I guess that I’m an engineer. I have a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. I have a good grounding in mathematics and the sciences.

And I go to Software Engineering conferences.

This casual use of the term “engineering” by software folks has always bothered me a bit. It was Peter Naur’s suggestion in 1968 to attach the term “engineering” to software, which Helmut Goss (who was there) reports was meant to be taken tongue-in-cheek. Engineering builds on solid foundations in the sciences such as physics and chemistry. There is actually an element of science in software complexity and automata theory. But software engineering rarely ascends (descends?) to this level.

The IEEE states that software engineering is: “The application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation and maintenance of software” (IEEE Standard Glossary of Software Engineering Terminology, IEEE Computer Society, 1990.)  Numbers, technology, nerd stuff—no people or life. But the IEEE identifies engineers as “promoting the development and application of electrotechnology and allied sciences for the benefit of humanity, the advancement of the profession, and the well-being of our members.” I like that “benefit of humanity” and “well-being.”

On one hand, the use of the term “engineering” is a caricature that stilts the expectations of its own constituency. “Architect” conjures another metaphor for what some of us do. It was proposed by Fred Brooks who himself expressed skepticism about the label until encouraged by Jerry Weinberg, who felt it was a good model for what we do. And Peter Naur (again) would say in 1968 that software should look to the architect Christopher Alexander for inspiration. Both “software engineer” and “architect” reflect internal value; engineering is about delivered value.

Software engineering lifts its moniker from a sense of formal envy that characterized its search for identity in the 1960s. But little of the engineering profession is either quantitative or systematic. In fact, the bulk of engineering is about management, contract administration, and project management. 60% of surveyed Canadian engineers over 45 report their job responsibilities are primarily managerial (Engineering and Technology Labour Market Study, Engineers Canada, 1990). Software engineering literature has a significant qualitative side: Count qualitative results as you thumb through ICSE proceedings.

Software academics too readily don the engineering mantle, and there are dangers that the metaphor masks the bulk of its foundations of design and method that are dynamic cycles of fashion rather than invariants of nature. On the other hand, as it seeks its identity, software should learn from any discipline it can.

Further, as we look at engineering and software, we find that there is nothing that delineates them as formally separable concerns. They characterize arbitrary definitions from society rather than laws of nature. Much the same is true about the supposed division between architecture and digital system design. So it is with any broad element of upward human endeavor. Half of all engineers work in more than one engineering discipline over their careers, and more than 65% work in more than one industry. These labels have more to do with our desire to belong (the discipline focus of the software engineering definition) than to reach out to other disciplines and society (as the broader engineering definition implies).

Software engineering is not, and should not become, engineering. It continues to seek an identity of its own. In the mean time, it’s probably better that it live alongside engineering—it might as well have neighbors who are a good influence. But art, psychology, and a host of others should also be in the neighborhood.

We treasure our friends here in Denmark. It may surprise American readers to hear that a Dane usually has only two or three real life friends (ven or veninde). Maybe you call them “best friends” or “soulmates.” More than anyone else, it is by these people that the world changes us, and through these people that we change the world.

What does this have to do with career? I launched this ‘blog by asking you to consider your place in changing the world. Jerry Weinberg taught me long ago that we change the world one person at a time. Sure, on a job—in a group or on a team—we maintain enough close working relationships to get the product out the door. Teams are important, too, and the relationships they develop can last a lifetime and be of great value. Don’t overlook the relationships in these connections, and don’t overly separate the professional and personal sides of that relationship (look back on The Whole Person).

My metric for a worthwhile change to the world is that some of part of it, no matter how small, has fundamentally changed. By fundamental here I mean changing beliefs, changing one’s reason for being in the world of work. That is career growth on a par with human purpose. Think paradigm shift. I could have alternatively defined success in terms of the mass or extent of change, because it takes less energy in the short term to move many people a small distance. Think Twitter. Fundamental changes take sharp focus, and it takes far more focus to engage in fundamental change on a group level than pairwise. I have instead decided to trust the social process of change propagation: I change one person, and I trust that person’s new foundations will propagate thousands of times. If I move that person a great deal, in the end, I will have moved the world a great deal. And I will have created a new, defining relationship in the process.

Society equates power with span of control. That tends to work against the painstaking process of caring for one individual at a time, and of carrying on a true dialog. You can’t seriously dialog with a crowd: you can only broadcast and receive disembodied slices of feedback. Dialog happens soul-to-soul. When I’ve had the job of lecturing to thousands about new technologies, or of writing to tens of thousands about design, it must have an impact. But it’s the individual feedback that matters.

I am concerned about the increasing use of social media as a primary venue for fundamental engineering dialog. I miss the thoughtfulness and depth of pairwise dialectic. Call me nostalgic, but, sure, I do Tweet, and have a portal on most other household social networks. And there is, after all, this ‘blog. It’s all part of the equation. But in the end, broadcast media are just an outlet for a task whose hope lies in hearing some individual story, one great success, or a single change of mind. I’m not here to align anyone’s agendas with mine. As a reader, you are a victim of my attempt to lure you more deeply into an appreciation of human sensibilities and individual worth. I don’t care what you believe, if you’re honest with yourself about what you believe. I do care that passionate people engage in dialog at an individual level;  that lifts the world.

Change the world by being part of changing each other. Jerry should have said we change the world two individuals at a time.

The Swarming essay drew the interest and comments of many readers. Most of the retorts evoked deeply held fears of one’s individualism being threatened. Society has taught us that survival owes to our salary at our job, and that our job owes to our individual performance. Society has reinforced those notions with accolades of individual accomplishment: patents, promotions, and promises of favor. Culture needs and has always needed such rituals, and we shouldn’t minimize their contribution. It is, however, important to know that they work differently in different cultures, and that there is a much, much bigger picture.

If one looks beyond the cultural trappings of recognition, it has long been known that it is society, and not individuals, who invent. The anthropologist Kroeber, in his book Anthropology (1923, Harcourt, Brace and World), tells us that “as long as the matter [of the nature of genius] is viewed simply as one of persons, it remains rather meaningless.” Many people invent, but “[o]nly a fraction are ever found out, or allowed the rank by history.” He lists inventions discovered by multiple inventors thousands of miles apart within months of each other: the telephone, telescope, steamboat, phonograph, natural selection, and dozens more. How can an individual in good conscience claim ownership of a novel idea?

You can argue that even if this is true, that society demands recognition of accomplishment on the Pavlovian basis that people do what they are rewarded for. Rewards are important as cultural artefacts; but we know from Edward Deci’s Why We Do What We Do, from Daniel Pink’s book Drive: The Truth about What Motivates Us, and dozens of other sources, it’s all about the intrinsic sense of accomplishment than any extrinsic motivator.

