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wjossey

This is my career so far in a nutshell.

I’m an average programmer.

I’m an excellent problem solver.

I have an above average work ethic.

I’m an excellent communicator.

Basically, I combined all of these traits and found roles that leveraged these traits to maximize my impact.

Not for nothing, but this is why my liberal arts college was profoundly impactful for me, despite not getting a “top tier” CS education. My writing abilities were given a shot in the arm, because I had to write so many analysis papers for my government minor. My understanding of human behavior was expanded by my psychology courses. My understanding of how I should never design a UI was solidified by how poorly I did during a year of art classes.

Some days I wish I was as strong mathematically as my friends who went to MIT, or as talented with programming languages as my friends who went to Cambridge, but each one of us have been able to have successful careers, despite our differences in breadth/depth.

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> I’m an excellent problem solver.

Don't mean this to be a mean comment but how did you assess this?

I think i am good problem solver but i don't know if i am better than anyone else.

Problem solving ability is basically just IQ.

If that were true, everyone with a very high IQ would be a great poker player, a great negotiator, a great writer, a great leader, a great investor.. etc.

IQ is as proxy for problem solving if the problems look like a standardized test. The problems people face in the real world require more specialization and a more complex combination of skills and traits.

IQ is a general measure for pattern recognition. Most modern IQ tests are heavily dependent of things like ravens matrices.

Pattern recognition in obviously helpful when problem solving.

Is IQ really legit? I heard form Nassim Nicholas Taleb that the math used by psychologist is weak.

It's not. It was originally used to find profoundly disabled children. But know extended to be the be all and end all of intelligence. It's weak science.

its legit in the sense that is a huge variable in predicting general life success/educational attainment.

if you think those outcomes are decent proxies for intelligence then IQ is useful

IQ is one of the strongest predictors we have for many life outcomes, such as career success, wealth, lower risk of death. This doesn't mean "everyone with a very high IQ will blah blah blah" but it does mean that those with high IQs are more likely to achieve certain things.

Strongest predictor taken from a pool of weak predictors is still a weak predictor.

I might be pulling things out of my ass here but IIRC the correlation is up there with that of your parents’ wealth. And in current political discussion lots of time is spent on how to deal with the latter. It may in fact still be a weak predictor, but that obviously doesn’t make it meaningless.

IQ is somewhat inheritable as well though. Is it IQ or inherited wealth that is the factor?

The studies account for wealth.

What should I do if I know i have a low IQ?

First, understand that IQ tests can be biased and can shaft minorities. Second, they are tools and are only as good as the person making use of them.

Third, eat right, exercise, live right, etc. Performance is impacted by health and even supposedly high IQ people will perform worse if they are sick, short of sleep, etc.

IQ isn't a useless concept, but I'm somewhat well versed in the history of IQ tests, etc, and it's got a lot of issues with it.

Please stop. Your self pity is annoying. You have an engineering degree. There’s no way you’re not in the top quintile of intelligence and you’re probably in the top decile. Enough of the pity party. If you hate yourself go join a boxing club or start running marathons or something else that will put the petty bullshit of work life in perspective besides the fact that you’re young and you have a beautiful, working body.

IQ is one of those myths smart people love.

I'm having trouble parsing this - is it a mark of stupidity not to believe in IQ or is IQ a lie that mostly hoodwinks smart people?

Well... There is fluid intelligence and crystalized intelligence.

What you're pointing out is that crystalized intelligence is what matters.

Fluid intelligence mediates the ability to gain crystalized intelligence.

Higher IQ in theory means you should get further faster. Though even without if you are dedicated enough to obtain the same level of crystalized intelligence you might be able to do so. I suspect at some point the cognitive ceilings are different, but who knows by how much.

Time put in still matters no matter how smart you are.

I think a person with a high IQ could be a great poker OR a great negotiator OR a great writer. Perhaps 2-3 total.

Disagree totally with this. My psychometric IQ has been stable for a long time, yet my problem solving ability has increased significantly.

Some ways to modulate it might be reading material such as George Polya's "How to Solve It," taking your own notes on heuristics and techniques you've found useful and continuously reapplying and iterating them, and simply delving deep into many hard problems (be they directly coding related or not).

Agreed. Problem solving is a skill separate from IQ and unlike IQ it can be developed over time. If you want to level up your problem solving skill, carry around a small notebook and pay attention to the problems you see in other people, or in the office, in public, or in yourself. Write down the problem and its cause, continually drilling down into root causes. Then make a graph of problems and root causes, with directed edges showing causation.

Within one or two years of doing this you will recognize patterns others do not see. I have improved my problem solving skill by at least 7-8% by doing this. The key is iteration.

