Career Growth

For a longer stretch of my career than I’m entirely comfortable admitting, I operated with a mental model that went something like: figure out what the right thing to do is, check that someone above me agrees, then do it. I told myself this was being collaborative, building alignment, making sure I wasn’t moving unilaterally in ways that created problems downstream. And those things are real — they matter. But if I’m being honest, a meaningful part of it was also something else: I was using the approval process as a shield. If I had someone’s sign-off, then if the thing went wrong, the fault was distributed. It wasn’t just on me. ...

Early in my career, the way I learned was blunt and physical, almost. I’d build something, watch how it behaved, and pull apart whatever didn’t work. The feedback was immediate and the corrections were mine to make — which ideas connected, which broke things, which caused my senior engineers to raise an eyebrow in the particular way that meant I’d missed something worth understanding. There wasn’t much strategy to it, but there didn’t need to be. The feedback loop was tight, and I learned an enormous amount in a short time. ...