Social and technological progress are less about individuals than about groups and swarms. In his recent book Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation (Riverhead, 2011), Steven Johnson tells us that “Analyzing innovation on the scale of individuals and organizations—as the standard textbooks do—distorts our view. It creates a picture of innovation that overstates the role of proprietary research and ‘survival of the fittest’ competition.” Johnson’s conclusion is that “openness and connectivity may, in the end, be more valuable to innovation than purely competitive mechanisms.” He offers case study after case study of how cross-fertilization of people and ideas led to good ideas.

In his book Finite and Infinite Games (Free Press, 1976) the theologian Carse describes the finite games that distinguish winners from losers: academic grades, promotion and, arguably, invention. He contrasts finite games with infinite games, whose goal is to continue playing the game. Intellectual process is obviously an infinite game. Over-attention to individual genius, and its rewards, reduces it to a finite game. Carse relates that playing an infinite game as though it were a finite game is the very definition of evil.

These are just five citations. They’re probably foreign to much of an engineering readership—a readership bent more on credit for inventing than acknowledging its place on the shoulders of the giants of history.

Of course, individuals matter, at least in so much as collective populations comprise individuals. At some level wars are fought and won by individuals. Yet one of the most highly celebrated soldiers in any war is the Unknown Soldier, whose tomb stands for the individual anonymity of the collective. From the long view of history, the inscriptions on the military cemetery crosses fade and blur into the big picture. The one universally remembered by name is the one with no name.

 We all dream of adding years to our lives—by giving up smoking, through good exercise and diet, and all those other good things we associate with clean, healthy living. Let’s say that life gave you an extra day, that an extra day just dropped into your calendar. Would you treat it like just any other day? Would you just get caught up on your to-do list? Let me invite you into a gedanken experiment about such a day being a great opportunity to focus on concerns that would otherwise never make it to the top of your list. When they try to make it to the top, you find you don’t have time.

Holidays come close to serving this need, but it’s not quite the same. The year-end religious holidays bring us thoughts of charity. The advent of the New Year gives time for reflection on how life has been good to us — or about how we can make it better for ourselves in the next year. But these holidays become almost a duty. People make New Years’ resolutions almost begrudgingly. These holidays are a ritual. We can muse that these are the kinds of thoughts that every duty-minded employee attends to as a duty to their employer, mindful of sustaining their secured income. We can muse that a career-minded person, on the other hand, leaves those issues to the daily joy of problem solving, and uses the gift of extra time for outward focus.

In the same way, February 29 can take its place in our calendars as a gift. It’s an equal opportunity gift afforded to everyone, independent of their station in life or level of accomplishment. It’s a way that our culture has chosen to remind us to take time for what is important to us.

Every day should be a February 29. Far too many people make every day February 2, in the sense of the movie Ground Hog’s Day. It’s natural to take time and its daily activities for granted; routine and ritual are, in fact, important to avoiding information overload and as such are key to our survival. But try balancing the gait of routine daily activity with excursions into novelty. Consciously spend time alone, or consciously spend time with others. Be intentional in your actions for one day. You’ll learn much about yourself.

This year will also be the year of the leap second as well—the first time since December 2008. On June 30 at 23:59:60 (yes, that time is right) you’ll again have time added to the length of your life. Even an additional second can be a priceless gift. A spark of inspiration can arrive in a second. You can give a smile, or receive one, in a second. So, first, use that extra second. Then ponder on the thousands of ordinary seconds that you have this year as well, and consider how to use them wisely.

Of course, there will never be enough days dropping into your calendar for you to clean up your backlog. Yet, somehow, the gift of additional time helps you focus on what your priorities really are by encouraging to think of how you should most effectively use that time. And if you did something mundane on this February 29, it means that you’re a day ahead on the work of the upcoming months. That gives you even more flexibility to choose one of those days as your ersatz February 29. Take that day and think great thoughts—or, even better, do something really great.

Monte Python’s Brian reminds us that we (most of us, anyhow) “are all individuals.” Rugged individualism is the hallmark of many cultures — most notably of Americans who celebrate a pioneering spirit borne of its expansionist 18th and 19th centuries. Perhaps some day I’ll  dedicate some thoughts to that topic. But today I’d like to draw your thoughts to work-in-the-many.

Anthropologists sometimes debate whether homo sapiens are social animals like apes or loners like bears. I tend to lean to the social animal side of the argument. At this point, as you project where today’s installment is leading, you’re likely to roll your eyes in anticipation of yet another one of those homilies about teams. Teams are all the rage these days, and appropriately so.

However, today I want to talk about swarms. Yes: humans swarm, though the collected entity is rarely as physically identifiable as the apiarian analogue. Such structures have long existed in human culture. Religious denominations often fit this model, as do political parties. Swarms long pre-date the Internet, though the Internet has brought life to swarms with instant communication and connectedness that were unthinkable five years ago. I dare say that will remain a timeless claim no matter how far in the future you are reading this article. That’s why swarms are so important: our swarm-connectedness is bound to grow over the decades.

Back in 2000, Dick Gabriel’s OOPSLA keynote talked of the importance of swarm development in software. Open source had already been in full swing for many years. Forget pair programming: bug density plummets under the gaze of thousands of pairs of eyes. I can launch a question into the swarm about an Apple API and get a useful answer in minutes or hours. That was unthinkable even from dedicated help desks just a few years back.

Join a swarm — not a club — of thousands or millions of people. Clubs are about stature; swarm members are anonymous. Clubs are social and fun; while there’s a bit of that in a swarm, it’s not really part of the swarm dynamic. Clubs just gather; good swarms do work. Yet some swarms generate identities that emerge at a larger scale. The open source movement is a shining example — millions of anonymous workers building some of the greatest software on earth. The pattern community is another, and while it is like a bed of tulips where much the same flowers recur on an annual basis, it carries a vision of a shared worldwide identity. It is perhaps a club in transition to becoming a swarm if history so favors it.

Contemporary engineers are team creatures. Today’s engineering career path follows much of history as individuals hop the stepping stones from one team identity to another.  For all their good, however, teams are remarkably insular. They interact tens times as much among themselves as with members of other teams. More social progress comes from swarms than teams.

It’s important to note that “swarm” is not a synonym for “good.” While mutual trust characterizes some swarms, it is hardly germane to all of them. Invoking Gabriel again, we note “dangerous waterholes” in the savannah where both the lion and gazelle “swarm” to drink. If the lion kills the gazelle there, then the gazelles will stop coming there at all and will eventually be wiped out for want of water. Tune swarm parameters just right and you get mass movement psychology — a cancerous, collective insanity.