My IQ has been stable like yours, around the 96th percentile, and despite being a Tier 1 top-talent engineer, I’ve had to actively improve my problem solving ability over time.

Interesting that you are you self-aware you can tell the difference between a 6% and a 9% increase is something as nebulous as "problem solving ability."

Edit: Oh, the account is nothing but troll comments. Nevermind.

IQ is a prerequisite for being a problem solver, but is not enough. You also need to have the correct mindset for it.

I think problem solving is knowing when and what terms to google

The amount of times I've solved something no one else could, just because I went the extra check of looking up the manufacturers documentation when the companies fell short...

Real problem solving is what you do when google doesn't have the answer.

Not really.

It's both fluid and crystalized intelligence that are required.

The better you can pattern match the faster you will be able to acquire crystalized intelligence by being able to connect the dots and you'll likely be able to leverage superior pattern matching abilities to utilize less crystalized intelligence to draw the same conclusions in certain cases. But if you have no or very little crystalized intelligence in the domain you're trying to problem solve in then you aren't going to get very far.

It's very much a combination of the two.

This betrays a lack of familiarity with the literature on intelligence. Fluid intelligence doesn’t change much if at all between 14 and 27, when it starts its long slow decline. Crystallized intelligence can keep rising for decades after that. The number of fields where fluid is more important than crystallized is very small if very important. Having a vast knowledge base, built on a foundation of experience, is more important for most full time academics, never mind those of us not engaged in research. You can’t play at all if your fluid intelligence isn’t high enough but there are a lot of people out there who’re smart and vastly less successful than dumber people who worked consistently at something. At the top are the smart, hard working and lucky but intelligence is not the be all and end all.

Despite the answers below, it’s not an IQ question (I likely have an above average IQ, but nothing remotely special).

If I see a problem, particularly in a business context (I’m not a trained scientist curing cancer here), I can solve it. Whether that’s marketing, product, sales, devops, engineering, you name it. I don’t mind jumping between disciplines, getting my hands dirty, and doing the work that needs doing (no matter how unglamorous).

And if I work for companies with hundreds of employees and I’m one of the go to people for any problem, big or small, I know I have something special that sets me apart.

What roles and companies do you typically search for when job hunting?

I’m on my fifth company of my career. Every job I’ve joined as an IC.

My first job I got because I interned and they wanted me to join full time.

My second job I joined as a straight SE.

My third job was via an acquisition of the second company, and I started as an IC and became a Sr Director.

My fourth job I was a co-founder that did a little of everything.

My fifth job I joined as a senior IC, and basically pitched where I could have the most impact during my first week and then have just run from there.

The only thing that matters when joining a company is really your salary, as they are unlikely to fix that quickly. Role, title, focus, manager, etc, can all be changed quickly if you present a solution to leadership that makes sense to them.

Oh, and regarding what type of companies. For me the primary factor right now is remote. I plan on being remote for the rest of my career. That’s my number one priority when looking at companies to join.

An HR leader once shared with me: "Because every hire is a compromise between available candidates.. there is no perfect hire, and no two candidates are truly comparable."

It's really an eye-opening statement for tech roles, and how formally taught and self-taught/transferred folks can work side by side successfully.

The unique thing about tech skills is there's more than one valid way to solve a problem or do something "right". It's hard to measure that.

Not even two CS majors who may be equivalently capable (in different ways) on the outset will be identical, nor will be the outcome of how they grow their strengths and capabilities.

I look forward to HR continuing to evolve better to understand technical roles and contributions as being beyond a binary yes/no measurement.

Current hiring practices continue not to extend well from a bricks and mortar approach to a abstracted online/digital measurement.

In the meantime... knowing how to leverage and communicate your skillet in a transferable way is really what's important. There's no better way to do that than learning to write and communicate well, and better than others.

In terms of concrete specifics, I've found having interviews with at least 3 engineers on the team you will potentially be working with to be really helpful for both sides to evaluate, and more specifically when the interviews are pair programming problem solving. You get to see how the candidate works through a problem and they don't have to code for an exact solution (or I don't think that should be the requirement anyways, it should be more about approach and communication than an exactly correct implementation , especially given limited time)

Whiteboarding architecture/approach is in my mind as important, or more important than memorizing things for coding tests.

Clever architecture will almost always beat and outlast clever programming. Knowing how to best approach a problem is more than half the battle.

This is also why processes are often not transferable, because the people are different.

Better leaders are always taking stock of what they have or don't have and reorienting the process rather than trying to stuff the new team into the old process.

