How do you become an effective engineer?

3 min readSep 22, 2024

Efficiency is not effectiveness.

This weekend I had the pleasure to read The Effective Engineer from Edmond Lau. He worked in some of the biggest companies including Google, Microsoft and Quora.

He tried to answer the following question to best of his ability:

What makes an Effective Engineer?

Here are some of the key takeaways I had that might be useful for anyone trying to become a better engineer — and, by extension, a better contributor to human society.

1. Use Leverage

Leverage is how you move mountains. See the image above.

Edmond defines leverage as:

leverage = impact_produced / time_invested

With this definition in mind, you can either:

Reduce the time to complete an activity.
Increase the output per unit of time.
Shift to higher-leverage activities.

Perhaps the highest leverage activity is to discover leverage itself and think about how you can apply it in your own life.

Within your team, an incredible on-boarding and strong mentoring culture is high leverage. If you are curious, you can read to discover some classics, Bootcamp from Meta and Onboarding in Google.

2. Optimize For Learning

In the beginning, you cannot optimize for fame or money. Those are lower in value hierarchy anyway.

You have to optimize for learning.

Because learning compounds.

Albert Bartlett put it beautifully:

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand exponential growth.

Let’s say you are responsible for a service in your division or you are trying to make a delightful product.

Actually, the thing you are working on is not the product — you are. Because the work works on you more than you work on it.

This becomes a possibility with the following:

Growth mindset only.
Investing in Rate of Learning. Better tools, better environment.
Seeking to be in places where people actively learn.
Writing to share. You do not have to figure everything out to write about something (Spoiler alert: No one ever does.), you can just share what you have learned.

3. Prioritize, Prioritize and Prioritize Again

Your attention is your most valuable asset, so you have to focus on important things, not just urgent ones.

This visual might be a spark for your thinking.

4. Measure what you want to Improve

You are either measuring or you are guessing.

In addition to using measuring, what and how you measure is equally important.

This is something that goes way beyond engineering.

Some people will not understand how you measure the impact of your actions, especially over the timeline you measure.

You can just laugh and carry on.

5. Help people around you to be successful

This will not only make you a better engineer but will also give you meaning.

For years, I was surrounded with greedy people. People with zero sum mindset.

Once you find the producers. The contributors. You’ll never walk alone.

Now. What are you going to do?

Notes:

[1] — The first image is from VisualizeValue.

[2] — Exponential Growth from VisualizeValue.

[3] — Eisenhower’s Time Management Matrix from facilethings.

Thanks to Edmond Lau , Jack Butcher , Christopher Kao , Lorelei Trisca .