My Values
In this article I want to share the values I am following during my job as Software Engineer or Engineer lead and why. I will share as well strong opinions I have around those values.
Curiosity
I am a strong believer in jack of all trades profiles. I understand some topic would need some expertise in order to outperform the result expected for complex technical domains. There is people to fulfill this needs but I am not one of them. I need to understand every part of what I am working on. It can be infrastructure, architecture, design, product, leadership, productivity or delivery process,… This led me to read about CI/CD, Docker and Kubernetes, Elastic Search and alternatives, Universal Rendering, Web performance, SEO, web service interfaces such as GraphQL or RESTful, SwiftUI, modern browser API such as WebRTC or WebGL, UI/UX principles, the mom test or working agile… While I may just scratch the surface of those topics and master only few depending on the needs. I feel like understanding the basics allow me to see better the big picture and keep me motivated.
Transparency
There are no secrets to keep when we want to work together. I am against opacity in a company. I believe that sharing success, failures and problems early with everyone leads to better solutions and make everyone more engaged. Senior management should not have different goals than any employee. They can share their worries based on their experiences but should not attempt to work under cover towards fixing those. Team spirit should be in my opinion cross management level. There is no need to protect people from bad situation.
Trustworthiness
I trust and want to be trusted back. There is for me no such need like performance or online tracking tools. I do not work only to get paid, I work because I believe I spend my time bringing value to a large amount of people. Therefore, we need to convince each other that the current strategy is THE best strategy. I measure the performance on the impact we bring as a team rather than individual contribution. The lack of contribution should lead to review the motivation and engagement of your teammate.
Autonomy
As well when most of my experience was being part of a team, either as software engineer or lead, I still believe we can work together and keep an high Autonomy. A developer should not be censured by management or leader because of opinions divergences. We should always spend a fair time into blockers before escalating it, but we should not be scared to escalate it when needed. Actually we all constantly takes decisions at different level. It can be naming a variable, proposing a new process for the team, proposing new technical solutions, defining a minimum viable product features, allowing a bug going to production… Some will leads to failures but this is fine, as soon as you learn something from it and even better share about it. I do not believe in kind of parental-child relation at work.
Balance
I do not believe that working late or working the weekend is a solution for hyper-growth and fast delivery. Writing code while being tired will bring technical debt, potential bugs and potential psychic problems. Knowing to leverage time between work, leisure and family is a really important aspect. I strongly believe in estimations and planning, it is more important to find a doable date to share to stakeholders than giving an impossible deadline thinking about working insanely to achieve this target. In case we work in time sensitive project there will be more benefits defining some minimum viable product features than pushing to huge amount of work in a short period of time.
These values are not engraved on the rock. They may evolve, but I will refer to it when I have important decisions to take. I encourage you to do the same, list what you value and why.