The Resilient Engineer

It is because of our longing to excel in our profession that we attend conferences, invest in books, read blogs, and attend training classes. Our efforts pay off in the form of achieving technical excellence, but it takes more than technical skills to truly build and sustain a successful, meaningful and enjoyable career.

The journey from junior level to the highest rank takes us through valleys and peaks, lows and highs, the expected as well as the unexpected, the familiar and the unknown. We celebrate achievements and we withstand setbacks. We are self-assured and stand firm, but we also experience insecurities and alter course.

We take delight in the good days at work, and we endure bad days.

For the lucky (or perhaps the wise), the bad days are few and far between, but some of us experience bad days more frequently. A bad day can extend to a bad week, which, in worst case become a bad season.

Let’s explore a few principles you can practice and add to your technical abilities to ensure you build workplace resilience and become the best you can be.

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Our battle is not technology.

Very often we invest profoundly in attaining technical omnipotence, and we underestimate the importance of developing soft skills and general wisdom.

It is very unlikely that a bad day at work is caused by a technical aspect of your career.

If you face a technical problem, you will most likely feel motivated to engineer a solution and your curiosity will take you on a journey of discovery. As you work your way through the problem, the serotonin, and dopamine enable you to persevere and you work your way through the challenge until you find a solution. It feels great when you achieve a breakthrough.

For the engineer, solving a technical problem is an incredible feeling. It leaves you with a personal impression that you are the best engineer ever and in your own way you believe you have just saved a project, your team, and your company. Wow, it feels great, doesn’t it?

But what about the times when you feel angry, upset, disappointed, anxious, helpless, insecure or stressed?

• You are disappointed and feel discouraged because you just came out of an important meeting where your contributions were ignored.

• You are paralyzed with fear during a company restructure.

• You are angry because you and a coworker have different views on a decision you will be held responsible for.

• You feel helpless because you’ve poured your heart and soul into a project and the initiative got canceled.

• You feel overwhelmed and drained, and no matter how hard you try you just seem to never get ahead, and the weight you carry just keeps getting heavier and heavier.

I am sure you can relate to some of these examples and even think of your own recent experiences.

We can clearly see that a bad day at work that leaves you in a weary, negative, passive or mind-numbing state is not because of a link between you, your skill and technology, but it is rather a consequence of your inability to understand-, internalize- and process the overwhelming number of complex, unpredictable, dynamic and forceful exchanges between human beings.

Yet, we choose to invest predominantly in developing our technical abilities and ignore the rest.

I am a software solutions architect and I am surrounded by world-class software engineers.

If you are a software developer, you will probably agree that a happy (and productive) space is where you are left alone with your PC, headphones, good music, good coffee and a level 400 technical challenge, and no one around to bother you.

This is why we work from home and this is why we build quiet rooms, and this might be why we find early morning and late evening to be the most productive time.

The bad news is that you cannot build your career inside a bubble. You cannot isolate yourself from this world and its challenges. You are immersed in an ever-changing, fast-moving and demanding world that expects nothing but the best from you while constantly throwing challenges at you.

If you want to be the best, if you want your career to make a true, meaningful and long-lasting impact in the industry, and if you want to be an influencer, you must make sure every second you dedicate towards your career is purposeful and focused.

If you are constantly distracted and if your mind is endlessly preoccupied with psychological and emotional distress, and if you spend more time trying to understand human behavior than perfecting your profession you will not become the best version of yourself.

Every ounce of energy and every thought directed towards understanding a workplace situation is done at the cost of perfecting your craft. The more you spend on trying to cope in the workplace, the further away you move from reaching the pinnacle of performance.

It would, therefore, be very wise to equip yourself in a way that ensures you are prepared for the non-technical challenges that will come your way.

Think about where you started your journey, where you are now and your experiences along the way and ask yourself how well you understand the road ahead.

You are not the first person crafting a career.

There has been many before you, there have been many failures and lessons learned before you, there are many who had made mistakes on a path just like the one you are on.

