If you've had a performance review recently, your manager probably wrote down with you your strengths, areas that they tend to be impressed by you or where you clearly excel, well, you lead the team in these particular areas, maybe.
And then areas for growth.
This is the politically correct way of saying things that you're not really good at.
Or maybe a better way to put it is things that you are less good at.
And so often we look at that and we convert it immediately to a to -do list, We imagine that this list is the areas that we should improve in order to become a good developer, right, or in order to improve our technical capabilities.
Now, understand that you need to be working with your boss on this.
Don't talk to just me about it, but it's probably misguided to look at this list and immediately convert it into a list of things to improve on.
These are growth areas that have been identified and it's very possible that your manager has done this on purpose and they've already done the filtering that we're gonna talk about here in a moment, but it's also possible that they haven't.
That they're looking at the full list of capacities, they're looking at the full list of skills, the skill matrix, capability matrix, whatever you wanna call that, right?
They're looking at your job description maybe and they see these three areas that you haven't demonstrated any kind of expertise in.
So maybe, for example, on the job description, you see a handful of programming languages, but you may also see some kind of integration tooling or whatever the list is.
And so you may have this list of areas that you would, you know, if you were to score yourself on your strengths, they might be eights and nines, and these areas might be twos, threes, fours.
They may even be a one or a zero.
These are areas that in theory, you could put some effort into.
In theory, you can bring those twos and threes up to five, sixes.
Maybe if you really put in some effort, you could get them up to strengths.
But there's a little bit of a trick in this.
And it's one that even really good managers sometimes miss.
And it's why you as an IC, you as an engineer, and also even if you're a manager, you as manager need to be aware of this.
And that is that that list of things you could get better at your manager is going to let you work on that.
Most likely your manager is going to look at that list and say, sure, sure.
You can grow in that direction.
You could spend time learning that thing that you currently would score yourself a one on.
you could pour a bunch of effort into improving in that area.
Now, it's very possible that if I were to take another poll, another score, tell you to rate on a scale from one to 10 how much you enjoy the things that you're not very good at.
How much do you aspire personally to improve on those things?
I imagine that there is a correlation at the very least between the things that you don't really enjoy doing and the things you're not very good at?
There may be the odd thing that you consider yourself pretty good at but you've gotten tired of doing it or maybe you're burned out on it, you're not really interested in doing it anymore.
But for the most part, a lot of the things that we are not good at stem from our lack of interest in that thing.
Now, the areas that I want you to kind of circle on this list. You can probably circle it mentally.
The the one area I really want you to pay attention to is the things that you are interested in but that you're not excelling in.
And I want you to ask yourself, what exactly has kept you from excelling in those areas and try to be honest. If it is an aptitude problem, in other words, there may be some things that, no matter how hard you try for whatever reason, something just is not clicking.
I think these areas are fairly limited, by the way, but they do exist. Most of the time, the thing that is keeping you from excelling in a growth area that you do care about is probably time or opportunity.
It may be your own self -confidence, but usually it's just that nobody has told you that you could spend time doing that.
But the key insight that I want you to take away from this episode is that if you're looking at this long list of things that you could get better at as a to -do list, then you're looking at it the wrong way.
Because, for the average developer, the list of responsibilities they have most of the time they have a broad spectrum of capabilities across the list and a good manager is going to compose a team of people who have very high scores and a handful of things and then and the next person that they put on that team has a high score in maybe a overlapping area, but in other things.
In other words, we are going to put high performers on each instrument in the band.
So, if you are particularly good at backend systems, you might get paired up with somebody who is pretty good at front end.
If you are really excellent at optimizing queries you might get paired up with someone who is really good at ingestion pipelines or some kind of workflow.
There's a lot of different ways that this can come together but the important thing is, because you are responsible and we talk about this on the show all the time because you are responsible for your career your manager is not responsible for figuring out what your stack of skills should be.
They can give you some guidance and they can give you support, but ultimately you're responsible for your career Now if you rationalize this with your manager and you say, okay You know Bob Bob's the always the manager in our examples here I see Bob.
I really You know, I really believe that out of the growth areas that you've listed for me The ones that I think we should focus on are limited to these couple you know, these three or four, and I would like to figure out with you which of the other ones we can either, you know, eliminate from the list, allow somebody else to get good at that on the team, or could we compromise, could we have some kind of minimal investment in those so that I know enough to get by, but I'm not considered the expert in it.
And this is a very important insight.
And the important thing here is that you communicate that you're not trying to get out of improving, but instead you want to be strategic about what you're improving.
Now here's the secret in all of this, I guess, is that so much of what we are taught to do is balance our skills out.
Try to invest in all of the areas for growth because they're exactly that.
They're areas for growth.
But what I'd like you to challenge yourself and think about is what if instead we thought about our areas for growth as the ones that we're already excelling in, what would happen?
Instead of being an eight, we would become a 10 in that area.
Instead of being in the top 20 % in the industry, we get to the top 2 % in the industry.
Because the truth is, we're not very good at something.
We may be able to come mediocre fairly quickly at that thing.
And there are probably a handful of those areas for growth that you would need to become mediocre in because they are an expectation of the job.
But to go from mediocre to very good, there's a huge gulf between those two things.
And instead to take that same energy that you would spend trying to become in the top 50 % of that particular skill or that area, you could spend that same energy making your already strong areas extraordinarily good.
And the opportunities that this presents both for you and your company and for you going forward into the future are much more, you know unique prospects for your roles.
It's very rare that a long list of okay skills is going to outperform at least in the job market.
It's going to outperform stellar skills in a limited list. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of developer T.
I hope you enjoyed this discussion on areas of growth and how to reframe those, both to yourself and to your manager.
If you enjoy this episode, do two things for me.
One, share it with somebody that you think could benefit from it.
Your manager would be a good example of that.
If you wanna talk to them about this concept, then share this episode with them.
That is a good starting place.
They can hear kind of the concept directly from the episode.
And then if they want to discuss it with me, I'm happy to talk about the ideas in our DeveloperT Discord community.
Both of you can join and we can hash it out.
That's developert .com slash Discord. All of you can join for free for that.
And I'm gonna ask you for a third thing actually.
I know I said two, but I'm gonna ask you for a third and that third thing is to leave a review in whatever podcasting app you're using.
the most impactful place to leave a review is iTunes.
Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, enjoy your tea.
