Sharing Ideas

As engineers, we have a tendency to “over engineer” our sharing of knowledge. We often put a lot of pressure on ourselves to come up with bombshell ideas that take time and effort to cultivate, and spend a lot of energy to deliver in a meaningful way. Additionally, there can be a lot of show business in how ideas are shared, especially at larger companies that hinge on thought leadership and making big moves to stand out.

Showing and not telling

As engineers, we like to show off. Sharing large paradigm shifts, architectural overhauls, and brand new tech is great, but I think it is worthwhile to examine the approach to the ideas we share and ensure we aren't consistently giving audience only to the big stuff, especially in advanced engineering roles. I think there is a lot of value in sharing smaller, simpler ideas that can be easily overlooked. Small things that might improve efficiency in day to day work. This could be something as simple as showing how you tackle fixing a common type of bug, showing how you personally prefer a specific style of code within your own team, or even how you are effectively using AI tools. Speaking of AI, since usage of these tools is on the rise, it is perhaps more crucial than ever to spend time showing how you are using them, but I’ll save this topic for another post!

Mentorship

Engineers of all experience-levels are not only looking to learn best practices, they are looking at how to be efficient and useful to their teams. It is important to not only answer questions about difficult problems plainly when asked, but also provide the context in how you personally arrived at the solution. It's important to not make yourself appear infallible. By clearly showing how you came to learn about the topic you are focusing on, and not obscuring information, you make yourself look like a human who is also learning, not someone who is running on machine code. This is something I need to remind myself daily.

Next time you are coming up with ideas for presenting to other engineers, consider just showing how you work on a particular problem, or maybe some personal software you are using to make your process more efficient & convenient. You never know what others might find helpful, and who might gain value from how you solve problems everyday.