I am one of those people who function better by writing things down. One day, I realized that most of my notes don’t have to be private, so here they are - my second brain. Be warned that, if you stumble upon something here that doesn’t make sense to you, it isn’t meant to!
How to operate at work
Motivation It has been quite awhile since I’ve been trying to figure out how I want to operate at work. The company expects me to be more of a tech lead because that will allow my manager to scale out and get work out of a larger workforce. And while that does have some merits, it isn’t the best way for me. It isn’t fun and I don’t get to learn much. It isn’t what other companies expect from SDEs, so it decreases my employability. (For example, Facebook and possibly both Google and Microsoft expect their senior engineers to contribute a lot of code). Even within Amazon, they’ll look at my deliverables at the end of the year. If I only work through others, I won’t have a lot of tangible stuff to show forth. I’ve also heard from my manager that whatever I do inside the team isn’t going to take me to the next level, so why do that as much? The other side of the story is that not behaving as much of a tech lead could lead to some reputational loss, but I think that’s an acceptable tradeoff. ...