Good point. The only way a process stands a chance is if it's person agnostic, which can introduce a different set of issues to navigate.

I don't know about in modern times but historically military leaders had a lot of interest in person agnostic processes. Caesar's book is all about what he does to avoid relying on anyone having special talents.

Startups, and riskier technology ventures generally, seem to be the opposite. There you aren't Caesar, you're the Gauls. You're hoping that your team has just what it takes to overcome the odds.

Startups rely on Generalists who can specialize until the scaling happens, then it's about specialists who look to grow into generalizing/broadening.

Different skills needed for different stages of growth and not everyone can switch gears or have the range in transmission, founding leaders included.

How do you do leverage these strengths? I have a somewhat similar profile and I simply feel like a fish judged by its ability to climb a tree.

Yet, I:

- Help with hiring/marketing/leading scrum sessions (when the actual scrum master is ill)

- Conduct pentests

- Do the frontend and backend (what I was hired to do)

If they'd let me, I'd help with the writing efforts as well as my writing ability is better than that of the average developer, if I have to believe my grades on any report in any degree that I did (game studies, psychology and CS).

Not OP, but had a similar experience.

The key, I've found, is figuring out the role that maximizes your strengths, and converting your current role into that (gradually) or finding a company that has a position that matches.

For example, I loved a lot of aspects of being a PM (leading the team, breaking down complicated tasks/releases, designing great UX) but am an engineer at heart. So I worked with my PM to take over responsibilities that leveraged those skills, and then I used that experience to get a new role where I'm able to do those same things to a greater degree (at a company now that combines typical tech lead + PM responsibilities into one).

How do you balance both of those roles? Do you take on a smaller portion of technical work and "manage yourself"?

>How do you do leverage these strengths?

What is your goal? I identify with the parent comment here, (the parent of that too) and feel like I've reached a point where the most obvious answer to your question (on leveraging strengths) is management.

If you can code, project manage, and communicate effectively with [non]tech people and don't mind the stress of dealing with other people's issues, then it might be up your alley.

Say if that were true (as it might be), one doesn't just go into project management. There is no company who'd hire me as that as I have no prior experience in it.

No but if you have a job right. Ow you can take in PM responsibilities on top of your current work. After 6–12 months you have PM experience you can parlay into a PM job.

>I have no prior experience in it

Well based on the comment I replied to, you communicated that you did! Don't sell yourself short. Talk to your manager; is there opportunity at your current org to do the kind of work you are looking for? If not, look elsewhere; the challenge is communicating that you have the relevant experience (ideally with something to show at your current role (hence my previous comment)).

When I was first starting out, one of my goals was to manage a team. I thought no one would hire me for that role since I didn't have the background for it.

Instead I started freelancing, got a few clients, and eventually hired others to help me.

Looking back, when I impressed clients with my work I was regularly offered various forms of management responsibilities. I probably could have found other opportunities like that if I had pursued it.

If you demonstrate good results in one of the main skills required for a job and explain how you would build up the others, you might be surprised at who would hire you.

People who can do well in several areas and effectively manage projects or other people are always in short supply.

One of my favorite colleagues is just an average developer, but he’s also very funny. He has figured out his niche and excels at it. To leverage strengths, it’s often helpful to understand the team.

How is him being funny helpful for career advancement ?

Soft skills. Having everyone around you like you is more important than being a good programer.

People like working with others with whom they like. Being a smart-asshole, by contrast, is a difficult way to get ahead.

Being funny is one way to be like able

an aside, being funny in this context is where everyone gets a benefit of being happier. some types of humor is denigrating to a particular group or person and that's generally not going to take you very far in a lot of fields.

There is a fine line between being offensive and being funny. I think the funniest people go very close to that line, but maybe that's just the type of humour I appreciate. I tone my homour down a lot at work compared to when I am with good friends as there are a lot more consequences to going over the line.

Being consistent, personable, and kind has helped me advance more in my career than any one specific technical skill. Funny people are generally endearing, and it is usually easier and more productive to work with folks you get along with than ones you don't.

My very first service desk job interview began with:

Interviewer decidedly nervous, shaking even!

Me Pours glass of water for them, and for me, take sip.

Interviewer Takes a sip, notably calms down

Rest of the interview was: Interviewer:"Do you know XYZ software we have to use?"

Me:"No."

Got the job.

"Well-well look. I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?"

Oh man! Haven't heard that one in a while. Need to rewatch it and write a TPS report.

Sounds like you might want to try out being a product manager. I'm a sub par engineer, but I think my diverse skills worked out pretty well for a PM job.

Join a smaller company.