Are you a part of a swarm? Know what kind of swarm you belong to, or swarm into a good one.

 An academic degree is a way for your colleagues to recognize your hard work to prepare yourself for a job. Successful completion of an undergraduate degree supposedly shows that you are smart enough to be able to learn how to do your job in a given field (see the previous installment on Mentoring). A master’s degree, by its name, suggests mastery in some topic. A Ph.D. is at least evidence that you can navigate academic politics (and by inference, the politics of your discipline) and that you can be persuasive in selling ideas. And where I went to school in Brussels, a Doctorate shows your ability to start a research program in any field.

I actually embarked on my Ph.D. program so I could more credibly continue in discrediting the institution, as I had for years. I had seen too many theses taken at face value because of their academic stature, though they remained out of touch with day-to-day realities. I was actually cheated in that pursuit because I found myself saddled with a wise promoter, and found myself in a great environment that challenged me while also giving me opportunities to contribute.

On its face, a degree is a recognition of worthiness by society. Alistair Cockburn once told me that his Ph.D. was largely recognition of work already done. Such recognition does open doors.

These educational opportunities, and perhaps even the associated laurels, probably have some value. I’m not sure whether higher degrees offer any more value than what one can gain on-the-job. In fact, working with my colleagues in Finland, I find that most of the value in their Ph.D. degrees (and, increasingly, in their Masters’ degrees) comes from an action research approach — trying to gain what insights one can from actual on-the-job experience in some area of focus. The good news is that the students’ learning is grounded in day-to-day problems. The bad news is that their research publications are occasionally over-constrained by the artificial limits that the messiness of the real world imposes. Some research deserves to run unfettered.

More important, after having received four academic degrees (and earned enough credits for another), and after having kept my hands dirty working for almost 40 years, I think that the main tie from my academic credentials to my work situation is in the introspection encouraged by the environment in which I took my Ph.D. Academic degrees are not career milestones. For me, my undergraduate degree broadened my opportunities to appreciate the arts (see Ars Gratia Artis) and to develop a love of programming. My Master’s degree gave me a nurturing academic environment in a setting where I had a job related to my degree: Most of the learning emanated from the job, rather than from the classroom.

This perspective has implications for hiring. Why hire Ph.Ds.? It’s not necessarily because they are worth more. In fact, academic achievement tells us little about talent. Most academic programs are rooted in test scores, and those have little correlation with career success or even job performance (Michael Wallach, Tests tell us little about Talent, American Scientist 64(1), 1976).

A career is not a collection of academic degrees. Don’t hang your career success on academic achievement. Use academic institutions for the learning opportunities they provide, partially through the classroom but even moreso through their culture, environment, opportunities for deliberate practice, and opportunities for work-study programs. Employers: hire accordingly, and make a place on your staff for bright folks still working on their sheepskin.

One of my recent installments (There is no failure, only feedback) was a short essay on a career perspective on problem solving. Some comments I received on the article made me realize that it didn’t sink in with exactly the people who need it most. So here is another try.

If you regularly work to remove the source of recurring problems you have the leadership seeds of a good career. A great way to kill a career is to deal only with problems you are asked to solve or that lie within the confines of a job description. Too many engineers limit their focus to engineering problems. My former Bell Labs department head, Steve Baumann, once told us that there had never been a technical problem that Bell Labs had been unable to solve: All the interesting problems are about people. It’s everyone’s job to solve those.

Saying this, I’m usually admonished to get back to the real problems.  It is not only the recent retorts here that are of this nature and have self-pity and bitterness lurking just beneath the surface. Instead of solving problems, the Scrooges and Grinches among us blame everything on others. Managers usually blame. employees. Workers usually blame managers. We hear: “management typically ignores the value proposition of common best practices” or even that someone feels their job is to “find a way to trick or coerce management into doing what they should be doing but are too busy golfing to ever get around to.” Would you trust your life to an engineer designing medical equipment, who sees tricking management as part of his job?

Enter the Grinches and Scrooges, who elevate this perspective to bitterness and a self-pity. Sure, I’ve had bad managers, too, and I spend a lot of my time these days advising managers. Many of them listen, and often act, if employees will only take the time to talk to them. And when that hasn’t worked out I’ve fixed the problem by moving on to something better. The bitterness doesn’t come from the problem — it comes from not removing its source.

While avoiding the problem (because it’s easier to trick management instead) is a bad thing, sometimes the worst thing you can do is to just fix it. That’s putting a band-aid on it. The bitterness of statements like “I try to improve the common value proposition by being ready to put out fires” reflects a job perspective rather than a career perspective. To gain strategic advancement, you must exercise strategic skills. Strategists embrace failure.

The principles of the Toyota Way lie at the heart of the most popular Agile approaches today, including Toyota’s application of Kaizen: making things better. Surprisingly, it’s not about fixing problems. It’s about removing the source of the problems, with the greater good of the community and company in mind. Again: think job versus career, respectively.

But, yes, Virginia (and Scrooges, too), there is a Santa Claus. And it could be you. Career-mindedness and a broad vista of problem-solving is what it’s about. Great problems don’t come up and bite you on the bottom. Engineers attack problems, even if  — especially if — they’re outside their job descriptions.

Every workplace (and ‘blog) has its Grinches who complain about problems and allocate blame because they feel impotent to solve them. Every company and every ‘blog site has them. But we wish a great holiday season even to them — and that includes you, Joshua. And the same to the rest of you — with an added admonition not to let the turkeys get you down.

You’ve just found a bottle on the beach. You rub it and a magic genie appears.  But because it’s just an old Danish beer bottle you get only one wish — but it can be for anything (but no meta-wishes). What do you wish for?

Or you’ve completed a series of interviews for a new job, and you’ve just received a job offer. Tell me what your eyes scanned the page for when you opened the offer letter.

You probably know where this is going —  once again into the job / career dichotomy. But the two are linked, after all. And each of them addresses different Maslow levels of your value system (see Do Your Best, an earlier installment in this series).

Money is likely one answer that many people would give for the opening questions above. Come on now, be honest with yourself. But this answer is probably more common for recent graduates than those further along in their career. Why?

Rationalizations ensue: We argue that a good starting salary is the base that establishes what you will be making in 20 years (it’s not true). Those senior folks who don’t seek money are hippies or are financially complacent; maybe they’re rich from years of work and now they are seeking something else from working. And there are those who use their salary as a measure of stature — we’ll leave them alone with their thoughts. Money is more about feelings than about other facts

There’s a deeper answer. Start with the fact that money has no value in its own right. It is only a socially agreed token of exchange for goods and services of value.  Few people garner money for its own sake: paper money makes a lumpy mattress, and the metal stuff is heavy and cumbersome. There’s not much enjoyment having it sitting in the bank, particularly given the way things have gone with banks these recent years. No: money is our means to some other end.

