Craftsman vs Entrepreneur - Invest in the Right Path for You (From L8 SWE at Microsoft)
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- Опубликовано: 2 июл 2024
- Are you a craftsman or an entrepreneur? Do you ever feel you are at a place that doesn't reward you for doing what you're good at? In this video, I will talk about the different archetypes of an engineer's core motivations, and how understanding these concepts can be tremendously helpful to our career.
Blog post: / craftsman-vs-entrepren...
0:00 Intro
0:21 The two archetypes
1:51 Why can't you be both
4:07 Understand your motivations
5:36 Understand your organization
7:28 Motivations vs skills
8:28 Outro
Your channel is very underrated. You deserve thousands more subscribers and likes. I'm not in your field of work, but I can apply your content to my career. Thank you, Kun!
Appreciate the kind words! Hopefully RUclips algorithm agrees with you soon! :D
Kun, thank you. im not certain why your video was suggested to me, as i am not in an engineering or software field at all.. but the nuggets of wisdom behind the occupational field was much appreciated. we tend to be 'all or nothing' in our career paths... thinking about the differences between the craftsman and the entrepreneur is right up my alley. i own and operate a mechanical repair center with a few employees. my goal has always been to just be an owner... maybe there is a middle ground, where i can focus on ownership but be ready to jump in and wrench if necessary too... thank you.
Thanks Paul! I'm so pleasantly surprised that what I'm talking about in this video can actually apply in a different field! :) And agree with your takeaway - I think having some craftsman skills helps a person become a better entrepreneur, and vice versa.
Great content !!!
Well articulated video Kun! So many issues or differences of opinions can be resolved if engineering cultures recognize this spectrum and communicated that both polarities can have substantial measureable
impact. I know you said craftsmenship can be hard to measure, but at computer science’s core is algorithms. So when companies need to scale, craftsmen who are well-versed in the various forms of algorithms, the impact could be measurable, if the company cares enough to do so.
Well said. Totally - I also wish tech companies learn about how to measure the value of craftsmanship more effectively.
Great video, Kun! I very much feel like a bit of a craftsman in an entrepreneurial organization! Truthfully, I didn't know that there were teams that placed such a value on craftsmen, and that the only option was to be more of a bottom line type of guy.
Thanks Jordan! They are becoming more rare indeed! Back when software was shipped on a CD and bugs can't be easily hot-fixed, the world had a lot more craftsman engineers. :) Now the world has evolved and I think the engineering culture everywhere is adapting to the changes.
Many companies are still figuring out how to strike the right balance and it's very much work in progress. I think the key is that someone needs to figure out a generally applicable playbook for how organizations can measure the long term value of craftsmanship so that it can be properly prioritized against making immediate progress.
Currently, I would say teams with well-established products generally value craftsmanship more, but on the other hand their projects may sound less "sexy" compared to shiny new ideas. It can be a tough choice!
@@kunchenxyz completely understood! I hate to say it, but I'm starting to find myself becoming more and more interested in getting into financial software engineering at something like a high frequency trading firm - the reason for this being that engineering excellence is quite literally their entire business. Obviously there's math to it too, but that's mainly left to the quants, whereas the main job of the software engineer is really just to worry about performance.
I’m definitely a craftsman but my team is looking for impact, fast iteration and product direction.
It’s a challenge to balance fast features and good practices but I’ve begun to see the benefits of the other side - the entrepreneur
Striking the balance can be hard indeed! In an entrepreneurial organization, you would need to keep a sharp eye on opportunities for craftsman to make impact - efficiency gains that saved the company money; fixing recurring customer complaints in a systematic way; building a tool/framework that allows everyone else to move faster - if you can find a way to measure the outcome of your craftsmanship, you'll increase the chance of getting your work recognized and valued.
Love your videos
I'm so glad!
Kun, the difference seems to me to be about the different types of impact people want to have. A craftsman cares about engineering excellence impact, and the entrepreneur cares about the holistic product impact, right? And there would be both type of each in any person.
But when I categorize features in my team's backlog, each of them again seems to be a combination of both types of impacts.
So this has become complex: how do I ensure I am making the right choices, both at an individual feature level, and at a longer time duration level over multiple features, that I am always making the right choices for myself? Would you suggest I measure all of this in calculation explicitly? Or should I rely on my intuition and memory on this thing? Thank you.
That is a great question.
The exact same project can be done differently by a craftsman vs an entrepreneur. A craftsman might build it with great engineering excellence, while an entrepreneur might first build it as a minimal viable product. The outcome and impact is different when put in different people’s hands.
