Give technical staff some non-technical advice

I have been working in IT for many years. I have encountered many pitfalls, but I have also gained a lot. Some things will only be deeply impressed if you have experienced them yourself. Without further ado, I will record the following and update it later.

1. Timely feedback is needed

For example, if you have a task on hand that needs someone to complete. When you tell others about this requirement, in many cases you hope that the person can give you a completion time, rather than simply telling you that they will do it. A better situation is that when you give the requirement, the implementer can provide a better solution, or can analyze with you the problems that may be encountered in the implementation process, and make a rough plan to solve them, and finally give you a completion time, and explain the possible risks. With such a response, you will feel that this person is reliable and truly understands your needs before doing them, rather than just leaving the requirements there to deal with them or making plans (it is best to give a time point to make a plan when making plans), and you need to keep pushing them to do it.

As implementers, engineers or technicians undertake many demands from products, operations, and even the market. Among these demands, some can clearly determine the corresponding technical solutions, some require research, and some may not be technically mature enough at this stage. No matter which of the above situations, at the moment of accepting the demand, you need to promptly feedback some information to the demander. For example, the expected completion time and the difficulties that may be encountered. Let the demander know the progress of things regularly. This is like after we buy something online, we will often check the current logistics status of the goods and when it will arrive. So put yourself in their shoes. When a demand is raised to you, you also need to regularly feedback this information to the demander so that he can understand the progress in real time.

2. Focus on teamwork

Software development nowadays is a process of division of labor, cooperation and collaboration. The days when Zhang Xiaolong wrote Foxmail alone are gone forever. When developing, you need to treat yourself as a member of the team and cooperate with each other. When you encounter a problem, throw it to the team in time, instead of struggling alone. Remember, there is a team behind you, and you fight with them.

In this era of large-scale collaboration, it has become extremely difficult for a person to achieve outstanding results like their predecessors who worked alone. Such people often appear as leaders or organizers, but the real achievements are created by the team behind them. For a product to be successful, in addition to the product itself being usable and easy to use, it also depends to a large extent on the operation, market, launch, promotion, data mining, hacker growth, etc. behind the product. Good wine needs no bush in this fast-paced era. An excellent team is a necessary condition for the success of a product. Integrate yourself into an excellent team, become a part of the team, share honor and disgrace, solve difficulties together, and share joy together.

3. Professionals do professional things

The division of labor in today's society is very detailed. If you don't understand a field, you should find a professional to solve it. A characteristic of technical people is that they like to get to the bottom of many things, pursue to know all the technical details, and even want to do everything from scratch. In the scale of modern software, it is completely unrealistic to do it yourself. Every profession has its own specialization. An unprofessional person to do a thing is definitely not as good as a professional in terms of time cost or economic cost, and in addition to this, there are often invisible costs, such as human ability. Even if there is plenty of time and money, the final product may not be able to surpass the professional. So except for the core part, leave the rest to the professionals.

4. Be efficient in doing things

From the outside, one of the characteristics of the Internet is that there is a lot of overtime. 996 and 997 are often mentioned by people around me. In terms of efficiency, programmers only have a few hours of effective working time. Programming is a creative activity that requires inspiration, not time accumulation. So more often, you need to find the hours when you are most efficient. In those hours, improve your productivity instead of slacking off.

Another point is that as the pace of product development gets faster and faster, there will be more and more things to do. Never think about finishing all the things, there are always some important and urgent things to deal with. For those unimportant and non-urgent things, just let them go. Focusing on those important and non-urgent things most of the time can avoid dealing with important and urgent things frequently.

5. Do your best before talking about others

We have restrictions on children doing certain things at home, such as watching TV or playing with mobile phones, and the reason they open their mouths is that their parents also watch TV and play with mobile phones. Compared with watching TV or playing with mobile phones, it is more serious to always find faults in others when being criticized. This is like what we often hear or experience ourselves, when some electric bikes run red lights, when they are caught by traffic police, they may first say, look, who is riding an electric bike in front of you also ran a red light, why is it okay, and feel unbalanced. They may even say, look, pedestrians also run red lights, why don’t they have to be fined.

In fact, we often overlook an important point here: it is wrong for us to do this thing. Since it is wrong, why don’t we look for the reason from ourselves first? We are always happy to actively search for the shortcomings of others and our own strengths. And automatically ignore our own shortcomings. It is not an easy thing to do well. If you don’t do well, there is actually no reason to blame others. But on the other hand, if others don’t do well, there is no reason to blame yourself, which is a far-fetched argument.

6. Everything can be done better

This one can be regarded as a supplement to the above ones.

Everyone knows that automobile assembly used to require a large number of workers. After becoming skilled workers, many assembly workers think that assembly is a physical job. But in fact, we rarely see a large number of assembly workers in factories today. Thinking that physical work is a complete cognitive problem does not mean that there is no room for improvement in automobile assembly. Otherwise, you may still see a large number of assembly workers in the factory, but there will not be the current assembly line assembly work. Whether there is room for improvement depends on whether you are the assembly worker who is not satisfied with the existing physical work and wants to turn it into an assembly line.

Sometimes, after working in the business for a long time, engineers feel that the work they do is similar to that of assembly workers, and they feel that there is no room for improvement or that the room for improvement is not large. In fact, most of the time, it is just because you use your existing cognitive thinking and your familiar habitual way to do business. After getting the business, you will subconsciously decide to use many familiar technical solutions. These solutions form your own comfort zone. You like to stay in such a comfort zone and don't think about breaking through. Gradually, you will feel that the business is no longer challenging for you and that it is boring to do.

In fact, writing business code can also be very awesome. After doing more business, what you need to think about is how to encapsulate and abstract the business so that the business code can be more easily maintained. Or from the perspective of SDK, how to enable newcomers to implement business through simple documents. These things are also business-level things, but they are two completely different levels in the technical dimension. There is an advertising slogan: There is no best, only better. The same thing, finished and done well, has different results and gains.

The above points are some of my insights from my daily work. I have not done well in some of them, so I share them with you. It can also be regarded as a warning to myself and encourage everyone.