TL;DR: Acquiring skills by doing the real job. Always keep looking for more challenging tasks, projects, and expand scopes. Asking someone more expert to be your mentor and learn from them.

What's wrong with the way of learning

I have done some experiment about knowledge sharing. I shares knowledge, interesting topic, trends to the team regularly (e.g. weekly or bi-weekly). Here's what I did and observed.

• The knowledge that has been shared is not being use soon.
• The team understand the idea at the sharing moment.
• The team still told me that they understand even if the piece of knowledge is a bit of abstract. For example I shared about a strategy to write test that heavily inspired from functional programming.
• 3-4 weeks later, there's a task that suits to use the idea shared previously. The team just forget it so I have to share again.
• I collect feedback which told me to give more concrete example. I did it but the result is the same, they cannot actually use it.
• I know more about the subject that was shared because I need to prepare it but I believed the team won't because they just listen to it.
• What I shared mostly based on my own experience. I use it to do the real job, see the result, sometimes if it doesn't work then I just throw it out.

From the observation, knowledge sharing by just listening from expert won't work. The listeners are able to learn the concept but they are not acquiring skills into the level of being able to really use it.

In order to finish a piece of work, the person has to have an ability to demonstrate the skill, adapt, and solve an any unexpected problem. You can't swim by reading from books.

Your career cannot be advanced if you are only able to talk about skills. You have to done something and it is required the skill.

What to do instead?

Instead of learning like a school where a teacher gives a lecture, we can learn a new subject just-in-time or on-the-job. This is the best time for a person to concentrate on the subject and put thoughts and creativities in order to finish the job.

Everyday, you and your manager have to maximize the learning by assigning a task which have to balancing between practicing a person's skills to become an expert vs expanding knowledge in a new area.

For example, if you want to become a solution architect, you and your manage can work together with backlogs and let you explore different solutions, do proof of concept with a clear goal of the task. You can also get mentor by another solution architect in your company or work with manager on what he/she is expecting to see. Another example is if you are a web developer and want to learn more about mobile development, you can start working on mobile bug fix and take more challenges as you progress. You can also pairing with a mobile engineer in your team or asking for learning materials support from your company.

I would like to give a tips on learning from materials here: reading is faster than watching a video and don't learn it all, just learn enough for you to do the work. You should also allocate more free time to learn deeper in the subject.

After you have learned a new subject, you should also give a presentation to the team. The goal here is not only about let the others learn from you but it's about communicating what you did and improve your understanding on the subject by thinking in a different perspective.

You can't do it alone

With this way of learning, you have to incorporate with you manager about your goals. The company also has to have tasks that align with your goals as well — if you want to become a mobile engineer but the company is only doing a website, you'd better looking for a new job.

Starting by have a clear picture of skills you want to acquire/learn, then you can optimize your learning. If you don't have a skills list, you should talk with experts who can paint a clear picture so you can choose you own journey.

Hope this help.

I've talk with many people — engineers in my company, candidates in interview sessions, meetups, etc. They are often excited about new technologies, frameworks, tools and eager to learn, try, and talk about it. They may listed those tools as what they have experiences in CV. This is good but I think that over the half of those people are “tools' user” — who know how to use tools but don't understand it deeply.

Complexity

There's types of task's complexity that engineer will have to solve. CRUD or defined business workflow maybe classified as “Clear” so any engineer can simply write a program in a very straight forward way and this type of task is suitable for junior level.

Next is “Complicated”, an engineer may received a customer problem and asked to solve it. It also could be a technical challenge. The solution is not identified yet. The problem itself is solvable and feasible in theory. For example, scaling the system to handle more load, or in business context which a coupon quota is overused somehow. This type of task is suitable for senior level.

I won't go into more types here but I hope you can see what will happen when task is more complex.

Dots & connect the dots

In order to solve more complex problem, engineer has to use more knowledge and has ability to mix & match many things and come up with a solution.

Dots represent knowledge. Connect the dots is a process of utilizing knowledge and creating a solution that could solve a problem.

In order to increase ability to solve problems, it's simply to increase more dots as much as possible and practicing to connect those dots together so one can generate many new possible solutions.

For tools' users, their dots are limited — even if they know a lot of tools but those knowledge are quite shallow. It's hard to use across different domain because tools are tend to be specific for some use cases. Underneath those tools, there's layers of knowledge, techniques, and principles to be acquired — which are more fundamental and more reusable across different domains.

Critical thinking

When you're asked “What's happened when you open a website?” and your answer was “The browser send a request to server, received a response back, and render it.”, you're not think critical enough. You also may be asked “Why Kafka is so fast?” and the answer was “Because everyone said so.”, it's not a critical thinking.

