Subject: Upgrade yourself from the world of coding


Upgrade yourself from the world of coding

How does one build a successful technical career?

SUBROTO BAGCHI gives you the nine key factors.


THE other day, I met a bright young engineer in MindTree and asked
him what his ambition was. He was very clear. "I want to be an
architect". My next question to him was, what does he read? He looked
surprised and then replied that he does not read much outside what
appears on a computer screen. My next question to him was whom all
does he admire in MindTree among the three best architects? He named
the predictable three. Then I told him what the fundamental gap was
between him and the best three. It was about the ability to make
intelligent conversation about any subject under the sun - a
capability borne out of serious reading habits.

The next thing I asked him to do was to poll these three on what were
the six books they had read last. The result was amazing. The three
named eighteen books in all - of which at least six were common.
Ninety percent of the books had nothing to do with information
technology. The exercise proves a key point - to be a great nerd, one
has to have interests outside writing code. However, many engineers
think that the path to a great technical career is about technical
skills alone.

Long back, Bell Labs conducted an interesting study - closely
watching the common characteristics among a group of technical
professionals who rose to the top. The exercise revealed nine key
factors outside just technical competence that differentiated
brilliant technical folks from the masses. The study was conducted by
Robert Kelly of Carnegie Mellon and Janet Caplan of Williams College.
As I see the Indian industry today, I think the study done at Bell
Labs remains relevant in every detail.

The Bell Labs engineers who did extremely well for themselves - as
they progressed in their career, showed the following qualities that
differentiated them from their peers: taking initiative, cognitive
ability, networking, leadership, teamwork, followership, perspective,
organisation savvy and show-and-tell capability. Let us look at each
of these and see what lies underneath.

Taking initiative

This is about accepting responsibility above and beyond your stated
job. It is about volunteering for additional activities and promoting
new ideas. None of these will jump out as apparent as a young
engineer gets in to her first job. She will tend to think that her
career progress is really dependent only on the ability to write
code. The concept of initiative begins by looking for technical and
other opportunities in the organisation and volunteering for them.
The idea of volunteering is little understood - both by organisations
and individuals. In the days to come, it will gain increasing
prominence in our professional lives.

Initiative is also about two other things - dealing constructively
with criticism and planning for the future. The latter is a function
of many things - a good starting point is to start mapping the
environment, learning to understand how the future is unfolding and
then stepping back to ask, how am I preparing myself?
 
Cognitive abilities

The concept of cognitive development is about understanding the
interplay of technology and trends in how they are getting deployed.
It is also about recognising the business eco-system in which
technology works. It is about situational understanding and
consequence thinking. The importance of consequence thinking is very
critical. It asks us to look beyond the immediate deliverable of a
task and it is about asking who will be impacted by my work, what is
the end state? People in our industry just think in terms of modules
and seldom ask where is it going, who is my customer and more
importantly - who is my customer's customer? Cognition is a key
faculty that determines how much we are able to read patterns, make
sense of things. Refining cognitive skills helps us to go beyond
stated needs of our customers to explore unstated needs.

Networking

We tend to think of networking in a social sense. As one grows higher
in life, we are often as powerful as is our network. Building a
professional network requires us to step out of the comfort zone to
look at whom can I learn from. Quite often, and more as one
progresses in life, the learning has to come from unusual sources. At
MindTree, we expose our people to social workers, architects, graphic
designers, teachers, people who lead government organisations,
leaders from client organisations. The interesting thing about
benefiting from a network is that it works like a savings bank. I
need to deposit in to it before I withdraw. We all have heard about
how important internal and external knowledge communities are. Again,
in MindTree, we encourage people to belong to 26 different knowledge
communities that run on a non-project based agenda and are vehicles
of learning. These create networking opportunities and open many
doors.

Leadership

Next to networking is development of leadership skills. Many
technical people associate it with "management" and shy away from
developing key leadership skills like communication, negotiation,
influencing, inter-personal skills, business knowledge, building
spokespersonship and so on. Take for instance negotiating as a skill.
Imagine that you are an individual professional contributor. Why
should you learn to negotiate? Tomorrow, your organisation becomes
member of a standard body and you have to represent the organisation
as a technical expert. You will find yourself needing to negotiate
with powerful lobbies that represent a competing viewpoint or a rival
standard. Unless you have honed your capability alongside your
hacking skills, you will be at a complete loss. Yet, you do not
discover your negotiating capability one fine morning. You need to
work on it from an early stage. Negotiating for internal resources is
becoming another critical need. You can choose to remain an
individual professional contributor but from time to time, you have
to create mind share in the organisation where resources are limited
and claimants are many. Establishing thought leadership is another
key requirement of growth and independent of whether I want to be a
technical person or grow to be a manager, I need to develop as a
leader who can influence others.

