As much as we love our engineering industry, it also has some downsides

I’ll share with you some of the issues I have been dealing with as an engineer and an engineering leader throughout my career.

Perfecting my solutions to an extent

I could particularly see this as an issue when I was building something visual. I was not satisfied with the result. This color should be like this, this font should be like that, etc.

And then this also transferred to code as well. I was trying too hard to make things “perfect”, and I was hurting my progression toward getting things done.

Right now, I still find myself sometimes trying to “perfect”, but I remember how important progress is and I try to quickly readjust my mindset. I also have a quote on one of my shirts to remind myself: “Progress over Perfection”.

Not making decisions fast enough

As engineers, there are so many micro-decisions that we are making daily. I have found myself procrastinating and making decisions a lot of times.

Decisions like:

• naming the variable or a function,
• should we split the file/class differently or not,
• what approach to use to solve a particular problem,
• how to properly test the solution.

This brought me to unnecessary stress, that I could avoid if I would just make a decision.

Procrastinating on tasks, hard conversations and giving feedback

I was guilty of this a lot of times, the first one is still the case sometimes. And the second and third were obvious when I first started with engineering management.

I saw things that needed to improve but hesitated to have the conversation and give feedback. I thought that things were going to get better eventually. But I was wrong. Therefore it’s really important to react swiftly and not procrastinate.

Feeling like an imposter

This was the case, especially at the beginning of my career. I thought that engineers with a lot more experience have such amazing abilities. That it would be hard or almost impossible for me to develop.

But then I found out that we are all learning consistently. And I wasn't that far from that. That sparked me to learn even more and be even better every day.

Can you relate to them?

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