Ask HN: Improving Strengths or Improving weakness? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Improving Strengths or Improving weakness?

4 pointstechnology3 comments

There is alot of debate about if one should focus on improving strengths or improving weakness.

Such as this article by Jim Taylor, Ph.D., who is a clinical associate professor at the University of Denver.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-power-prime/201201/personal-growth-know-thyself-is-the-first-step-life-change

Most people love to talk about their strengths, but don't like to admit that they have weaknesses. I disagree with Marcus Buckingham, the co-author of Now, Discover Your Strengths, who asserts that the way to achieve goals is to focus on your strengths. This approach may work for some parts of your life, for example, a job that involves one or two highly specialized skill sets, such as an accountant or a computer programmer. But most aspects of life require a constellation of competencies, so the "focus on your strengths" model will actually limit your ability to make substantial changes in your life.

Think of your strengths and weaknesses for getting promoted in a new job in, say, banking, as a mathematical equation. On a scale of one to ten, where 1 is very poor and 10 is the best, if you have very good financial analysis skills (8), but you are quite poor at relationship building (2), then your over-all performance would be moderate (8+2=10 out of a possible 20). If you focused on and improve your analytical capabilities (say, from 8 to 9), you wouldn't improve that much over all because you were already capable in that area of your work (9+2=11). But if you improve your relationship skills (say, from 2 to 6), then your over-all performance would rise significantly (8+6=14). Of course, you want to continue to build your strengths, but the more you improve your weaknesses, the better you'll be able to make the changes you want.

Then there was this post by Marc Andreessen where he talked about career planning, he said to focus on continuously developing and broadening your base of skills. He cites 5 skills as examples: communication, management, sales, finance and international.

http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-career-planning-part-2-sk

Anybody have thoughts on talents, strengths, building skills and how one should go about it ?

This sounds like a real black-and-white question to describe a very nuanced problem. One shortcoming is that if you use that 1-10 scale to describe your skills in a given area, 1 or 10 are not the building blocks to the most ideal outcomes in all life situations. You may want a certain skill to be a 5 to achieve an optimal outcome.

Take your ability to let your inhibitions go and be the life of the party. If you're a 1, people think you can't hang or be trusted with things, and if you're a 10, it's hard for them to take you seriously (or they feel threatened or upstaged by you).

I'd say someone with a 3 in Java programming and a 8 in networking skills will more often than not financially outperform someone with the scores reversed, even with the job title "Java programmer".

Since we can't always know "a 7 in that skill would've made them offer me a job", nor if that's a one-time disappointment or going to be a recurring one, figuring out where to try to strengthen my skills is more an art than a skill, though I'd like to reach a 10 in that someday.

Having done this myself (and mentored a few others), try developing product management skills - it'll force you to grow your business savvy, it'll force you to work with engineers not only on technical stuff but also on management and schedules. You'll eventually work with sales folks, support engineers, and eventually, customers too. And you'll learn to communicate with all these groups. Good luck.

I think that ultimately it is a personal decision, and depends primarily on what sort of work you'd like to do.

If you were, hypothetically, a database engineer, and wanted to be the very best database engineer, then you would probably focus on your strengths. By shoring up what you already know, you can become the Michael Jordan of database engineers and command a premium.

The strengths are fairly obvious, in that you are building from a knowledge set you already have, and it might be easier to acquire more of that knowledge in a shorter time.

The cons are that you are at the vulnerability of the strength of the platform. If you were, for example, the best COBOL programmer in the world, the market opportunities are probably pretty slim at the moment (just guessing), but due to that rarity, you might be able to command more until the platform becomes completely extinct.

If you'd prefer to mitigate those cons, or if you prefer being the jack of all trades, then you may be inclined to work on your weaknesses, and start shoring up areas of knowledge somewhat tangential to your core. If you are currently a database engineer, this might mean learning a scripting language to automate tasks, or picking up on enterprise storage technologies to better understand the underlying platforms, etc.

Strengths to this are that you become more well-rounded, but at the expense of being the more thorough specialist.

Jobs may be easier to come by, but may not pay as well due to lack of specialty. In small companies, or more flexible roles, you may have the opportunity to shine more as you can touch on areas outside of your pigeonhole.

Anyway, just my thoughts, and all speak more to a core discipline than broadening skills into marketing, sales, etc., but probably apply to varying degrees.

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