to get past this hurdle, you must have a very strong heart.

postscript

Finally, I hope that the students who read this sharing can help you extend your passion for struggle and go further on this road.

In the end, thank you to my team who worked with me in various management practices.

Thanks to Alex, Brother Han, Sister Haiyi and Sister Ning who helped me in the development of my management ability.

Thank you for supporting my family as always.

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The road to engineer growth: How can engineers break through the bottleneck period after working for 1-3 years?