Now, that’s O.K. But I wonder if we too often fail to take that next step and honestly consider: What is my deeper motivation for money? For many, it is the need for a feeling of security — feelings rooted in a childhood where there was never enough food on the table or where it was difficult to keep a roof over one’s head. But for most of us, money is a means to something beyond: to save for retirement, or to afford that cottage on the lake or summer house in the Swedish woods.

Do you want that cottage or that summer house because it’s a way to get away from your job, to spend time with your family? That’s kind of interesting — to take a job on the basis of making enough money to get away from your job. That job may take you away from you family more than a less-paid one. We too often hide these trade-offs from ourselves.

Some harbor an illusion that you work now and that life starts sometime after age 65. But those who most enjoy their retirement are those who keep their minds and fingers busy in the fun of their business long after their salary stops. And, it’s funny, those are many of the same people who seemed to know really how to live throughout their earlier years.

Seek to optimize your overall work life value. Make your job enjoyable, perhaps by using it to reach out to others or to create greatness in the world. The world tends to take good care of those who have that outlook.

We’ve all made mistakes. Some even admit it. The best of us learn from our mistakes. But the very best of us have a talent to ignore our long-cultivated reflexes that lead us to hide the consequences of our errors. A great career carefully courts failure.

Solving problems is fundamental to engineering. We often separate the problems we are asked to solve from the ones we cause, and classify the former as opportunities and the latter as failures. But we can’t, in general, always avoid failure. The nature of complex problems means we navigate failures as we close in on the solution. As Jerry Weinberg tells us: There is no failure, only feedback. 

History relates many stories of engineering advances at the hand of failure. Johnson (Where Good Ideas Come From,  Penguin, 2010) tells how DeForest’s invention of the vacuum tube came from a misunderstanding of what made it work. Fleming’s discovery of penicillin was similar, as were Daguerre’s invention of the daguerreotype and Greatbatch’s invention of the pacemaker.

Systems thinking literature and philosophy has a cornucopia of advice about failure. Deming’s Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle structures the feedback loop that compensates for missing the mark. We often hear that the fundamental form or architecture of the things in our workplace follows function, but Henry Petroski tells us that form follows failure (“Form Follows Failure,” Technology Magazine 8(2), Fall 1992).

Failure can be your friend. As long as he’s going to be in your neighborhood anyhow, you might as well get acquainted. You’ve heard that you can learn from failure. That realization has become the watchword of those looking for rationalizations when things go bad — when failure causes such pain that we contemplate fairness in creation and the cause of evil in the world.

Instead of rationalizing the big failures by just making lemons into lemonade, go a step further and capitalize on the more common and numerous glitches that are part of day-to-day business. We too often let these go by unheeded. If you pick out a few that you find worthy of attention, you will raise your own awareness of how to do better next time. 

The very nature of kaizen in Japanese culture is rooted in an introspective state of hansei: of deep reflection and of identifying with the problem. Only then are we truly in a position to understand how we can relate to solving the problem, either by removing its cause, or working with others to do so, or to embark on a program of continuous practice to remove the problem. Also intrinsic to kaizen is that improvement comes not so much from solving the problem, but from going to the next level to remove its very cause. There is lasting value in fixing a software bug. There is broad, lasting value from improving the process to diminish the chances that such kinds of bugs can ever arise again. But we need those bugs, those problems, to trigger the process changes. In that sense we celebrate the opportunity that presents itself when a problem arises, though we soberly assess our place in that system.

Speaking of intentional practice, periodic reflection is a good thing. Explicitly take time to reflect on opportunities to improve — as an individual, a family, a team, or as a corporation. It takes trust and courage, but it builds trust and courage as well. William James said “The error is needed to set off the truth, much as a dark background is required for exhibiting the brightness of a picture.”

I recently spoke at a conference in Oslo and was enjoying some lively interaction with the audience. One attendee bemoaned the fact that his company couldn’t rise to the challenge to excellence that I had put to the audience. When I inquired about what the problem was, he told me that their engineers were “stupid” and not up to acceptable standards. Feigning that I had inside information, I apologized for having forgotten that his company had a policy of hiring idiots.

Few companies make it a point to hire idiots, yet I often hear senior employees complaining about the inexperience of their staff. There is a widespread belief that companies live and die by excellence in their hiring programs — programs with standards designed to weed out the slackers while hand-picking the cream of the crop.

It is difficult to cream-skim talent a tight market. When prosperous times push the job market demand over the supply, or when long-term pessimism about the business creates a delayed shortage of graduates in some area, companies often must take what they can get.

But first, talent is probably overrated. Richard Gabriel reflects that talent has little to do with the level of excellence that an individual can attain — only with the speed with which one can attain it. There are exceptions, of course. But a company that sets new employees on a career path, instead of just giving them jobs, will more deeply value your potential to learn than your college grades. It makes sense to scrutinize the track record of a mature market hire only if he or she will be expected to do exactly the same work in their new job as they did in the old one — and that is often not the case.

However, it might not matter that much. First, Deming tells us that quality owes more to the process than to individual performance. Second, schools rarely arm students with the skills they will need to thrive in the corporate world or even in any particular engineering discipline. Practice may follow academic theory or the tenets of basic training if you just land in a job, but they don’t prepare you for the employment opportunities that can launch a career. Industrial practice is always more particular, exacting and contextualized than either educational experience or previous employment can prepare one for. 

That means that employers can’t help but bear the burden of educating new employees. Many corporations have a “mentoring” program to bring new employees on board. While these programs are well-intentioned, they are often superficial. Corporate value systems expect mentors still to complete all their assignments while brining a new colleague into the company, and expect mentees to be “self-directing” in their quest to climb the corporate ladder. Mentors may expend a few days giving the new hire a tour of the premises, tips on standard procedures, admonitions about exigencies and taboos, and an overview of upcoming work assignments. But mentors too often end being just a “safety hatch,” checking up on new employees now and then to ensure that they aren’t stuck, and to be sure that they aren’t doing any damage.

Good mentoring is a partnership, and while it is good to have a single “buddy” who can help bring a new employee on board, it’s a team responsibility. Expect each new employee to detract from the effectiveness of each team member by about 25% for 6 months. If that’s not the case, you’re probably not doing a good job of mentoring — and you’ll pay the price in the long term.

Uncle Bob honored me back in 2008 by asking me to pen the foreword to Clean Code (Prentice-Hall, 2008). Though perhaps better known for writing about programming in-the-large, I was being asked by Bob to reflect on the crucial issues of programming-in-the-small. After all, the greatest mansion eventually reduces to its boards and tiles, and the most ambitious creations in software are built brick upon procedural brick. Small things matter.