In the software development industry, we can evaluate the experiences of leaders like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and even those around us. If we make the effort to understand the things they went through, we can predict the challenges we are likely to face and prepare ourselves.

If you do this, you can stand on the shoulders of giants.

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The Journey

We have different personalities, our career aspirations are unique, and the companies we work in function in their own ways, but let’s look at how the journey of a junior engineer change direction as he progresses up the ranks.

• The first few years – You study to become an engineer, then enter the market as a junior and for the first few years, you will rely on your hard skills to get the job done. You learn from your leaders. You sense a degree of responsibility, but you can make mistakes in a safe environment and learn from it. You are praised for good work and experience clear and direct feedback. You strive towards continuous improvement.

• From Intermediate to Technical Team Lead – In the software industry it is common for the strongest software engineer to promoted to Technical Lead. It is unlikely that you receive formal training on how to lead others and you face new challenges like Time Management, Multitasking, Quality Control. You start to feel accountable for the mistakes made by the team.

• From Technical Team Lead to Engineering Architect (in this case Software Solutions Architect) - When you reach the pinnacle of your engineering omnipotence you will be called upon to provide input in operational- and tactical planning meetings and you will likely be asked to play a supportive role in other departments like Sales and Marketing. The years of perfecting your craft are paying off, you are a technical influencer. You are the go-to guy and you feel important.

• From Engineering Architect to Manager - Your influence in different areas of the business paid off and senior management trusts your judgment thereby promoting you to take on more responsibility and more control in the form of a managerial position. As you settle into your new role you may find the adjustment to be harder than with previous promotions. This is because unlike your previous positions, for the first time you will be facing a wide range of non-technical duties what will challenge you in ways that your technical skills will not help you at all. With every promotion you are introduced to new challenges and you rely on your knowledge, skill, and experience to ‘level-up’ but this time you face new unfamiliar challenges. You shift from a strong technical focus to a management focus. You need to motivate staff, keep teams engaged, decide on recruitment, restructure teams, work assignment, and career development. These may seem like complex challenges as the dynamics of human behavior cannot be linked back to technical terms and you may need to adjust your problem solving thought patterns. Through your decisions and actions, your influence on individuals stretches beyond the workplace and work hours. You have a direct effect on the lives and possibly the families of those under your care. You realize you carry a great responsibility and you have a longing to be a good leader and, in this need, you start to discover a whole new world of non-technical principles.

• Manager to Director of Engineering and beyond - Your days are fragmented into a series of small activities, seldom lasting more than an hour each. You attend lots and lots of meetings. You manage stakeholder’s expectations and at times it feels like you are being pulled in different directions. Your role shifts from team-centric (doing what is best for the team) to organization-wide (doing what is best for the organization). For your team, you want to set clear goals and eliminate noise but at the same time, you want to be flexible and responsive towards organizational needs. Getting this balance right requires a lot of practice and even seasoned leaders still struggle with it. You rely on technical skills of others too so that you can make quick, accurate and wise decisions and you carry the consequences and impact of those decisions. You are now becoming a business-minded individual, an entrepreneur, a strategic planner. It is usually at this point in your career that your lack of soft skills is holding you back and your technical skills no longer propel you forward at the velocity it used to.

Isn’t it fascinating that from start to success the landscape changes completely?

You set out to become an engineer, and later you may find yourself co-leading an organization or divisions within an organization, not directly relying on the hard skills which took so many years to acquire and refine.

Your technical experience and skills still serve as the basis for good decision making and innovation but to truly be impactful you now need a new set of skills.

It is a phenomenal adventure, if you never cease to learn, adapt, press on, remain strong, persist, conquer.

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Building Resilience

Let’s look at a few key components of building resilience and equipping you for a successful journey:

1. Set Clear Goals – know what you want in life

Most of us don’t make the majority of our decisions consciously and in so doing, we pay a major price.

Tony Robbins warns that if we don’t set goals we are at risk of experiencing the Niagara Syndrome.

He explains it in the following way; Life is like a river, and that most people jump on the river of life without ever really deciding where they want to end up.

