For a large portion of my career I thought that Engineers were uniquely gifted people. We are the ones creating all the value for the customer — the actual product — after all. These sales, marketing, admin/hr, and executives just sort of sit around, talking about KPIs/OKRs and delivering 0 value, right? Wrong. These other jobs are the only reason you have a job. And you and I have a lot to learn from them.
Try for a couple days to build a side project and see what I mean. You have this great little engineering idea. You write beautiful code, executed with military precision. Unit tests at 99%. CI/CD. Deploying 50 times a day. Then you check Google Analytics - 0 visitors. Well there was the google crawler so at least one visitor.
This may sound glaringly obvious, but sometimes the obvious things are sometimes the most overlooked. Building something that no one wants to use is just masturbation. If you’re enjoying it thats great, but no one else is very interested.
The best marketers and sales people are amazing listeners. They are not the people shoving scams down your throat. They are people who genuinely care if the product they are selling adds value to the customer.
So while you are writing code all day, and these people are chatting it up on the phone, it may be easy to look at them and say “any trained chimp could do what they do”. But if you take a second, talk to them about what they are doing, show interest in them, you will get invaluable information.
I wish earlier in my career I realized how little I know. This is something you can practice now, and for the rest of your career.
Sam
Ready to be a better engineer? Email me sam@fdsa.me to setup a time to chat.