Contrary to the belief that people regret working too much, some highly driven individuals find their greatest fulfillment in professional accomplishment. For them, the biggest regret is not building more and achieving their goals, which serves as a powerful motivator to work even harder.
For well-funded founders, the downsides of PR can outweigh the benefits. Constant negative media attention is distracting for the team. Staying in deep stealth mode minimizes copycat competitors and keeps employees focused on innovation instead of public perception and damage control.
According to an ex-employee, Google had an unwritten policy to retain intelligent but underperforming staff. The rationale was that they might become productive again, but more importantly, it prevented competitors from acquiring top talent, effectively treating talent as a scarce resource to be stockpiled.
To bypass subjective debates and gain influence, junior engineers can build prototypes for all competing technical approaches. By presenting concrete, comparative evidence after hours, they demonstrate immense value and can quickly establish themselves as technical authorities, accelerating their path to leadership.
To quickly gain a broad, foundational understanding of an adjacent field, read their interview prep books. An engineer reading a PM interview book will get a superficial but wide-ranging grasp of product thinking. This builds empathy and enables more productive conversations with cross-functional partners.
Strong engineering teams are built by interviews that test a candidate's ability to reason about trade-offs and assimilate new information quickly. Interviews focused on recalling past experiences or mindsets that can be passed with enough practice do not effectively filter for high mental acuity and problem-solving skills.
A superior prioritization framework calculates your marginal contribution: (Importance * [Success Probability with you - Success Probability without you]) / Time. This means working on a lower-priority project where you can be a hero is often more valuable than being a cog in a well-staffed, top-priority machine.
Traditional big tech ladders often promote based on scope and cross-team influence, encouraging politics. A better system focuses on skill gradients like "truth-seeking." It rewards being right about foundational decisions, not just being loud or well-positioned, which fosters a healthier engineering culture.
The relationship between work and career growth isn't just linear; it's super-linear due to compounding. Managers give the most valuable work to those who prove they can handle an extreme workload, creating a powerful feedback loop for rapid advancement, making it crucial to cultivate a high tolerance for pain early on.