Solve Problems

22 Jun 2015

When I started working at Microsoft, almost five years ago now (!), I remember early career meetings with my manager at the time. God bless his patience. I was fresh out of college and, up until graduation, success and the problems I was required to solve had been clearly defined. Make this sculpture, write this paper, write a compiler. I was very good at execution and terrible at defining intermediate tasks. My conversations with my manager usually consisted of him asking what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go with my career. I had no conception at the time, and mentioned something about coding my features and fixing bugs. No self direction and a pain in the ass for my manager.

I thought that I was an asset at the time. I was a competent coder and I was a resource to be used. In reality, I was a time and energy sink for my manager. Instead of figuring out how I could help and self directing my energies at work, I acted the part of an automaton and waited for directions. Telling a computer what to do is hard, telling a person and trying to keep them happy seems way harder.

Then came startup life. I no longer had a manager. I no longer had someone to tell me what problems to solve and how to go about doing that. I needed to identify problems, diagnose them, design a solution, and execute. It took me about a year to figure out how to do that efficiently. By that time though we ran out of money and the startup quietly failed. However, I did learn how to solve problems, and in my recent adventure as an Education Consultant I’m seeing how valuable that can be to the people around me.

tl;dr; Don’t ask people what you should be doing. You’re smart. Ask about their problems, figure out how to solve them, and do it.