Reflections on 2018

I have often seen posts on personal blog sites that show an account of a persons experience and an evaluation of what happened to them during the previous year. I have never written one of those myself, but I though it would be worth a try.

This past year was my second year living and working in San Francisco as a Software Engineer. In terms of work events, it has been a ride! I have been fortunate enough to work at a company that recognizes value in their employees, and excelled enough to be promoted to Senior Software Engineer near the beginning of the year. 6 months later, the opportunity arose and I became the lead technical lead for my one of my teams in the same product. Being a team lead has been remarkably different from being an engineer in several ways:

• I am no longer working on solving a single technical issue and need to set the direction for the whole team. This means writing tickets, helping other people debug their code, etc. Writing and designing technical tasks is surely an art of its own that I probably hadn’t appreciated as much.
• By necessity I’m the point of contact for other teams and product managers whenever there is a cross team effort or problem, which means and order of magnitude more emails, many times without context. As an engineer, I usually wasn’t the point of entry; whenever something came my way it was already distilled.
• Planning how to distribute work amongst my team is hard, and takes deliberate thinking. I don’t necessarily mean at the beginning of a sprint, but rather as to how to direct in our goals so that the tasks match help them achieve their own goals. Perhaps this is just part of managing people.
• Enthusiasm and work ethic matter more than background for success at work. However, the former coupled with a solid background will get you bigger achievements sooner than average (assuming people around you are not toxic). This is kind of obvious, but it has been amazing to see it in practice in the workplace.
• There is a marked difference between people who like technology and people who consider a job as just a job. The former do not necessarily fare better than the latter in a professional environment.

I’ve also been fortunate to learn things outside of work, mostly for my own personal growth:

• If you want to make something happen, you are your best ally and worst enemy in making that happen. This applies to any and all goals you may have. As an example, I traveled on my own (and with my own dime) to Europe for two weeks last spring. Being your own advocate in a foreign place has ways of making you proud of yourself or making you fear doing something very very quickly. Perhaps it’s just an increased sense of responsibility and part of growing up.
• Having a consistent workout schedule does wonders for my mental health, but it is hard to schedule work afterwards. I have been able to build discipline in exercising my mind, but exercising my brain by either investing the time in learning a new concept or reviewing another seems not as clear cut for me.
• While acquiring a new social media account (Twitter @francosasieta) to follow people in the technology industry has done wonders for me to track new developments in the industry, it certainly hasn’t helped my productivity. I’ve recently used the screen time app on my phone and that has helped me taper down my social network usage.
• Dating is hard.

Finally, the last thing I learned is that I excel at procrastination. I intended to publish this post more than two weeks ago yet here I am. Anyways, I appreciate it if you’ve read this far, I wish you a happy 2019 and much luck in your goals for the year in this one or the next.