In career, as in architecture and coding, there is a close tie between quality in detail and quality of the whole. We can recall a host of cultural saws that recognize and celebrate that relationship. He who is faithful in little is faithful in much. A stitch in time saves nine. Mighty oaks from little acorns grow. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The architect Mies van der Rohe tells us that God is in the details.

A paradox lurks here. A career is a grand notion that transcends decades and thousands of individual acts. No one is under any illusion that we can define a precise career destination and arrive there by taking exactly the right footsteps in exactly the right order. Together, however, steps are guided by an underlying compass needle, a broad goal.

Agile principles lie deeper still: the power of choice to change one’s compass heading. We may do so to adapt to temporally short obstacles. More fundamentally, we can choose to redefine the destination. To unthinkingly plod to a stubbornly fixed destination can be a death-march. The mid-20th-century notion of “taking over Daddy’s business” is one archetype of such paths. Agile careers recreate networks of associations every day, because the world changes too much not to.

Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (William Morrow, 1974), offers a metaphor linking the big picture with crucial details. “To strive only for some future goal is shallow.  ... [I]t is on the sides of the mountain where things grow. Yet, there are no sides without a top. The top defines the sides.”

If the path up the mountain twists and turns, and if we even switch to another mountain now and then, what is the deep, underlying invariant? Pirsig suggests that it might be caring. Caring plays out in the small things of life.  Any destination is the accumulation of thousands of individual acts. So while the compass needle points the way, our daily choices define the path. The destination can be foreseen, but the path is defined only in retrospect.

You can make the grandest claims about being an engineer striving to make the world a better place, but it is a hollow accomplishment if you climb on peoples’ backs to get there. Accomplishment goes deeper than some goal: equally important to what you do is who you are. As Pirsig reminds us:  the journey is on the sides of the mountains.

Caring subsumes a host of ethical preconditions to any career. I opened my foreword to Uncle Bob’s book with an anecdote about a Danish licorice box. Our Ga-Jol licorice boxes all come with a witty saying printed on the inside of the lid. On the morning of the day that I was to write the foreword I opened a box to the admonition,  Ærlighed i små ting er ikke nogen lille ting. “Honesty in small things is not a small thing.” Keep the big picture before you, but attend to excellence, honesty, integrity, beauty, and joy in the small things of life. Big things will follow.

The programming trade recently lost one of its great contributors, Dennis Ritchie. As many of the emerging eulogies to Dennis attest, he was a quiet, focused man. I never saw him seek recognition or glory. His work spoke for itself, and earned him honors such as the Turing Award and the National Medal of Technology, awarded personally by U.S. President Clinton. Steve Jobs’ departure is another recent landmark loss.

It is these peoples’ outstanding influence that begs us to compare them to others and to ourselves. The Maslow hierarchy, a common model of human motivation, is a mirror of contemporary Western values. Maslow says that respect by others trumps even the love found in friendship and family. Even deeper lie our basic needs for safety, security, and survival (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs).

What is the place of career in being our whole selves? Do careers give meaning to life, or move us up the Maslow hierarchy? Reflect on others who have left their mark across human history. We can invoke several archetypes:

• Mother Theresa, whom we remember for selfless contributions to thousands of individuals, but her example inspired yet many more. She is perhaps best remembered for two characteristics from near the apex of the Maslow hierarchy: morality and lack of prejudice.
• Albert Einstein, who created a new body of knowledge, and set challenges that inspired many scientists and engineers in the human quest for knowledge.
• Bill Gates, who transformed an industry and became one of the world’s richest men. Even whether he changed it for the better is controversial, depending on the technology affiliation of the people you ask, he is probably better known for the extent of his influence rather than its vector — similar to Attilla the Hun who, in spite of his reputation, in fact spread many positive aspects of culture across Asia.

If there is any universal across these three archetypes, it isn’t that they were all in it for the money, power, or fame. I don’t think we can say that they were seeking comfort. Why are we so intrigued by all three? They were all high on the Maslow scale. They stand out as human archetypes — so much so that they are held up as the definitive saint, genius, and mogul, respectively.

Which archetype do you aspire to — Gates? Einstein? or Mother Theresa? There is no right answer. It’s easy to stand outside these great lives as we evaluate and emulate them. Society’s values call us to that perspective. Yet it’s crucial that we turn these evaluations inward. Our externally visible career self is not our whole self.  Nor was it for these celebrities. Gates’ philanthropy stands beside his career, attesting to another Maslow level. A quick web search turns up a cornucopia of quotes that unveil Einstein’s humanistic side.

What is their universal common attribute? Perhaps it is passion. Perhaps passion correlates to one’s Maslov level. Dennis Ritchie had a passion for detail and precision. History rewards those with passion for such excellence, or for people, or even control. When considering which of these should guide your career, carefully attend to your intrinsic values rather than those of society. Modern research by Pink  (Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Riverhead, 2011) shows that our sense of accomplishment is itself our highest reward — also high on the Maslow scale — independent of influence.

You don’t have to aspire to be a saint, or a mogul, or a genius in your career.  Just go back to the Cub Scout motto: Do your best. Somehow, I think that’s what drove Dennis.

If you’re reading this, chances are that you are male. The British National Guidance Research Forum says that men outnumbered women in Engineering by 4-to-1 to 5-to-1 over the past 15 years. The U.S. department of commerce reports the 2009 ratio at about 3 to 1 even though the job market as a whole is split half and half. And the numbers for women in computing are falling (Beedle et al., “Women in STEM: A Gender Gap to Innovation,” U.S. Department of Commerce, ESA Issue Brief #04-11).

Whether you had noticed or not, and no matter if your principles tell you whether it should or should not be so, women and men are different. Men prefer Android phones over iPhones, while for women it’s vice-versa (Nielsen Wire, 1 December, 2010). Whether you’re on the Android or iPhone side of the market you want your work force to understand both perspectives. One tips the work force gender balance at one’s own peril in the market.

Computing and engineering have long been male bastions. Numbers for women grew slightly back when I was in school in the early 1980s, but  fell off again and have never quite recovered. The reason? Maybe because women view male-dominated engineering cultures as less humane work environments than the alternatives. You can guess more reasons. And they’re important.

There’s more. On the average, women in technical professions are better-educated than their male counterparts  (The Gender Gap in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Occupations, scientopia.org, 4 August 2011).  Girls’ academic performance is better than boys’, and the gap is widening (BBC News, “GCSE REsults: Gender Gap Widens,” 25 August 2011).

I’m sure that with research I could find other numbers in women’s favor. However, looking beyond gender alone, diversity is a virtue in its own right. We can find analogous numbers that favor men. We can find other numbers that favor Asians. And others that favor just about any ethnic group you might choose.

