Issue #12 - Level Up As A Software Engineer By Thinking In Business Terms.

It's not just the technology, it's how the technology solves business problems.

Most software engineers don’t know how to think in business terms.

Learn how and you become 100x more valuable.

Here’s some simple ways to start:

❌ Don’t just learn about the technology stack at your organisation.

✅ Learn about the business and the market and industry you operate in.

❌ Don’t talk technical terms to non-technical people.

✅ Learn to simplify technical terms and communicate in business terms.

❌ Don’t just build the solution you’re being asked for.

✅ Ask questions to discover what the business problem to be solved is.

❌ Don’t just think about your work in your team.

✅ Think about the impact your work has on the business and the customer.

❌ Don’t do work just because it was asked for.

✅ Find out what the highest priority work is and do that.

❌ Don’t refuse to give estimates.

✅ Present a range of possibilities and the tradeoffs and risks to hitting them.

❌ Don’t assume deadlines are fixed.

✅ Negotiate deadlines against budgets, risk and priorities.

❌ Don’t let missing a deadline be a surprise.

✅ Communicate that it’s going to happen as soon as you know and offer options.

Want to Level Up Your Coding Skills?

I believe the best way to do this is to build real-world applications. For that reason I write a weekly newsletter sharing Coding Challenges.

The coding challenges are all designed to walk you through the process of creating an application and to be less than 8 hours work.

Each challenge has you focus on building real-world software rather than toy applications or algorithms and data structures.

You can tackle the challenges in the programming language of your choice. You can even tackle them in several different languages if you prefer.

You can see the challenges and subscribe on the Coding Challenges SubStack.