An engineer's worth can be seen from the number of different perspectives they can look a problem from. As a software engineer I may think about getting things across the finish line. But I have found that if I start thinking it from someone else's perspective it makes my work better. Different people in different professions may look at things differently. e.g.
- Someone who is doing software testing might think "How do I break this", "What do developers usually not test"?
- Someone who manages Infrastructure might think "In what sequence would this get deployed" or "How many servers would this change require"?
- Someone who does ETL might think where is data coming from, where is it going?
- Someone who does BI might be more interested in what each column in a table means and how does it relate to business?
- Someone in customer success might be more interested in how will this be rolled out to customers? If something happens would there be workarounds for the customer? How would the team find out before the customer has to report the problem?
- Someone who has to increase sales for a product might be more interested in reducing the number of steps customer has to take to buy something to increase the likelihood of sales.
- Someone who has been working more as a SQL dev might tend to solve problems one tabular operation at a time, someone who has been working in general purpose programming languages might tend to solve problems one row at a time.
I recently started thinking much more about how to grow more as an engineer. This is the answer that I came up with. Try and put more hats when looking at a problem to make the solutions better.
What's your take on this?
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Top comments (2)
Good point. The more perspectives you can consider, the more effective you’ll be.
Sometimes though, it’s hard to to come up with this yourself. So personally, I invite and ask opinions from the various “hats” to ensure I’m not missing anything. Especially for very major projects.
Inviting opinions from different people definitely helps. That is actually how someone can learn different perspectives.