Johnson (Where Good Ideas Come From, Penguin, 2010) steps outside the “creative genius” engineering model to regard innovation as a result of diversity itself. He says, “This is one explanation for superlinear scaling in urban creativity. The cultural diversity those subcultures create is valuable not just because it makes urban life less boring. The value also lies in the unlikely migrations that happen between the different clusters. A world where a diverse mix of distinct professions and passions overlap is a world where exaptations thrive.” (Chapter VI)

An exaptation is an inventive use of an old idea in a radically new context. Gutenberg’s printing press was a bastardized wine press. These twists of innovation come from idea migrations in a world of “a diverse mix of ... professions and passions.”

Too many engineering cultures stereotype women as project managers, usability specialists, or executive assistants. Such stereotypes in fact perpetuate what might be dangerous, deeper prejudices. If we believe Johnson, such prejudices break down the very structures that fuel innovation — which in many ways is the heart of engineering. Diversity in the professional environment isn’t only doing the right thing — it props up the bottom line. 

When I teach ScrumMaster certification courses I can predict, 9 out of 10 times, which team will score highest in the Velocity Game production simulation. It’s the one with a critical mass of women. Use your hiring and career development clout to grow diversity in your work force. You’ll be glad you did.

Related: Do Romantic Thoughts Reduce Women's Interest in Engineering?

One of my favorite books is "The Clock of the Long Now," edited by Stewart Brand. Brand will become a young man of 73 this 14 December. The book’s premise is that we who live now have a responsibility to the future. Ah, the past; the future. This is my third composition in a row that touches on the subject of time. My Season composition reflected on the fact that we can’t control our destiny in detail, but that, paradoxically, planning is important. The Routines reflection looked at the place of habit and cycle in life, and recalls Mary Poppendieck’s admonishment that we practice with deliberation. One theme common to these two perspectives is that we live in the now. But a good now is long, straddling past, present, and future.

While we are endowed at birth with various gifts, talents and abilities, most of our professional selves is nurture rather than nature. We are a product of our experiences: of the family that chose us to raise, of the schools we chose to attend, and of our chosen colleagues. Every now is worth treasuring as an opportunity to grow, improve, and to refine our influence. Planning helps us prepare for the opportunities that accelerate that growth. Ritual honors the human element and contextualizes our experiences to help us better integrate them into our whole selves. Improvement comes from time and attentiveness.

The most direct way to learn is first-hand experience from our work. Critical conversation with voices of experience can often be more efficient, optimizing our paths around needless blind alleys. King Solomon said, As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another. Vicarious learning is often the best.

While we can reap benefit from any conversation, we should listen with particular care to the voices of those who have had time to collect and assimilate the world’s knowledge, and to demonstrate that they could act on it. It has been fashionable in engineering for some time now to put our faith in youth, but the most resilient ideas are woven from grey hairs. I think of Jeff Sutherland when he invented Scrum at age 52, building on previous careers in the military, medicine, and finance.

As I write this, I’m on my way to spend some days with a friend and mentor, Trygve Reenskaug, who invented MVC at age 47. We’ll be talking mainly about nerd stuff, though the discussion will build on our combined lifetime of experiences. But more than that, we’ll both draw on the many gifts of insight that accumulated in discussions with others over the years.

In planning your career, think about your stage in life and how it affects your contribution both to your firm and to society. Share your knowledge in open dialogue but be willing to be challenged either by broader, deeper and more general experience, or by a new perspective that causes you to realize that long-held beliefs might be arbitrary stereotypes or tribal beliefs. Find good mentors who have followed, or perhaps pioneered, the path before you. Just take the time to hear them out. Integrating their experience, though sometimes outdated, with your own life experiences increases the chances you’ll take the right paths.

If you feel you are smart now, but can see how wrong you were in the past, it’s worthwhile projecting yourself a decade or two into the future. You can often do this through the eyes of someone that age. Extend your now into the past through the eyes of senior people, and into the future through your dreams.

My last column was about about time in the large. My main message was that it is difficult to plan the big things in life far in advance, but that it was nonetheless important to adopt a ritual of planning. In this installment I invite you to examine shorter cycles of time, and a discipline of time on an everyday basis. If your career is the journey, rituals and routines are the disciplines that keep the ship in shape.

We follow routines because, though sometimes small, they can be essential to our long-term goals. Not brushing your teeth isn’t a big deal but in the long term could lead to losing your teeth, a subsequent poor diet, and eventually, death. Routines are those things we should do almost without thinking. Good routines become a matter of habit. Rituals are those routines that we elevate and celebrate as having social relevance.

Cycles go hand-in-hand with routines and rituals. In The Dance of Life (Peter Smith Publications, 1996), Edward Hall notes that cycles are one of the most powerful organizing principles of human behavior. You brush your teeth according to established cycles: it’s a routine. What are the rituals and routines of a good career? Here are some that are close to me.

Taking stock. In the previous column we talked about updating your direction by reviewing the what's on your plate. Making a routine out of this will increase the chance that it happens. Ritualizing this time celebrates the value of the activity in its own right and may help you gain the support or approval of others. I take an annual celebrated week in the Nordic woods to do this.

Meet with your colleagues. Whether it means just going to work, or the morning standup, or an annual conference, give your colleagues an expectation of seeing you regularly. This is the Fox’s most endearing advice to The Little Prince (Gallimard Press, 1946).

Appreciating others. Write holiday cards. Appreciate your customers and clients, co-workers, and boss. Appreciate colleagues on their birthday.

Take time off. Take time to do nothing and to find rhythms of relaxation. Too many of you who are reading this forget to stop working on weekends. Take some weeks away from the job on an annual cycle. Celebrate annual holidays.

Practice. Give yourself time to refine your talents, both professional and personal. You advance by practice, not by accident.

Write. Writing is crucial to an engineering career. Write regularly. Software great and poet Richard Gabriel taught me to write ritually every morning, exhorting me to write something every day. (I happen to not do it in the morning, but otherwise agree with him.) A diary, technical papers, letters, poetry, a ‘blog: find something to write.

Read. The rapidly arising advances in your field won’t walk up and bite you in the bottom. And no, I don’t mean reading what the dogs write on the Internet. Read good books, good journals, and carefully read the letters of your friends.

Change job or career. As described in the previous article, it’s hard to plan as far ahead as the time between career changes. However, there seem to be cycles even on long time scales. What Color is your Parachute (Ten Speed Press, 2010) describes seven-year cycles. Keep an awareness of these cycles in the back of your mind. You may note they correlate to “interesting times” in your life.