So, in a short period of time, they get caught up in the current.

When they come to forks in the river, they don’t consciously decide where they want to go, or which is the right direction for them. They merely ‘go with the flow’.

They become a part of the mass of people who are directed by the environment instead of by their own values. As a result, they feel out of control.

They remain in this unconscious state until one day the sound of the raging water awakens them, and they discover that they’re five feet from Niagara Falls in a boat with no oars.

At this point, they say, ‘Oh shoot!’. But by then it’s too late. They’re going to take a fall.

You must know what you want in life. You must be able to visualize it. You must life purposefully. You cannot just go with the flow. You must not live unconsciously.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is a fantastic example of the potential power of goal setting.

His recipe for success is making a committed decision to reach a predetermined specific goal, combined with a burning desire, followed by immediate, massive action repeated consistently for as long as it takes until the goal is reached.

Bill Gates utilizes the OKR method:

• First set objectives (the "O" in OKR), meaning what you want to accomplish.

• Then you identify key results ("KR") that help you meet your objectives. Key results should be specific, measurable and verifiable.

Larry Page said "OKRs have helped lead us to 10x growth, many times over. They’ve kept me and the rest of the company on time and on track when it mattered the most."

OKRs have been used in several organizations including LinkedIn, Twitter, and Uber.

Having a good mission is not enough. You need a concrete objective, and you need to know how you're going to get there.

Ray Dalio practice 3 principles:

• Focus. To achieve your goals, be selective. In his book, Principles he wrote: “While you can have virtually anything you want, you can't have everything you want. Choosing a goal often means rejecting some things you want, in order to get other things that you want or need even more.”

• Aim High - When you set goals, aim high. What you think is attainable is just a function of what you know now. Remember that great expectations create great capabilities. If you limit your goals to what you know you can achieve, you are setting the bar way too low.

• The worker-you & manager-you. You are responsible for doing the work that will get you what you want in life, but you must also be the manager who brings out the best in the worker.

2. Be Adaptable – deal with constant change

We don’t like changes. We want to engage in meaningful work and when change is introduced our efforts seem futile. In most cases, we see change as a disruption rather than an opportunity.

One of the most difficult and demoralizing things to deal with is when you worked very hard on a project and before completing it, the organization responds to an opportunity or risk and you must change direction. When this happens, it feels like you have done sisyphic work and it is overall very negative, but it does not have to be.

Technology changes, work environments change, projects change, team structures change, roles change. Whether we like it or not, in life, change is the only constant.

When Charles Darwin discovered the Blue-Footed booby birds on the Galapagos Islands he wrote;

“It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives, but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.”

Jeff Bezos said, “Being truly smart is about being adaptive and open to new perspectives and ways of thinking”.

When Tai Lopez was asked what the number 1 skill is to possess, he responded by saying “Being able to instantly adapt to any environment you find yourself in.”

Dr. Max McKeown, author of Adaptability: The Art of Winning in an Age of Uncertainty says, “Because adaptability is all in your head, we can’t just flick a switch, but we can develop – and trigger – your innate ability to adapt to new situations.” and “All failure is failure to adapt, all success is successful adaptation. Investing in high adaptability will lead to higher returns because people will redivert energy wasted in what doesn’t work into new success.”

3. Time Management – when there is just not enough time

All of us get the same number of hours per day, but most us find it hard to fit everything we want to achieve in a single day, or even a week and go to great lengths to try “get-ahead’ of work. We sacrifice time with family and friends and we neglect our health and personal well-being. The margin we need to absorb the unexpected becomes slimmer by the day.

Isn’t it incredible that someone like Richard Branson owns over 400 companies, and he still has time to kite-surf, and Elon Musk is disrupting 3 major industries, but he is able to dedicate his weekends to his kids?

Clearly, I must be doing something wrong, how do they manage to get it right?

How can some people have so much on their plate and still find time to do the things they want?

Bill Gates approach to making the most use of his time is as follows:

1. Take Your Time Seriously – Bill Gates can buy almost anything on earth, except time, and he realizes that, so he makes sure his time is being well used.

