TTT 35: Align With Software Engineers 💻

Turn Your Problems Into Purpose 🤓

I made this Pizza Hut Thin N Crispy inspired Cracker Crust pizza. I went heavy on the sauce and cheese so it looks a bit flooded 🙂

Hi TTTTeam,

மாலை வணக்கம் (maalai vaNakkam), Buenas Noches, and Good Evening from New York City.

I’ll be sharing a thing I did, a tweet I loved, and a thought I had.

A Thing 🎶

In case you missed it - last week, I shared the first exercise working with Idahosa Ness, the creator of the Mimic Method, to improve my accent in both Spanish and Tamil.

The second exercise we did was “Practice: Improve the Accuracy of your Echoic Memory”. 

The skill of mimicry has 3 steps to it - capture, store, and reproduce. In the first exercise, since the audio loop was continuous, we didn’t challenge the “store” step of mimicry.

For this second exercise, the audio is muted every other repetition. During the silence, you continue echoing the sound in your mind (and softly with your lips) as if you were listening to the continuous audio from earlier. 

When the audio resumes, your echo will either be perfectly in sync, or not. Most likely it will not be in sync, because you were either too fast or too slow. The “surprise” emotion will trigger you to pay more attention and calibrate.

Since Tamil was not an audio option on the Mimic Method website, I used Looper, the mute button on my keyboard (to simulate the muted repetition of the audio), and this Hello Kekutho episode to get the reps in. You can see me demonstrating this live at end of this IG reel below.

janahan888

A post shared by ஜனகன் சிவராமன் (@janahan888)

The feeling you get internally when you’re synced with the audio is magical. Like you’ve become part of a club you never thought you'd get into. During the course of conversation, repeating the words someone else has said is a bigger part than you may realize.

It’s analogous to the concept of “playback” in a corporate setting. It removes the doubt in the counterparty that their words were understood ambiguously. And trust is the name of the game in conversation.

A Tweet 🐦

Adi Verma @adityatheverma

How to never run out of ideas to write about: Make a long list of your reader’s: • Pains • Fears • Frustrations Then share ideas to solve them. People never tire of reading about their problems.

Writing helps me turn my pains, fears, and frustrations into purpose.

I write about speaking Tamil because I never thought I’d be able to.
I write about getting promoted because I never thought I’d get past senior engineer.
I write about cooking because it puts me in control of exactly the experiences I want to create again.

I share what has worked for me.

I underestimate how many people share these same pains, fears, and frustrations.

People never tire of reading their own problems because those problems keep them up at night.

A Thought 💭

I never want to be blind to reality.

I spoke with 3 customers of my video course, “How To Get Promoted Beyond Senior Engineer” this week. I sent a free bonus offer to meet 1-on-1 with me to discuss their unique pain points. And I am so glad I did!

One customer is an ML research scientist at a Big Tech firm. I was surprised they even bought the product. But their goal with the product was to figure out how to better work with the software engineering teams who scale their models.

Here’s what they told me:

• They could now understand how software engineers think at an operations level. 

• They could adapt many of the templates to be more organized and drive projects harder

And given their unique situation - they asked this question, “How can I get natural alignment with the software engineering teams from the outside?”

This question caught me flat footed. I’d never considered how I’d done this before. But after a pause, I told them that whatever they ask of another team - it must tie up into:

1. Revenue - there’s no money like new money

2. Customer Experience - because word-of-mouth marketing is top-tier

3. Reputation

   1. Internally (to other teams) -  Given the foundational nature of their work, 2nd and 3rd order internal reputation tie ups are likely the best strategy for achieving that alignment on a less than 6 month timeline - a shmedium bet.

   2. externally (to the customer)

Before I started the HIPAA compliant cloud project at my job, it used to take 6 months to deploy a new healthcare app. I had pitched the cloud to my VP as a way to reduce that down to 1 week. So now the VP could transitively boost his reputation by boasting that his division can deliver the fastest.

This is an example of reputation - internal.

Because my VP was so proud of the speed to deliver, he suggested that another application team use the HIPAA compliant cloud for their new apps to capture COVID symptoms for employees. They were able to go from idea to full deployment in 10 days.

I knew that revenue and customer experience wins would materialize years down the road. However, that would not be an effective way to ensure the platform could survive the inevitable strategic 180 that comes with every change of upper management.

At a high level, strategy has a much longer timeline than we realize. We overestimate what we can accomplish in a year and underestimate what we can get done in ten years . The way to get to quantitative outcomes - like revenue and customer experience, usually goes through reputation wins along the way. 

As these reputation wins snowball, they afford you the “benefit of the doubt” to take on bigger opportunities.

Especially for technical folks, it can be easy to overlook the human aspect of our work. But to overlook it is to be blind to reality.

I never want to be blind to reality.

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I'd love to hear any feelings you felt while reading this and until next time - be easy. 

With Love,
Janahan