Remember: it’s not just doing these things that’s important. What’s important is to make them routine. The familiar lays a firm foundation for the unexpected.

Most engineers try to plan their career paths. When I graduated, the typical engineer planned to make $50,000 a year within five years, to have 1.3 children, a $200,000 house, and to enjoy stable employment until Armageddon. In the old days, you could do that — as 1950s culture is described in Helgesen’s Everyday Revolutionaries (Doubleday, 1998). And it’s particularly true for engineers. Thomas Allen tells us that engineers do this because they expect stability. Traditional engineers traditionally show corporate loyalty. Scientists, on the other hand, are loyal to their discipline and less so to a firm.

Today you can't plan that far ahead. There is no right time to change career, to get married, to have children, or to stop drinking. There is only what you want to do, and a now. All else is illusion.

“I find that when going into battle, that plans are useless; planning, however I find to be indispensable,” said Eisenhower. Planning is in the moment. A life fully lived responds to the leading of what is most important right now. We can’t control or even change the past, and we’re pretty lousy about predicting the future. We convince ourselves that we can change it, and to a degree, we can — by doing things in the now.

Planning, therefore, should focus on three concepts in sequence: what, how, and when. Start with what. What do you want to achieve — to write a book or finish a program or fall in love or start a family or get a promotion? Don’t worry prematurely about how and when. Lay out before you what makes life worth living.

Second is related to the how. Are some of your whats building blocks for others? Are you missing some whats that are prerequisites for others? Figure out the dependencies between the elements of your vision. Consider everything. Don’t keep a personal calendar and a work calendar; there’s only one You, and that one You should have time to do what’s important at any given moment. Keeping two calendars gives you the illusion of being able to sustain two nows. You can’t. You’ll end sacrificing one of them.

Finally, there is when. A good when has a sense of immediacy: a now-ness. Brand’s The Clock of the Long Now (Basic Books, 1999) admonishes us that now lasted a lot longer in the old days then it does today.

As a concrete example: Right now I am still weary (but nonetheless content) from working on my most recently published book. I am not eager to publish another one right now, but I probably will someday. Maybe it will be a book of collected thoughts on Agile career development. If I were to do that, what would I need? Enough chapters of good ideas to challenge and entertain the reader — and enough energy. I’ll know it when I see it. When will it happen? Some morning I’ll awaken to the light at the end of the tunnel. Thought by thought, the book will have come together. I don’t know when that now will come — or even if it will come.

Over-planning your career like 1950s engineers did causes you to miss open doors. Occasionally bring your ever-changing perspectives together to uncover the new whats that life progressively reveals. However, without reflecting on these whats, you’re just out on a drunkard’s walk. A little housekeeping will help you do what you really want to do. Then, execute. Picasso admonished, “Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.”

True to the unpopular predictions of my friend Haim Levendel 20 years ago, computing has become a commodity industry. Computer and software merchandising isn't much different in 2011 than it was for dish soap in 1960. Both academia and industry know this, and we have been through one or two decades of The Great Dumbing Down.

We’ve come a long way from Diderot, who held that all the world’s knowledge could be captured in a single, although encyclopedic, book. The data on the Internet grows tenfold annually. We simply can’t know everything any more. We have three choices:

• Be a Jack of all trades and a master of none.
• Strive for breadth
• Strive for depth, and leave the breadth issue to team diversity (as I discussed in “Build on your Strengths” some seven installments ago).

If you’ve been reading my previous contributions, you’ll know by now that I value exploration outside one’s comfort zone. Innovation is crucial to most engineering endeavors, and most innovation comes from linking otherwise disparate ideas. This is popularly recognized in research and by the literature; for example, see Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From.” If you have broad foundations, you’ll be better as an individual at working through general problems.

However, we’re still stuck with the fact that we can’t know everything, while success generally depends on a grounding of deep knowledge. Teams sometimes feel safety in numbers independent of experience, but endeavors launched with these assumptions usually end in failure — many failed startups that went forward without business acumen stand testimony to this.

Speaking practically, you need a combination of breadth and depth. My main message here is: Start by striving for depth, because starting conditions are crucial. My secondary message is: Let experience be your guide.

How deep should you go? I’m a depth person. I subscribe to the old saw that the best way to learn a programming language is by writing a compiler for it. I have to admit that I have much empathy for, and was perhaps inspired by, the classic novel "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." Pirsig takes us into a vision of the relationship between rider and machine that starts just as an intellectual toy: How, exactly, do the adjustable shock absorbers work? The relationship becomes more personal with long-term experience. I know that if I shift at this many RPM I can avoid carbon fouling on my spark plug. Eventually the senses shift from monitoring the tachometer needle to recognizing just the right whine and roar in the engine. You need thousands of miles of experience to get a feel for such things.

Let’s say that I was serious about learning object-oriented programming. With Java as my learning tool, I could learn enough to carry on cocktail party conversations and write code for most common environments on Earth. Most contemporary academia adopts such a commodity approach. But if I instead sought a deep learning experience, I would choose Smalltalk, forced to make the paradigm shift instead of being sidetracked by populist compromises. Or, with a good mentor and Ruby or Python in hand, I could better appreciate Kay’s original object vision of programming instead of missing the point in a forest of classes. Then, with experience, I could approach Pirsig’s ideal and know the human experience of OO programming.

As I wrote in Re-making Yourself, fundamentals are crucial. If you want to learn a concept, start deep and narrow to first master the basics. Then the real application and learning can start — with adaptation and experience.

Engineers understand the difference between data and information. In fact, a good deal of information is misinformation, particularly in this Internet age with its instant, personal publication. Publication is less and less a sign of authoritativeness. I used to show my English classes Peter Steiner’s 1993 cartoon of a pooch at a keyboard, saying, "On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog."

The volume of Web data boggles the mind. Each of the world’s 3.2 billion workers would have to read the equivalent of a stack of books 58 kilometers long to digest the information that passed through the Internet in 2010. Bookstores are close behind: The world produces about 400 new English language books every day. The gap between archival literature and trade rags has grown vanishingly small.

Many people have much to say, but few professionals differentiate between opinions they want to convey and facts they want to pass on. In the end, it is in fact all opinion, but we reserve the term “fact” for conclusions that are more broadly or rigorously corroborated within some community’s mores. The natural sciences are fundamental to those mores in engineering, as is broad peer review. The findings of the ages provide the soil on which knowledge grows.

So when you put your pen to paper or bits to a URL, strive to substantiate what you say. Improved business results or process improvements from a single project are insignificant; strive to triangulate your claim by reproducing the results twice. We suffer from case studies; we need longitudinal research. Build on reputable sources that maintain high standards of peer review. These usually include publications from professional societies in your discipline—but even peer-reviewed articles in the trade press should be viewed with suspicion.