2. Use the Timeboxing technique to Structure your Time. Any task consists of four variables. These are time, cost, scope, and quality. A change in one constraint will affect the others. Without timeboxing, we usually work to a fixed scope, meaning in many cases some deliverables cannot be completed within the planned timescales. So, we spend more time than planned on a task, or we compromise the quality. With timeboxing, the deadline is fixed. We allocate a certain amount of time to a task and discipline ourselves to not exceed the committed planned duration. If the amount of work involved in the task cannot be completed within the planned timeframe the scope would have to be reduced and you must focus on completing the most important deliverables first. Timeboxing often goes together with a scheme for prioritizing of steps and this technique will help you immensely in managing your time more effectively, but it is a skill you must develop and practice with a great deal of discipline.

3. Be disciplined - when you’re at work — be AT WORK. When you’re at home, be at home.

4. Prioritize and, if possible, make sure you choose what you work on. Other people will try to take your time, and in most cases, if you manage requests and demands in a professional manner, others will understand. Don’t just go with the flow and don’t accept meeting invites unless you are certain your attendance will add value.

Jeff Bezos practice “proactive” days during which he takes a break from emails and meetings to enter a state of ‘flow’ also known as ‘deep work’.

Richard Branson learned to delegate effectively. Being a CEO multiple times and owning over 400 companies he has no other option than to delegate.

Michael Hyatt once said, “do only the things only you can do”. It is so convenient to rather do something yourself than to delegate it but failure to delegate is one of the surest ways to waste your time.

4. Multitasking – an ineffective attempt at coping

Our desire to fit a busy work schedule and time for family or friends into a short day leaves us with few opportunities to spend a significant amount of time doing only one focused thing.

Multitasking seems like a great way to get a lot done at once, and it might seem you are able to accomplish many things at once, but multitasking can reduce productivity by as much as 40%

When we multitask, we pay the price in terms of a “switching cost”, and a “mixing cost”.

Switching Cost is the cognitive impact when doing the actual shift and can be broken down into two "goal shifting" and "role activation".

Mixing Cost is the degree to which one task intrudes into the other. If you do multiple tasks at once your mind will drift back to the easier task. This is because the neurons that are involved in each task fires more efficiently after a lot of practice, so when you combine a complex task and an easier or more familiar task your brain will find it easier to fire the ‘trained’ neurons instead of ‘training’ new ones.

Other effects of multitasking on our brains:

• Multitasking is rewarding because we generally are entertained by at least one of the tasks, and we minimize the negative aspects of the other. When faced with just a challenging task we battle to remain focussed.

• Multitasking makes it difficult to sort out relevant information from irrelevant details.

• Multitasking Causes Anxiety.

• Multitasking causes overwhelm and burnout - according to neuroscientist, Daniel Levitin, multitasking causes the prefrontal cortex and striatum to burn up oxygenated glucose, and the brain burns through fuel so quickly that we feel exhausted and disoriented after even a short time. We’ve literally depleted the nutrients in our brain. This leads to the build-up of decision fatigue.

• Multitasking leads to impulsive behavior and bad decisions. We get so used to making a high number of quick decisions that a really important decision is likely treated in the same way and result in an undesirable outcome.

5. Humility is Key

There are two types of humility; inward humility and outward humility.

Outward humility is applied when you show others that you are humble, like when you tell others you are an “ok” in a specific skill, but you are “not that great”.

Inward humility is when you admit to yourself that you don’t know everything and that there are lessons to be learned from almost everyone and you strive towards continuous improvement. It is more difficult to achieve inward humility because most of the times our ego will be in the way.

During Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bodybuilding days, he approached Olympic weightlifter Franco Columbo so that he can learn techniques from him on how to lift heavier weights and build more muscle.

Tiger Woods won the US Masters, and the very next morning at 6 am he was on the driveway trying to improve his ability.

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tiger Woods reached for ongoing improvement even at a very successful level, and this level of humility was most likely one of the key contributors to their success. They realized the need for inward humility. Most of us are not nearly as successful (*yet) so let’s ask ourselves, how much more do we need such levels of inward humility?