Teamwork

Our educational system does not teach us teamwork. If you ever tried
to solve your test paper "collaboratively" - it was called copying.
You and I spent all our school and college life fiercely competing to
get the engineering school and seat of our choice. Then comes the
workplace and you suddenly realise that it is not individual
brilliance but collective competence that determines excellence.
Collaboration is the most important part of our work life. Along with
collaboration come issues of forming, norming, storming, performing
stages of team life. Capability to create interdependencies,
capability to encourage dialogue and dissension, knowledge sharing
become critical to professional existence. All this is anti-thesis of
what we learn in the formative years of life. Add to it, our social
upbringing - our resource-starved system tells us to find ways and
means to ensure self-preservation ahead of teamwork. In Japan, the
country comes first, the company (read team) comes next and I come
last. In India, it is the other way round.

Followership

The best leaders are also great followers. We can be great leaders if
we learn and imbibe the values of followership. Everywhere you go -
there are courses that teach leadership.

Nowhere you will find a business school teaching you followership.
Yet, when solving complex problems in life, we have to embrace what
is called "situational leadership". I have to be comfortable being
led by others, I must learn to trust leadership. Many people have
issues reporting to a test lead as a developer, or being led by a
business analyst or a user interface designer. In different parts of
a project life cycle, people of varied competence must lead. I must
be comfortable when some one else is under the strobe light. I must
have the greatness to be led by people younger than I, people with a
different background or a point of view. That is how I learn.

Perspective

This is the hardest to explain. It begins with appreciating why I am
doing what I am doing. Quite often, I find people having a very
narrow view of their tasks; many do not see the criticality of their
task vis-à-vis a larger goal. So, a tester in a project sees his job
as testing code or a module designer's worldview begins and ends with
the module. He does not appreciate the importance of writing
meaningful documentation because he thinks it is not his job or does
not realise that five years from now, another person will have to
maintain it.

I always tell people about the story of two people who were laying
bricks. A passer by asked the first one as to what he was doing. He
replied, "I am laying bricks".
He asked the second one. He replied, "I am building a temple". This
story explains what perspective is and how the resultant attitude and
approach to work can be vastly different.

Organisational savvy

As technical people grow up, they often feel unconnected to the
larger organisation. Some people develop a knack of exploring it,
finding spots of influence, tracking changes, creating networks and
in the process they learn how to make the organization work for them.
The organisation is not outside of me. If I know it well, I can get
it to work for me when I want. Think of the difference between one
project manager and another or one technical lead from another.
One person always gets the resources she needs - the other one
struggles. One person knows who is getting freed from which client
engagement and ahead of time blocks the person. One person reacts to
an organisational change and finds himself allocated to a new project
as a fait accompli - another person is able to be there ahead of the
opportunity. Larger the organisation, higher is the need to develop
organisation savvy. It begins with questioning ones knowledge about
the larger business dynamic, knowing who does what, tracking the work
of other groups, knowing leaders outside of my own sphere and a host
of other things. Importantly, it is also about tracking what the
competitors of the organization are doing and keeping abreast of
directional changes.

Show and tell

This is the bane of most Indian software engineers. We all come from
a mindset that says; if you know how to write code, why bother about
honing communication skills? Recently, we asked a cross section of
international clients on what they think is the number one area of
improvement for Indian engineers? They replied in unison, it is
communication. Show and tell is about oral and written communication.
Some engineers look down upon the need for communication skills and
associate it with people who make up for poor programming prowess. It
is the greatest misconception. Think of the best chief technology
officers of companies like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM Global Services or
Sun. Their number one job is evangelizing.

If they cannot forcefully present their technologies, nothing else
will matter. So, every engineer must pay attention to improving the
ability to present in front of people, develop the ability to ask
questions and handle objections. In a sense, if you cannot sell the
technology you create, it has no value. So, building salespersonship
is a key requirement for technical excellence.

The foregoing points are not relevant if you have already filed your
first patent at the age of eighteen. Everyone else, please take note.


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WHAT IS DEFEAT? NOTHING BUT EDUCATION, NOTHING BUT THE FIRST STEP TO SOMETHING BETTER
-Wendell Phillips
MANY OF LIFE'S FAILURES ARE PEOPLE WHO DID NOT REALIZE HOW CLOSE THEY WERE TO SUCCESS
-Thomas Edison
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