Join companies with problems worth solving, add value as quickly as possible, and then find problems that you can tackle and start advocating to be granted the latitude to tackle them.

Most companies and teams are thrilled to have people who proactively seek to solve thorny issues. The difference with me is that most programmers are attracted to solving “problems” in a code base, which might add value but have arguable ROI. I’m rarely the person who advocates for a rewrite or tries to push some hot new technology. I’m almost always the engineer who asks the question “how can we apply what we’ve already written to this new sector” or “how do we change up this experience to cut onboarding time in half” etc.

Better take, to add in to this:

My unique (well one of) internalized properties I have is having a keen eye for good problem to technology fit. Steve Jobs said it best with

“start with the experience and work backwards toward the technology”

In another words, it’s extremely valuable to be able to understand when you can re use an existing tool (in this case, existing code) to achieve the result, which is different from trying to shoehorn your existing code to fix/improve/add a feature to an existing problem space or product domain.

That’s the real key, to me, in a nutshell

(And why I almost never buy in on complete re writes)

My other knowledge is in biology, but bioinformatics seems to pay less than normal software engineering.

Being an excellent communicator is a great virtue to have and something I come to value more and more in co-workers. Once upon a time in my career it was standard for devs to wander off into the woods to painstakingly craft a wonder over 3-4 months, now collaborative working is the thing and it's far more productive. Those people who have the right balance of not being constantly dependent on others but knowing when they need to tap someone in and, specifically, knowing how to get someone up to speed quickly for that tap in - those people shine brightly.

Being a good communicator is probably what I'd ask new devs to focus on the most - it's going to pay out a lot more than an encyclopedic knowledge of algorithms or creative problem solving and it's the only skill that everyone on the team greatly benefits from.

>Once upon a time in my career it was standard for devs to wander off into the woods to painstakingly craft a wonder over 3-4 months

Care to elaborate on that more? Curious to hear what kind of work streams you were a part of, and how they differ from the more 'collaborative' norm of today.

For a while I was employed at a shop that was a sort of unified platform and on that platform we would support a number of tools - these tools were usually developed by contractors that would get a complex set of business rules and build a solution to fit - then we FTEs would take care of the plumbing and platform tech debt... Unlike how a lot of places like that might look with outsourcing our contractor pool was pretty steady so while they didn't technically continuously work for the company they were essentially co-workers.

It was an interesting place to be but suffered greatly from a lack of permanence in the roster - for a few years tings were great - then some of our regulars moved on and were replaced with more flaky people. I assume it was just the specific mix of folks that made that setup sustainable while it was.

I agree. And over time I have realised that a good team player is far more valuable than an algorithmic wizard who is a prima donna.

The problem is no one interviews for that.

I think that fresh out of uni people feel like being a prima donna algorithmic wizard is the expectation so they play towards that sterotype. When you're looking at hiring more senior people they have usually accumulated the confidence to highlight how dev teams they've been a part of have worked together to overcome issues together without telling a personal glory story - those folks are worth their weight in gold.

Honestly, if someone walks into an interview talking about how they did something awesome to support a co-worker while they were struggling that's about the best anecdote I could hope to hear.

I suspect that also goes for products as well.

An iPod

A phone

An internet communicator

nice. I understood that reference.

> My understanding of human behavior was expanded by my psychology courses.

Lee Iacocca [0] in his autobiography states that his minor in Psychology in college was the part of his education that was most useful to him as he worked his way up the chain at Ford.

I highly recommend his autobiography as well.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Iacocca

I go to a liberal arts college studying CS too. I don’t know if I can accurately attribute what I learned in college to anything but I have broadened my scope a lot.

How do you suggest to make good use of this situation/setup?

I, too, have had a pretty successful and rewarding career in software with a liberal arts degree -- but I'm also 50, so when I entered the workforce in the early 1990s, lots of (at least American) university programs were still super behind what was actually in use in the commercial world.

Many of my coworkers over the years had only 2-year degrees, or in a couple of exceptional cases no degree at all. People my age mostly learned to program on our own, as teenagers, starting with BASIC and then going deeper, so by the time we were in a position to take CS 101 or whatever we balked, because spending time listening to a professor tell you about writing a bubble sort in FORTRAN just isn't interesting or applicable when your hobby project is writing your own text editor or whatever.

So yeah, lots of people my age have liberal arts degrees -- political science, English, foreign languages, history, whatever. The secret advantage of that background is that we can usually write and communicate WAY better than the CS grads, which turns out to be immensely useful.

The tl;dr is really "understanding how software gets built AND being able to describe it to both technical and nontechnical people opens up lucrative career paths."

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