Best Engineers are Focusing on Helping Others

My top insights on how best engineers are helping others + 🎁 additional tips from the LinkedIn and Substack community!

Intro

Many different things make an engineer a great one. One thing that truly stands out is the ability to help others. Best engineers know that by helping others you contribute so much more value than just with your own contribution.

It took me a while in order to understand that. Let’s get into that next.

It took 5+ years for me to understand the importance of helping others

As an engineer, growing and progressing in my career, I was focusing a LOT on getting better every day and learning as much as possible. I was learning through tutorials, building side projects or doing freelance work.

You can read more about how freelance work has helped me to grow from engineer all the way to CTO here: My secret for growing from engineer to CTO (paid article).

But what I didn’t do is to also share what I have learned with others. I remember being the only person on the team who had a good understanding of Angular and also the whole frontend part of a certain app.

That wasn’t so great, because without me, it was hard for others to make adjustments. If I could turn back the time, I would:

• learn together with others,

• get others a lot more involved earlier,

• continuously share what I did and also what’s the mindset behind it.

When you teach others about a certain topic, you understand what you know and what not.

And If you are growing and learning together with a group of people, you all learn and progress much faster.

I needed to become a manager to fully understand how important helping others is

When I first became the team lead of the team and later an engineering manager, I made many mistakes. You can read more about my journey here: From IC to Manager (paid article).

But one thing became clear to me. I needed to shift my mindset from focusing on my individual contribution to helping and uplifting others. That’s where I started to truly see the progression of the team.

And not only that, I started to understand that I need to have people on the team who are also helping others, because I couldn’t do it all alone:

• I am not an expert in all of the technologies,

• I have limited time in the day,

• I can't be involved in all of the fine details.

Since then, I understand how important it is to have people in the team that do that. Two of the key traits I look at when I’m hiring a new engineer are the drive and motivation for learning and the willingness to share the knowledge and help others.

How are the best engineers helping others?