Portugal also has a bit of the culture of working long hours. People joke when you leave at 6pm/7pm and ask “are you taking the afternoon off?”. We also have the “manager + 5 minutes” rule to leave work. Most of the time, when I worked in these types of companies, I was killing time and feeling depressed. After moving to the UK the culture changed. Less working ours so I started attending meetups and doing Udemy courses (most are all 60/70% finished but still!). I’m much more productive here.
My son was born with TEF/EA (TOF/OA in the UK) and needed a 4 hour surgery when he was 2 days old. The days before the surgery and the following month while he was incubated were agonising in ways I can’t even describe.
Even though my story isn’t nowhere near your situation, I can vaguely relate. To the pain you feel, but also to the strength you seem to have found, to look for the positives because, deep down, you know that being positive and embracing the situation is the best you can do for your son.
I’m sending all my love to you, your son and your family.
> What would be the worst thing that could happen if you did ask again? Would you get fired?
It's about "reputation" and about what your peers think of you. I feel that how others perceive is very important for career progression inside a company. It's common for managers to ask team mates for feedback during performance reviews. This was (and is) my fear.
You need to overcome learning challenges, be tenacious in seeking understanding, and share what you know with others. That's what makes for a confident high performing employee.
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For better or worse, you want people's perception of you to be accurate.
To do that, you need to figure out how to understand the concepts or bigger picture and demonstrate that understanding through your actions.
To be able to do that, you really need to figure out how to best understand and retain the stuff you're having a hard time with. That probably means being more proactive and noisy in meetings where these concepts are shared. If you don't understand something, you have to advocate for yourself and fill in your gaps by asking.
When your peers are thinking about your performance they will either see you making choices that are well informed and aligned with the bigger picture, or they'll see you making choices that are just guesses.
Right now, you should be figuring out why you're having a hard time understanding and retaining things. Start with a good foundation. Healthy sleep, exercise, and anything physiological that stands in the way (learning disabilities, ADHD, dislexia, etc.).
Then focus on the process. Does taking notes work? What if you record meetings and slowly listen later on, repeating parts as needed?
If you learn well with guidance and curriculum, seek out professional courses to help you learn. If the knowledge you're lacking is very domain specific or unique to your company then make the curriculum yourself. Make a goal of teaching other people the things that are unique to your company and not only will you learn it, you'll teach others.
I can't stress this enough: ask questions, take copious and clear notes so you don't need to keep asking the same questions. Ask more questions if you have gaps. Restate the concept out loud, then ask if you're getting the concept. Repeat until you've got it. If you approach it with the intent of helping others learn, you'll be much more diligent about reducing complex ideas into easier to understand chunks.
You'll also be helping your peers. Someone in the room will inevitably be just as confused as you were before you began asking questions to help improve your understanding. Do you think those peers will think you're not capable, or do you think they'll be grateful you had the guts to ask?
If you're working for a company where asking questions is discouraged then maybe start looking for a new role somewhere else. It's not just a red flag for how your experience will be at that company, it's a massive red flag for the viability of the entire company. A company that isn't an expert within their domain is one that's always reacting to market forces, but never leading.
Don't convince yourself that asking questions is a sign of weakness. It's part of your job.
I literally just got out of an hour long meeting with a CTO of a fintech company where all she did was ask questions. The reason: she needed help getting up to speed on something that wasn't even all that difficult to understand but had a broad impact on her organization. It's part of her job to ask questions so she can make informed decisions.
My "big picture" was not so big. It's just to get enough context to do my "mundane" work well. I forgot to say that I'm only a mid-level engineer. For instance, to give good opinions/high-level solutions during ticket refinement sessions, realising when a ticket is not clearly written and things like this.
Also, there's always this debate about the level of detail that goes into a ticket. Lots of detail makes refinement sessions take ages (and they aren't the place to "solutionize".
However, tickets with fewer details (just the business outcome), can be challenging as we may not yet know all our service's logic or we may not know enough about the organisational structure of our company (for when we need to interact with other teams with different competences).
I think you're onto something here.
Yeah, Feynman is a good source of wisdom. He has other nuggets of wisdom I like (for instance, "You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish.").
Thanks for the article. I will read it.
> I'll do this many times throughout my day if I don't already know the answer. If you are feeling afraid to feel "dumb", I don't know exactly how to force it, but you need to have a moment where you accept the fact you will not know things and will have to ask questions to get the answers you need. It becomes easy to ask questions once this moment happens.
I need to staple this (or maybe the whole answer) to my wall and read it many times a day. Thanks :)