In order to think critically, you have to tear it apart, think finer in every piece, go deeper more into detail, asking why again and again, until you arrived at the atomic piece of knowledge that cannot be split anymore — the first principle. This is how anyone should learn about anything. In this way, you will acquire much more dots than before.

When solving a complex problem, divide & conquer is a common technique used which break down a problem into smaller problems that easier to solve. It's kind of the same way of critical thinking. If you want to apply critical thinking into problem solving, you should look closer into a problem, identify any detail out of it, tear it apart into many pieces, dig down inside what's seem to be magic or abstract, and try to arrive at the first principle.

Wrap up

Skills are required for growing up to be senior or higher. The higher level you are, the more complex problem for you to solve. The ability to solve more complex problem are coming from ability to think more critically, how many dots (knowledge) do you have, and how you can connect those dots to create solutions that solve the problem.

Again, those abilities need to be practice and take time to acquire. Don't be rush. Asking yourself if today do I acquire any more dots? do I generate new ideas? do I think critical enough? do I arrive at the first principle? How can I go deeper to hit first principle?

Talk with someone more expert will speed up the learning — because they can think more finer than you.

Hope this help.

#careers

I'm going to be a stereotype here. I'm pretty sure it won't cover all the cases, it’s just for simplicity and I hope that it should cover at least 70% of the cases.

I divided the problem into 2 sub-problems: Lack of skills and Lack of scope.

Each of these problems could be fixed independently. I'll write more about what I believed a learning process should be. The important thing that you should know is fixing these problems is not a sequential, but it is a cycle to fix a little bit of each sub-problem many times.

Lack of skills

This problem is well-known among software engineers. Everyone wants to be smart, full of wisdoms, or even a 10x engineer. There's many way to increase your skill: read books, blogs, watch video, learn on the job, side projects, leetcode, mentored by expert, etc. These materials consumed are usually focusing on technical knowledge: programming language, scaling, performance, design, tools, etc.

The missing piece here is the other side of technical knowledge which I called soft skills (It isn't the same commonly known soft skills). The sample of soft skills are: project management, effective communication, effective writing, mentoring, inter-personal skill, problem solving, critical thinking, outcome-focusing, etc.

Without the soft part, all you have is an engineer who's waiting for someone telling you “Hey, this is your ticket with full of requirements and if you can check all the boxes in the ticket then everything will work as planned”. It's like a ticket bashing — who can clear tickets so fast, alone, and doesn't account for anything.

I tend to find engineers focusing more on the hard-skill and pay a little attention to soft-skill. I believed because hard-skill is in your power to control but soft-skill need someone else to practice with.

Even if you know that you need to improve soft-skill, it still lack the way to improve it, for example, project management — you cannot practice it alone but you have to actually do it. This issue creates inequality, if you are chosen to do it then you have more opportunity than the other. The same project won't come back again for the others to practice, only a newer project that is harder. This is a vicious cycle that make the gap wider.

Lack of scope

What I mean by scope is below:

• How much you have to be responsible for?
• What's the size of your tasks/projects that you’re accountable with?
• How many engineers you have to work with and influence?
• How many people in organization you have to work with and influence?
• What's the coverage in level of people you have to work with, starting from senior management to the frontline?

All of scopes here is relatively compared among employees in the company, so it can't compare across company.

Let's be specific.

You are an engineer who responsible to complete a simple bug fix assigned by the other engineer and the ticket has full of detail, solution, everything is clear and concrete. In this case, your scope is less than the one who create a ticket for you.

You are an engineer to support ~10 of micro-services. These services are in maintenance mode. You have to keep watching its health, answer inquiries from other engineers. Compare with someone else who responsible to develop a new system which is very critical to the business. It's life or death. Your scope might be less than the other.

You are an engineer who responsible an end to end of a product life cycle. So you talked to all stakeholders, create a plan, review code, monitor its health, and be an on-call. Comparing with someone work in a team, there's product owner (PO) who try to give a concrete requirement and when that engineer have a question, the PO will find answer for him. You might have larger scope comparing to the other.

So, you can think of scope as a circle of responsibility, criticality, people connection, and influential. How large are your circle? How can I increase it? It has to be increased in all angle, otherwise it's not a circle anymore.

Fixing these problems is a cycle

You cannot learn all soft and hard skills before you increase your circle. And you can't increase your circle if you don't have enough skills, otherwise you will lose trust.

The thing is you should increase your circle bit by bit and learn it along the way. Have I done good enough? What else can I improve?

It takes time and you can't rush it.

The only problem left unsolved here is can we create equality to all employee in a company so that everyone will have the same opportunity to grow? I believed, maybe, it's the hardest or impossible to solve.

#careers