Improving Yourself as an Engineer

I can’t really say that I excel in what I do, nor can I say that I have reached a level where I can be considered an expert in any subject. If anything, I consider myself a slacker who cares only whether I’ll discover something interesting or not before deciding to do something.

I’ve been in the workforce since 2013, that makes it four years at the time this post was written. As far as my experience goes, I’ve met many people during these last four years from whom I managed to learn something. Well, some of them actually passed down some of their knowledge to me and some others served as objects of my observation.

Learning is something that allows people to grow beyond their current capabilities, but what and how to learn differs between one person to another. This post contains a collection of my opinions I’ve given to people who asked me how they should learn.

Different People, Different Concerns

Sometimes some of my fellow engineers ask me how I managed to make it so far. I find these people can be grouped into two categories: fresh graduates and experienced engineers.

Fresh Graduates

As far as I see, fresh graduates’ main concerns usually revolves around how they should develop their abilities to survive in the workforce. Since they’re new to the business, they need to explore and get some level of familiarity with different areas of the engineering field.

Some of them already have a long-term goal to pursue, but many others don’t have it yet.

Experienced Engineers

Experienced engineers who asked my opinion regarding their situation and how they should learn so far seems to be on their burnouts. Well, I know a few fresh graduates who’re unlucky enough to reach their first burnouts only in a few months after they started working.

Their concerns usually revolves around how to grow despite of burnouts and uncooperative environments. Some of them are already in the track that fits their technical interests, but facing problems due to reasons such as being overworked or family needs (since some of them are married). Some others have a bit less luck, ended up working in projects they don’t have any interest in.

Accomodating the Needs

While both groups come with different levels of expertise and different situations, they ultimately wish for the same thing: personal growth through learning.

Fresh Graduates

The lucky fresh graduates are mostly in a position where they have freedom to explore as many things as they want to, so they can focus on what to learn and whom to learn it from. The unlucky ones who managed to be overworked within their first six months at work and getting burnouts have it a bit harder, since they need to deal with another problem: how to make some spare time and energy to learn.

For those with the freedom to explore and experiment, they need to focus on getting access to the materials they need to learn getting guidance from someone more experienced regarding the subject.

For those who needs to make some spare time and energy to learn due to a very demanding workplace, it highly depends on what their goals are.

If their current work is necessary for them to reach their goals, they should put it as their top priority. Depending on how much they can learn on the job what they need for their future development, they might or might not need to make much spare time and energy for independent learning.

If their current work is actually getting in the way of the pursuit of their goals, I’d suggest them to find another job that can better accomodate their personal goals. Unless they have some financial problems that requires them to stay where the salary is higher, it might not worth to sacrifice their future development for higher salary.

Fresh graduates who’re eager to learn are potential future experts and industry leaders, it’s a waste to keep them away from unleashing their potential to the fullest.

Experienced Engineers

The more experienced engineers usually face more complex problems, and might be involved in some bad office politics that put them in unfavorable positions.

Some of them are also already married and have families to feed, and some others might need to take care of their elderly parents. Both of these require them to be financially strong enough to provide, so I wouldn’t be too eager to suggest them to switch jobs unless it doesn’t negatively affect their financial condition.

I mostly avoid too much meddling with the career decision-making, especially for the experienced engineers who need to provide for their families. The best I can do is to share my experiences that might be relevant to their situation, and hope that it can be useful for them to consider what steps they’re going to take next.

The safest thing they can do is to keep working at their current job as usual, but make sure to spare their time and energy to improve themselves. Once they’re ready, they might be able to get a promotion in their current company or to get a better offer somewhere else according to the skills they’ve developed according to their actual interests.

Some Pitfalls

There are a few traps that might be laid by bad managers and leaders that could limit people from improving themselves. While identifying them might not be as trivial as it seems, choosing a good environment is important especially for fresh graduates who need a lot of room for improvement.

The following are some examples of pitfalls we might find when working for various companies.

Elite Background Means Smarter

If the people in the environment enforces this mindset and discriminate between people with elite background and people with modest ones, it sucks. On a glance, it seems to give unfair advantage to a select few who happens to have a more glorious past and hampers those without it. It isn’t.

Due to their abilities being constantly underestimated, people without elite background might end up looking down on themselves. This could affect their confidence, and might cause them to lose motivation to pursue their goals since they started to underestimate themselves.

While it’s quite obvious that the non-elite people would be at a disadvantage, it’d also mess up with the elites’ mentality. Their elite status is acquired due to something that happened to them in the past that’s considered an achievement by the company management. While that something might contribute to their better average abilities right off the bat, overconfidence could end up slowing down their growth to the point where their abilities and levels are no longer higher than average due to their slow growth rate compared to the others.

Fake Meritocracy

A lot of companies claim to be meritocracies, but not all of them are real meritocracies. Some are just oligarchies advertised as meritocracies. A company that’s an oligarchy but claims to be a meritocracy could be really discouraging for a passionate engineer who’s genuinely trying to improve.

Let’s say there’s this engineer who’s passionate and works really hard. Despite working long hours, he keeps sparing some time to learn something new to improve. Yet, he never get any appreciation from his superiors. Instead, another engineer who’s below him in terms of contribution and abilities keeps getting promoted without any visible achievements.

The other engineer happens to be someone close to the management, which turns out to be the main reason behind the promotions. But our model engineer doesn’t notice it, he keeps asking for feedbacks to his superiors to improve himself but his superiors told him he’s pretty good. He ended up despairing over his lack of abilities and contribution, finally losing his confidence.

Ability Above Decency

While the ability and competence of an engineer is his obvious value to the company, I think some companies do wrong by valuing them above basic human decency and attitude of the engineer.

An engineer might be valued for his engineering skills. But more than that, he’s also a human being that should be valued for his character as a human being. Putting imbalanced emphasize on engineering skills alone might lead the engineers into vanity over their technical skills, while being a poor excuse of a human being.

Well, remember the Uber sexual harassment scandal? There’s also a case involving people I personally know, where an engineer physically stalked his coworker for a few months.

Basic human decency and attitude might not contribute directly to an engineer’s technical growth. Yet, without it we wouldn’t be able to create an ecosystem where humans can work with each other peacefully. In the end, engineers are still humans and work for the sake of humanity…or at least, another human being.

Without a good ecosystem to work in, it’s difficult to be passionate with our work and it might feel painful to be inside it.

Conclusion

Fresh graduates are generally in a much better position to improve themselves compared to experienced engineers who’re stuck in an unfavorable position. This is due to fresh graduates usually having less responsibility to look after compared to the more experienced ones. So try to focus on learning if you’re still a fresh graduate…or even better, if you’re still a student who’s not in workforce yet.

On the other side, fresh graduates might be a bit more naive and it might be harder for them to identify toxic environments. The pitfalls I mentioned only cover some examples of what’s happening in some tech-based companies. Even the more experienced engineers might get themselves into bad environments by some kind of unfortunate events.

The act of learning itself consist mostly of reading books/papers, consulting to other people, and experimenting by ourselves. The hardest part on the journey to improvement is to actually be able to focus on those until a certain level of mastery, while being in not-so-ideal environment.