How teaching made me a better engineer and manager
- Gregor Ojstersek from Engineering Leadership <gregorojstersek@substack.com>
- Hidden Recipient <hidden@emailshot.io>
How teaching made me a better engineer and managerIt helped me to 📈 grow from engineer all the way to CTO!
IntroThis may sound a bit counterintuitive and you may wonder: “How will teaching others help me to progress in my career? I am spending my valuable time on helping others, which I could spend on learning something new”. I’ve been there and I thought exactly that way. Well, make sure to read on! By the end of this article, you’ll:
I am sharing my mistakes with you that I made, especially early on in my career where I didn’t focus on helping and teaching others, which was a big mistake. This is an article for paid subscribers, and here is the full index: - I used to hate teaching others Let’s go straight into it. I used to hate teaching othersAnd the reason for this is that I viewed everything as competition. I compared with others regularly and I didn’t want to help, because I thought they would get better than me if I would. This was especially prominent when I was a jr. Software Engineer. I always had the huge drive and motivation to get better and better, but I could grow a lot faster if I would change my mindset sooner. The mindset of helping and teaching others. This is the abundance mindset. The exact mindset that makes all of us winners. If we help and teach others → others will help and teach us. This is 100% true and I’ll tell you why in this article. I wanted to learn everything myselfSimilarly, as I did with teaching others, I approached toward learning. I thought that others will view me as not a capable engineer if I asked for help. I thought that vulnerability is a bad thing, but on the contrary, it builds trust and bonds with your colleagues. As a self-taught engineer, my go-to was to always learn in isolation. Learn from tutorials, build projects or read books. Well, that definitely got me somewhere, but you know how the saying goes:
This quote is from the title of the book by Marshall Goldsmith: What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful. I’d definitely recommend it. Let’s get next into what motivated me to change the mindset. This is how I changed my mindset...Subscribe to Engineering Leadership to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Engineering Leadership to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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