The single most valuable lesson you've learned in your professional life

Mentoring new hires.

Mentoring (and really managing) is an extremely high-leverage activity.  Over the course of a year, an employee will spend somewhere between 1880 to 2820 hours working (assuming 47 work-weeks and somewhere between 40-60 hours per week working).  Spending 1 hour every day for a month (20 hours) mentoring or training a new hire may seem like a lot of time, but it represents only about 1% of the total time the new hire will spend working his/her first year and yet can have a significant influence over the productivity and effectiveness on the other 99% of those hours.

Building tools and automating repetitive work.  

Coming from a software engineering background, one high-leverage activity that I tend to do is to build tools that reduce manual, repetitive work. I'm a little biased, but I'm a firm believer that everyone would benefit knowing a little bit about coding (see Computer Programming: Should most young people learn to code?), primarily because there are many fields not traditionally associated with computer science where a mindset of automation would have huge efficiency gains.  Don't do what a machine can do for you.

Invest in learning and in continuously improving.  

This falls in the bucket of "important and not urgent" tasks that Steven Covey describes in his time management matrix in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People [4, 5].  Learning never seems like an urgent task, and it's easy -- if you don't budget time for it -- to allow unimportant interruptions to dictate your schedule.  However, learning is what lets you improve your work productivity and increase the opportunities available, so it's a big high-leverage activity.

Actively prioritizing tasks based on estimated impact. 

 Deciding what I should work on next that would be the highest impact requires regularly reviewing (I try to do this at least weekly) what needs to get done and having the data to guide the decision-making.

Holding tech talks and writing guides to bring new hires on board. 

 Inspired by Google's training regimen, codelabs are documents that explain core software abstractions and concepts that we use, discuss the rationale for why we designed and used them, walk through the relevant code in the codebase, and provide a set of exercises to solidify understanding.  These took many people on the team many hours to write, but they provide a scalable and reusable resource that allow new hires to start on a consistent foundation and cut down the amount of time that each individual mentor needs to spend teaching the same concepts.

Pushing back on meetings without an agenda or meetings that you don't really need to be a part of.  

Poorly run meetings are negative leverage because they waste people's time.  Avoid those.  A corollary to this is defining and setting agendas for meetings that you hold so that you don't waste other people's time.

Spending time on interviews and improving interview processes.  

Conducting interviews is a huge amount of work.  Interviews interrupt your workday, and the hours spent talking with candidates, writing up feedback, and debriefing all add up to considerable amounts.  However, making sure that we're hiring the right people, that we have a good process in place,  and that people we hire are people that I would be excited to work with is essential to building a strong team and a strong product.  There have been many weeks where I've interviewed 4 candidates per week, and I think my personal record during the height of the recruiting season was doing 20 interviews in 20 consecutive workdays.

 

Smart people can still be:

• stubborn and not willing to accept that they are wrong
• apathetic and not care enough about what really matters
• lazy at times and not put their heart into work
• pushovers and let more assertive and confident people steer the ship in a less than excellent direction
• myopic (figuratively) and lose sight of the larger picture
• negative and not see how much progress they've made
• selfish and not be team players
• narcissistic and obsess over their greatness

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