I dwell on this topic because I have seen a disconcerting trend in the supposed sciences, and particularly in software, over the past 40 years. We accept the written word as truth, and accept truth by repeated assertion. The Internet is their hand-servant. Both readers and authors suffer from confirmatory bias (imbalance in sources that support and refute some conclusion), but even more so from availability bias. We write and cite concepts within easy grasp — and the Internet extends our memory so information and misinformation are close at hand.

Any claim that is not backed by statistically significant analysis is suspect. Let me underscore that I said suspect, not wrong. Supposedly proven phenomenæ occasionally turn out to be misunderstood. Such is the story of much progression of knowledge in physics, where ongoing experiments cause us continuously to challenge our models. It’s good for engineers to follow suit, and most engineers thus aspire some day to become inventors. Before attaining that level we must first attend to basic respect for, and critical inquiry of, our bodies of legacy knowledge.

On the other hand, there is nothing like a public Wiki to support broad, open peer review. Suspect claims don’t last long on Wikipedia or on active open source sites. There is hope.

No matter what your station in your engineering career, you should treasure critical inquiry. Assess a source’s credentials, and challenge unsubstantiated claims. An amazing volume of ungrounded claims make it into the publications even of professional societies, and few contemporary technical books are grounded in theory, statistically significant evidence, or proof.

The point is not to have an impressive reference list. By all means honor your sources, but honor your reader first. How many sources do you think I investigated in writing this article? Maybe I’m just a dog on the Internet.

I got a great engineering and computer science education from some of the best institutions in the world. Then when I arrived at my first job they had to re-teach me everything important. The important stuff, you'll learn on the job. If you're still in school, seek work-study programs and get a summer job. Seek apprenticeships. If you have the good fortune of being in Finland or another culture that supports work and study at the same time, take advantage of it.

Learning the facts and theory behind engineering concepts is a starting point. It’s important to have the “Aha!” moment when you can truly appreciate a newly learned idea in a simple and direct way. But to make the idea useful, and certainly to take it to its height of value, requires practice. Good practice leads to habitual action. The more that habit guides work, the more your mind is free to focus on increasingly higher levels of accomplishment.

Practice, while literally meaning repetitive exercise, usually implies activities in a safe environment. You practice first, then do the real thing. Sometimes it’s a good idea to hone your skills outside the critical path, and that’s why it’s sometimes good to take a bit of your profession into your hobbies. You’ll find that it comes naturally, anyhow.

But application itself is practice. You become a better negotiator by negotiating. You become better at working with people by working with people. You become a better writer by writing.

Good practice also goes hand-in-hand with reflection, introspection, and feedback. Actions can become so habitual that we entirely lose awareness of them, so it can be hard to notice about whether practice has led to improvement. Take some time to get outside of yourself and reflect on your progress. More importantly, solicit others’ feedback on your performance.

Practice is both about achieving and sustaining excellence. Don’t forget to focus on the fundamentals: great baseball and tennis players always return to the bare basics when they are in a slump.

It takes focus and dedication to achieve and sustain excellence. Because most of us are below average in at least half of those hundred things that we do, we could expend a lot of energy on the lackluster 50. That doesn’t leave much time for polishing the other 50. Partly because of the technical precision inherent to its work, and partly because of its artistic overtones, engineering cultures tend to value excellence over competence. Focus on weaknesses that you can improve, but do so within the realm of your strengths and passions.

Mary Poppendieck urges us to Deliberate Practice — one of her favorite speaking topics. Mary suggests:

In the nature vs. nurture debate, researchers have declared nurture the winner. People who excel are the ones who work the hardest; it takes 10+ years of deliberate practice to become an expert. Deliberate practice is not about putting in hours, it’s about working to improve performance. It does not mean doing what you are good at; it means challenging yourself under the guidance of a teacher.

It’s the deliberate notion here that is important. Whether within or outside the critical path, consciously focus on technique and seek the feedback that will make you better and better.

In practical terms, take up programming as a hobby. Encourage your boss to let you explore, refine, and practice your skills at work. Attend or organize design and programming dojos, design contests, or other activities that deliberately drive you to practice in your work skill set.

Don’t ever get out of practice.

Writing has become a lost art. The US Department of Education estimated that 1 in 7 Americans are functionally illiterate, a figure relatively unchanged from 1992 to 2003. Effective written communication complements effective verbal communication. (Before we go too far, let me also remind you to hone your listening and verbal communication skills. Given the option of verbal or written communication, verbal communication is almost always a win in a small group.)

When we write for an audience, we aspire to move the world a bit in our direction. Sometimes we seek a bit of immortality by contributing to a body of literature that will outlive us. In either case, what we write matters — perhaps more so than our more ephemeral verbal communication. Writing, therefore, begs the discipline to evaluate consequences. Good writing is leadership. Use writing to develop a following in a direction that adds value to the community and the world.

Good writing is hard work, but discipline can make our writing more effective. If there is one universal rule, it is to continuously revise: evolve good works into great works. You and your work should be agile, responding to newfound inspirations, learning, and insights. Though in the end a written work carries its message unaided to the world, any work in progress should be embedded in dialog and dialectic. Too many writers use the pen as a one-way tool. Keep the conversation going until it fades — then, it’s time to hit the SEND button, or to publish.

While we usually think of writing as outwardly focused, it is in fact a great way to challenge and reflect on you own prejudices. Forster quips, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” It is not only others who can challenge a work in progress: use your own internal dialog to challenge yourself. You may find that writing becomes a tool to keep you more honest with yourself.

Rather than standing on their tiptoes, great writers stand on the shoulders of giants. A great engineer goes beyond his or her own wiles and educational foundations not only to build on the knowledge of colleagues and friends, but of all of those who have gone before. I’m not talking about Googling the web for pithy quotes, but about investing in the topic about which you are writing. The research that accompanies great writing helps you appreciate the world around you and to see it with new eyes. Writing can be a great medium to pass on treasured insights that others have given you. Give them credit.

If you're in college, take literature and poetry classes. Keep a diary. Write poetry. Find a pen pal and write letters. If you’re a programmer, remember that computers are people, too, and that code is — or should be — literature. Name every identifier with the same care as naming a first-born child. Express the business goal crisply in your code. When editing a colleague’s code, treat it with the dignity you would accord to their poetry. And whatever your station in life, you’ll find that voracious reading will improve your writing — whether the medium be articles, code, or a book.

Good writing emerges from habits, and habits emerges from practice. Richard Gabriel once advised me to try out his habit of honing every Email into a refined work of literature. While it is helpful to learn the more formal tools of rhetoric, in the end you become a good writer by writing. Why do you think I do this blog?