You don’t have to be the best at what you do. You just have to be good at fixing people’s problems.
You don’t have to be the best at what you do. You just have to be good at fixing people’s problems.
I am often too hard on myself. I see all the ways that I could be a better engineer and I’m hard on myself for not being good enough.
Being back in Chicago, though, and talking to people at Northwestern, reminded me of many key lessons. One is that nobody cares if I’m the best or not, they care that I can do the work. Nobody has asked me if I am the best engineer or if I 100% know everything. They care that I can do the work, and I’m the person who comes top of mind when it comes to fixing their problems.
Sometimes I feel imposter syndrome because I think about all the ways that I’m not 100% the best engineer. But there’s more than enough problems to solve with engineering that I don’t have to be the best, I just have to fix the problems that I’m given. Nobody has thought about or asked if I’m an expert, they just see that I fix the problem so they keep coming back to me to fix more problems.
Seeing things from that frame has made evaluating my progress much more results-oriented. Frankly nobody cares about who is the “best” engineer or not (if they could even measure it). They care that you can fix problems. I think that over time, I’m learning more and more just how important that actually is. We put all of these artificial layers of abstraction on top, but at the end of the day, your job is to solve problems, and the better that you can do that, the more that people turn to you as someone who can solve problems.
I’ve learned more and more to embrace being a “problem-solver” as opposed to an engineer. Being an engineer isn’t any good if you can’t solve anything interesting with it. Plus there’s plenty of programmers out there. I don’t want to just be seen as “just another engineer”, I want to be seen as the type of person that can solve the problems that a particular type of person might have. As I work towards my goal of eventual financial independence and freedom to do the things that I want to do with my time, I am better embracing how much clearer the end goal becomes when I think of growth not as “being a better engineer” but rather “being a better problem-solver” and “becoming better at fixing bigger and more complicated problems”.
Liken this to a restaurant. A restaurant doesn’t have to prove that it’s the “best” at a particular cuisine, because only 1 can be the best (and the task is hard to quantify anyways). There’s more than enough hungry mouths for all the restaurants. You just have to be the place that people think about when they want to eat. This necessarily entails two things: (1) you provide a good product (food, experience, convenience, price, etc.) and (2) people know about you and think about you when they’re hungry. People don’t eat at the “best” restaurant, they eat at the one that comes to mind as a good place to eat when they’re hungry at 6pm for a good plate of steak and mashed potatoes. One way to frame success at a restaurant is to reframe “I want people to come eat here” as “when people are craving Mediterranean food, I want them to think of and want to come to our restaurant”.
You don’t have to be the best at what you do. You just have to be the person that people think about when they need their specific problem solved. Focus on fixing problems. People don’t pay engineers to write code, they pay engineers to solve problems. The more that I embrace that, the easier that measuring my career-related personal growth becomes. I will never be the best programmer engineer, and measuring my growth and progression from that lens has been terrible for my own development since I always see all the things that I could’ve been doing. It’s been better for me when I reframe my own growth as “I’m getting better at solving bigger and more important problems” and this frankly is the frame that most people care to evaluate you anyways. They don’t care how good your code is. They care if you can fix the problem that they have. The better that you can fix problems, the more that people reward you for it.