To me, it’s less about categorizing the projects or features but more about identifying what your organization recognizes and values. If you spent a lot of time on engineering excellence but your organization doesn’t value it, and instead punish you for not having enough direct business impact, it will affect your career.
That’s why I recommended that you first identify what your core motivations are, and then evaluate whether it fits well with your organization’s culture. This should be able to give you better clarity than doing exact math categorizing each project in the backlog.
Hi Kun, I have a question about how to build a supportive or positive colleague network. One of my coworker seemed to distance me due to some misunderstanding - I was sick for a while and took a few months leave, but he thought I’m a coworker who slacks off. Anyways, my relationship with this coworker was pretty friendly, and I would like to collaborate on a project with him if no hostage going.
I hope to ask for any advice if it’s a good idea to directly clarify with my coworker about my sick leave, or generally, how much effort shall we put in maintaining good communications with coworkers? Thank you and really enjoy this video, as usual :)
It sounds like you two fell into a low trust situation. Have you seen my previous video about "building trust" by any chance? ruclips.net/video/tTOEhTluGeE/видео.html
It doesn't hurt to explain your sick leave, but more importantly you need to intentionally create positive interactions to increase the trust battery between you two so that you can get back to a healthy collaborative relationship.
@@kunchenxyz thank you so much Kun! Immensely helpful. Really awesome guides.
@@kunchenxyz hi Kun, I followed your advice and talked with my coworker. I was so surprised that he was sympathetic and we cleared the misunderstanding. I am so grateful for your confirmation- you made my week. 🌟
Wow I'm so glad to hear this! It's great that you got it resolved so quickly!
@@kunchenxyz Hi Kun, I hope you are doing well! I am so appreciative of you helping me along my growth. I have a quick concern that I wanted to check with you.
I am an level 3, joining work less than a year. After a couple smaller tasks and project, I am given a much bigger project, which is a new service that I need to design, pitch, implement, test, deploy, use logging for follow-up analytics. I checked with my friends, and my assigned project sound more like a staff or at least senior project. I’m confused, because I don’t know why I skip the general ICT3 expected performance, and directly receive a way more difficult project to work on. I expect myself to struggle and need help, but more importantly, from your previous video, I shall ask for a promotion to ICT4 first before expecting a bigger challenge like this one. Is this a good thing for me? Can you help me a bit on understanding what key metrics I need to pay attention to, if I want to excel at this project? In the meantime, this might be a good video material, because I believe so many other engineers can get help from you too.
Much appreciation on a Thursday afternoon 🌟.
Hi, Awesome content and really helpful!! I am 37 yo and I thinking to change career and switch to software engineering. I did computer science degree but never worked as SWE. After graduation, I worked for my dad company. I know it is maybe late for me but I am thinking either start a tech startup (I have an idea that I think might work and really promising) or land a job at big tech. My motivations are: build something and financial. I have never worked in tech and I am lost and don't know what to do? Is it worth to work for big tech or try my new adventure? Is it really mandatory to work in big tech to be able to build a good tech startup, learning good habits and good engineering skills? From your experience, is it better to learn coding and best practices on building staff or by following course? What I mean, is it better to learn coding by building my idea or is it better to do a bootcamp, land a job and then build my idea? Thanks for your help :)
It's never too late to learn to code! A few thoughts I can share -
1. You don't have to work for a big tech company to learn how to build software. In fact, big tech companies are not the best place to start learning about engineering because they generally expect that you are already fluent with basic engineering skills and will put pressure on you to deliver results which can be stressful for someone who's still learning.
2. Building a startup is also not the best way to learn software engineering. When you are just getting started, what you need is to build small pieces of software that matches your increasing skill level. Jumping directly into building an end-to-end product can be overwhelming and slow down your learning. You want to find out the kind of side project that's just right for your skill level, finish them quickly and gradually move onto something more and more challenging.
3. Don't under-estimate the difficulty of building a startup, and don't over-estimate how "promising" an idea is. :) Generally, I recommend against saying an idea is promising before you've got at least a hundred paying customers. There is a book called "The Cold Start Problem" that you might find interesting - it will give you a rough idea how difficult it is to bootstrap a new startup business. If you want to succeed with a startup as a technical founder - especially solo founder - typically you want to first gain enough engineering experience such that you can prototype minimal viable products extremely quickly, because you will likely need to experiment hundreds of ideas or iterations in order to succeed, and if each iteration takes you a few months you're simply going to run out of time.
@@kunchenxyz thanks a lot for your answer! I will start small and then see what happen! Thanks for your content and waiting for more videos ☺️
Am I watching a robot sociopath or a real human?
What’s your answer? :D