The Best Engineers Think Like Investors, Not Builders
Your approach matters more than the technical details
I lived in the library during college.
“The more textbook theory I studied, the better an engineer I would become,” I thought.
Yet when I started working, I noticed that the best engineers in the industry didn’t necessarily know more theory than new grads. They just brought a different mindset, the investor’s mindset, to work.
It was this mindset that helped them ask smarter questions, prioritize better, and set themselves apart. Like an investor they:
- focused on work that paid off sooner than later
- calculated if the work was worth their time or not before diving into it
- weighed the opportunity costs of their work
In this article, I discuss 3 common problems every engineer will face in their career, and how the investor’s mindset will help you make the right technical decision every time.
1. When will your work payoff?
In investing, there’s a concept called the “time value of money.” This refers to the fact that money now is worth more than money later. You’d rather have an investment pay off one year from now rather than five years from now.
Engineering work has “time value” as well. Engineering projects that payoff now are worth more than engineering projects that payoff later.
We saw this recently with Facebook stock. It dipped by 50% from its all-time highs when executives revealed their Metaverse investments might not pay off for as long as “15 years later.”
Just as how the long payoff period of the metaverse spooked investors, engineers should avoid work that pays off too far into the future. This mistake happens particularly when it comes to engineering migrations.
Why Migrations Are Costlier Than You Think
From an investment standpoint, engineering migrations are a guaranteed upfront cost, for…
