How To Be Different And Successful As An Engineer

Last week, I attended a meeting. Now I will talk about some things I learned from the meeting. A guy who will leave Alibaba Group made a talk. He is a high level engineer, he really made something successful and had a strong influence on the company.I really appreciate what learned: The way to learn things better, collaborate more efficiently with your colleague, and be more successful with your product.

1 Master things better and know more 🔗︎

To identify you have already known something, usually you should go through 4 periods: memorize it , understand it, express it, and use it.

Memory has two different types: long wave or short wave memory. Picture memory is the most useful, and also you must work hard to memorize it by using your physical head, and repeat it again and again.

you should understand that computers are abstract to real life. So you should make connections with your life. It makes it easy to understand. The best way is to make a simple example.Moreover, you should learn something as much as possible

Testing if you have mastered something is that you can express it easily and people can understand your meaning easily by your simple example.

The last thing, you should use it simply and deeply.

Google is not always the right choice, because you really don’t know what you need so you don’t know how to find it. Knowledge should be saved in your mind, so you can process it , get it quickly and use it better. You should make your knowledge indexable and structured.

The most happiness comes from the most pain.

2 Best Coding skills and be an expert 🔗︎

Simple out:

• Think more and hard
• Pursue excellence
• Love it and coding more

When you think about coding problems or knowledge, you should connect your thoughts more with philosophy and psychology: for example if you want to memorize the Object methods , maybe you should connect with:who i am, where i came from, and where i will go. Pursuing excellence means you should push yourself hard to do better on your products. The last thing is to keep curiosity, so you will love it finally.

Practicality， there are three things you can follow:

• 1 Reading excellence code resource.

• 2 Talked with excellence guys

• 3 Notes your excellence minds always

3 Best communication skills 🔗︎

Avoid XY Questions!! What is the XY question? I will make an example. If the man at the road asks you how to get to the train station.Maybe you tell him to the railway station 1 first, and then stop at station XX, and then take a car to the destination. Ok this is the Y question. But what the man really wants is to buy a ticket because he comes from a rural area. In his mind, he needs to go to the train station first to buy the ticket, this is the X question. In fact, you can buy a ticket for him using a mobile phone. So, the only thing you should do is ask what he really wants.

So when we talk with our colleagues, you should know what questions scope you are. The User issue scope ? The product scope ? Or the technology scope ? Or The business scope ?

4 Make your product success 🔗︎

As I had said at part 3, you should define your question first.The User issue scope ? The product scope ? Or the technology scope ? Or The business scope ? A product only solves one problem, it must satisfy human nature:

Sense of fear，sense of happiness, sense of vanity, these things define the user experiences.

The most important thing that you should do is to find a sponsor to support the product , then you can start to build your product. The product is your tag, you should be craftsmanship and patient. You should not consider it as KPI.