# How I work

In my career, I’ve seen a pattern of people of providing documents describing their work ethic. It is meant to provide a quick read of “these are the reason I do these things”. There are variations that also include “How to work with me.”

As an exercise, I wanted to build my own document. It will be changing document.

• Introduction: Provide a brief overview of your professional background, skills, and experience.

  • Software engineer for 15+ years.
  • Have built things for startups and large enterprise clients. Including single user software and millions of users per day.
  • A generalist that believes in the right tool for the job.

• Work ethic: Discuss your approach to work, such as your values, beliefs, and principles.

  • Want to build maintainable software, through simple concepts and approaches.
  • Prefer sharks over dinosaurs, sharks are still around, dinosaurs are extinct. Source

• Communication style: Explain how you prefer to communicate with coworkers, clients, and supervisors.

  • Direct Communication » Process » Tools

  Being able to approach anyone within your team (or organization) is always going to have the greatest impact. This is how you build relationships.

  When repetitive communication occurs, process can be implemented to streamline. It helps define what the expectation is of the communication – decision making, status updates, prioritization, etc.

  Tools help facilitate and complement a process that has been standardized. If you cannot do your process without your tool, it is not filling the need properly.

  • When being remote, one-on-one’s mean hands off keyboard. Let’s talk to each other, not get distracted by slack.

• Time management: Outline your methods for prioritizing tasks, staying organized, and meeting deadlines.

  • Availability and accessibility. If I am not in a position to give someone 10 minutes then things like Direct Communication can never occur. I will work to reorganize my schedule to fit time. People over meetings.
  • Prioritization is more important than deadline. When setting a deadline, we are setting a goal, it translates to “everything needs to be done.” Having the ability to prioritize gives the flexibility for delivery before a deadline.

• Problem-solving: Discuss your process for identifying, analyzing, and resolving issues.

  • Before we can solve a problem, we need to be able to define a problem. Too often engineers have a solution, but cannot define the problem.

• Collaboration: Describe your approach to working with others, including your strengths and any challenges you have faced in the past.

  • Prefer one-on-one over throwing over the wall. This does not mean just engineer to engineer. Different disciplines can approach each other to collaborate. I’ve worked with product managers and designers in live collaboration

• Feedback: Discuss how to receive and give feedback in the workplace.

  • When providing feedback, I appreciate an approach communicating the intended goal and offering actionable suggestions. If you find it challenging to approach me directly, please feel free to share your feedback with my manager

• Life balance: Introduce the boundaries to ensure work is a means to live.

  • There will be no work-related applications on my smartphone.
  • My work hours will be defined so that I am accessible for communication.

• Conflict Resolution:

  • positive and respectful