If you find yourself struggling to work effectively with your manager in your mid-career, it doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong. As you enter mid-career, you will likely also find that your managerial relationships end up changing, both in terms of what you can expect from those relationships and in terms of what you end up needing from them.
Read MoreOne of the biggest things I wish I had known a few years back is that feeling like my progress had slowed down didn’t mean that I was a failure or an impostor. Remember that different skills and different stages of your career have different rates of change.
Read MoreCareer progress these days is a lot less linear than it used to be, and engineers will start to face different challenges in the middle stages of their career. I started out with an expectation that I would build a career at an organization and level up until I became an engineering fellow or distinguished architect or whatever fancy job title was at the top of the ladder there. But that’s not how things worked out - so now what?
Read MoreA key aspect of resilience engineering is being able to adapt to unforeseen circumstances. For a culture or organization to be resilient, it needs to be able to change as well. The attitude of “we’ve always done it this way” is harmful whether it is applied to technology or culture.
Read MoreProgress isn't always linear. It doesn't always come in the form of big concrete achievements. There's a big difference between feeling like I did some things that were failures versus feeling that I myself am a failure.
Read MoreMoving to a new country and transitioning were certainly significant in the overall course of my life, but it's been really difficult to look back at the year and feel like I didn't have a single notable professional accomplishment.
Read MoreI got to a point where trying so hard to maintain some amount of "productivity" started to feel counter-productive. Seeing notably shorter to-do lists feels weird, but those lists were supposed to be a tool to enhance my life, not something to control or overwhelm it.
Read MoreI've discovered that giving myself room to be bad at some things frees up a lot of mental energy that I can use for the things I really do want to be good at. I spent so much time in my past worrying that if I let myself be bad at anything then I'd end up being bad at everything, but by not giving myself any space to just enjoy things I ended up burning out instead.
Read MoreI want to make sure that I spend my energy much more carefully going forward, and this means making a deliberate effort to free myself from things that use up fucks without giving me anything in return. I want 2018 to be the year that I set myself free from other people's expectations of what I should be.
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