Humble People listen more than others, and they sacrifice their egos for information and truth.

I am convinced humility will help you earn the respect of others. Dale Carnegie writes about key principles to building friendships and meaningful relationships in the corporate world and he encourages us to always conduct ourselves in meetings in a way that express more interest in the other party than ourselves. If we do this the outcome will be astonishing.

Your decisions and your actions will show how hungry you are to learn and if you are humble enough to ask someone to mentor you, and you are humble enough to read books and to keep learning you will propel yourself to new successes like never imagines before.

6. A Strong Mind and Body – caring for your health

To be your best you must have a strong and healthy mind and body, so I want to share with you three key aspects of taking good care of yourself;

Neuroscientist Dr. Wendy Suzuki concluded; "Exercise is the most transformative thing you can do for your brain today."

Three key benefits of exercising are:

• Exercise creates new brain cells in the hippocampus, which is involved in long-term memory and the regulation of emotions

• Exercise strengthens prefrontal cortex thereby improving attention and your ability to focus.

• Exercise releases good mood neurotransmitters like serotonin, noradrenaline, and dopamine.

You also need to become an expert at understanding and dealing with stress.

In his book, “Why Zebras don’t get Ulcers”, Dr. Robert Sapolsky describes how a stress response is designed to save your life.

During emergencies (like when a lion chases you), your Sympathetic Neural System kicks into action. It speeds up your heart rate, pumps blood into your muscle (raising blood pressure), pauses all long-term projects in your body (like digestion, growth, immune system and reproductive system), and prepares you to run for your life.

The problem is that your subconscious mind cannot differentiate a boardroom-type-emergency from an actual life-threatening-emergency like a lion chasing you, and if we experience a fight-or-flight emergency 5 times a day on every work day your body will start to shut down and you will be susceptible to chronic stress-related disease and disability.

There are many techniques for managing stress and I will only mention three that worked for me:

1. It’s your choice to turn a stressful situation into a positive opportunity. (Psychologist Kelly McGonigal and Ray Dalio)

2. Observe your own reaction – the mind wants to protect the body from future harm, so it tries to understand and learn from the experience thereby repeating the events in memory, going over and over it, trying to decipher what can be done in the future to save you from harm. Your subconscious cannot distinguish this from a real event, so as you go over the events in your mind, your subconscious sends signals into the body releasing hormones and emotions that cause the body to go into more stress, and as the body goes into more stress the mind works harder to understand the events, so it becomes a vicious cycle. When this happens simply observe and understand what is busy happening and will be able to quickly stop the cycle.

3. Exercise – it’s a wonderful cure for stress.

It is also incredibly important that we prevent burnout.

You only have 1 life and you must take care of yourself. Michael Hyatt suggests making an appointment with yourself to do exercise or to meditate or to spend time with your family and then to honor that appointment. Treat an appointment with yourself with the same sense of respect, urgency, and priority as you would if it was a meeting with your CEO or your bank manager.

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Closing

What are you trying to do now that is not working?

How frustrated are you going around and around the same mountain and no matter what you do, nothing is changing?

The absolute most stressful thing in the world is to spend your time trying to do something about something you can't do anything about.

There will be things you cannot change. Decisions made by others will affect you and you may not understand it all or agree with it at the time. You will face times of uncertainty.

Worrying and running from the one thing to the next, hoping you can impress people or attempting to gain control and secure your position with wear you down.

Do the very best you can in your role, in your group, and for your organization and then trust that things will work out fine.

There is only so much you can do and for the rest, you must have faith.

I implore you to learn from those before you, so you don’t have to repeat the same mistakes.

Your career (and life) should not only be about what you do but also about how you do it.

You are destined for great things. You can do anything, you can succeed, you can be the best, you can experience an incredible, fulfilling, impactful, stress-free, delightful career.

It’s up to you. Do not settle for mediocracy. Decide to equip yourself and live a purposeful focused life.

Go out there and be the best you can be.