High levels of clarity of mission and competence will be met with high rewards. But there’s a flip side to that equation. If you are unable to grasp your mission or if you demonstrate low competence despite our best efforts to train you, we’ll park you on unimportant tasks and micro-manage you in the best case and fire you in the worst case (I said this is a no B.S. guide). (View Highlight)
Your mission is to help our company increase revenues and reduce costs. That’s it. Every position in our company (and every for-profit company) has the same mission. Your value to our company rests on your ability to deliver on your mission. And we are judging you on that basis. So you need demonstrate that you understand your mission and start delivering on that mission as quickly as you can.
The best way you can help us increase revenues and reduce costs is by working on the most important thing at all times. I can’t overstate the importance of this point. (View Highlight)
This is a major problem for you as a new employee because:
you have no way of knowing the amount of “return” (revenue or cost reduction) any given task could be expected to provide
you can only guess at the “effort” required to complete any given task because you don’t know how we do things yet
So, it’s basically impossible for you to create much value on your own until you can make reasonable assessments of “return” and “effort.” And you won’t get much autonomy until you prove to us that you can make these assessments reasonably well. (View Highlight)
your most important decision is the first decision (what to work on). If you get that one really wrong nothing you do after that will help you create substantial value. You could write the world’s best software but if you solve the wrong problem, it’s worthless to us.
it’s not enough to find something of value to work on. You are looking for the thing that has the most value.
the most important decisions in your job are rarely 100% technical. Our product owner is an MBA. And he can’t tell the difference between an SQL query and a file full of jQuery but he’s really good at this stuff. His deep domain knowledge, ability to ask us (his programmers) smart questions, and his strong grasp of how value is created (“return” divided by “effort”) are all he needs to make great decisions. Unfortunately for you, this is also a lot harder to learn than the typical things new programming hires ask about such as the mechanics of how we create pull requests or how we name things.
it’s a mistake to assume you know the best way to make all these decisions as a new hire. But it’s not against the rules to ask a co-worker for help. Hint! (View Highlight)