The Importance of Well-Being in the Engineering Industry
If you don’t feel good, it’s going to be hard for you to help others and be productive professionally.
Typo - Ship better software faster🚀
This week's newsletter is sponsored by Typo. I’ve been in touch with Typo for some time now. Had the pleasure to also been on their podcast as well.
I’ve checked their platform and I am impressed by what they are doing! Also have given them some personal suggestions and feedback, that I believe would be helpful for users of their app.
Typo is a software delivery intelligence platform that enables modern software teams with SDLC visibility, well-being insights & tools to code better, deploy faster & stay aligned with business goals.
A personal note about why well-being is important in our industry:
When people feel like they are supported and part of the team where they are being valued, they are going to do the best work possible.
— Kovid Batra, Founding member of Typo
If you are interested in continuous improvements of your dev team, I would highly recommend checking them out!
They offer free starting version and 20% off for Engineering Leadership readers!
Let’s get back to this week’s thought!
Intro
As engineers, it’s a privilege to do what we do. We build great things. Our job is much more creative than we think. We are creative problem-solvers.
But our jobs can also get stressful. Deadlines, the pressure to deliver with the right quality and the never-ending process of learning new things. We also spend a lot of our time sitting behind a desk, which can take a toll on our health and overall well-being.
I have reached out to Richard Donovan, a Software Developer with over 22 years of experience, a mindset coach and also a personal trainer. He provided insightful advice to help with wellbeing in our great industry that we all love and enjoy being in.
Before we get into insights lets start with some downsides I had throughout my career.
As much as we love our industry, it also has some downsides
I’ll share with you some of the issues I have been dealing with as an engineer and an engineering leader throughout my career.
Perfecting my solutions to an extent
I could particularly see this as an issue when I was building something visual. I was not satisfied with the result. This color should be like this, this font should be like that, etc.
And then this also transferred to code as well. I was trying too hard to make things “perfect”, and I was hurting my progression toward getting things done.
Right now, I still find myself sometimes trying to “perfect”, but I remember how important progress is and I try to quickly readjust my mindset. I also have a quote on one of my shirts to remind myself: “Progress over Perfection”.
Not making decisions fast enough
As engineers, there are so many micro-decisions that we are making daily. I have found myself procrastinating and making decisions a lot of times.
Decisions like:
naming the variable or a function,
should we split the file/class differently or not,
what approach to use to solve a particular problem,
how to properly test the solution.
This brought me to unnecessary stress, that I could avoid if I would just make a decision.
Procrastinating on tasks, hard conversations and giving feedback
I was guilty of this a lot of times, the first one is still the case sometimes. And the second and third were obvious when I first started with engineering management.
I saw things that needed to improve but hesitated to have the conversation and give feedback. I thought that things were going to get better eventually. But I was wrong. Therefore it’s really important to react swiftly and not procrastinate.
Feeling like an imposter
This was the case, especially at the beginning of my career. I thought that engineers with a lot more experience have such amazing abilities. That it would be hard or almost impossible for me to develop.
But then I found out that we are all learning consistently. And I wasn't that far from that. That sparked me to learn even more and be even better every day.
I believe that my issues are not just mine, but a lot of you can relate to them, let’s see if I have been able to get rid of them.
Did I get rid of these issues?
The answer is no, I did not. I just know how to control them better and let them to not get to me. I still sometimes find myself perfecting, not making decisions fast enough, procrastinating or feeling like an imposter.
I learned that this is a natural behavior and it tells me that I am a human like everyone else. There is not one person who hasn’t felt at least a bit of self-doubt. Especially if you have aspirations to grow and goals that you wish to achieve.
Focusing on well-being helps me to deal better with these issues
 | A guest post by
|