This episode explores the complex landscape of receiving advice in your career, particularly during uncertain times. It offers insights on how to critically evaluate feedback and external information, prepare for potential negative outcomes outside of your control, and adapt your focus to thrive in a changing industry.

• Explore why the vast amount of advice you receive throughout your career, including feedback from bosses and peers, platitudes, anecdotes, data, opinions, and facts, will shape your thinking.
• Discover that even people you trust and consider authoritative may give advice you shouldn't listen to. Sometimes, all the positive signals and feedback you receive may not predict negative career events like layoffs or not getting a promotion.
• Learn not to stop listening to feedback, but instead listen for themes and common threads that resonate with your gut intuition.
• Understand the importance of contextualising people's assertions, testing them, and putting them through the wringer. However, even when following great advice and testing it, you might still experience negative events like a layoff, as luck and chaos agents are often at the helm and are not under your control.
• Discover why it is important to not only prepare for luck but also to prepare for failure modes – situations that go poorly regardless of your upfront actions.
• Learn that resilience, preparation, and the ability to absorb impacts (becoming antifragile) are likely to happen because you recognise what happens in the margins and prepare for eventualities you may not think are likely, rather than solely from receiving good advice.
• Consider that there are no real silver bullets or secret answers in career advice; moments of wisdom shared by others are often just a snapshot of one experience.
• Learn to make decisions within your limited context and apply advice dynamically, considering how it changes with environmental shifts and plays out in unlucky scenarios.
• Discover the advice to be a little bit more skeptical of the advice you believe the most and a little more accepting of advice that might seem counterintuitive or on the fringes.
• Explore the crucial shift in focus from developing skills to emphasising ownership and responsibility to combat fear about the industry changing and your skills potentially losing value due to factors like AI or layoffs.
• Understand that taking responsibility means being willing to be the accountable person and figuring out how to achieve goals, which doesn't necessarily require having the skill yourself but rather being willing to supervise, verify, or import skills.
• Recognise that ownership and responsibility are difficult to export or outsource, and a human in the loop is critical for taking ownership and finishing the job, unlike trying to hold an AI accountable.
• Learn the practical advice to drive conversations with your manager towards growing your scope of responsibility, accountability, and ownership, which builds trust and reliability beyond just your skill set.
• Understand that your perception of the criticality of your tasks and meetings is usually inflated, and the ramifications of not attending are often much smaller than you imagine.
• Discover a tactical method to evaluate your obligations (meetings, tasks) based on their pliability (ease of being moved or changed) and volatility (risk/negative effect of changing it) to help you manage your time.
• Learn to be ruthless in identifying how you spend your time.

If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.

If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today!.

If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to ratethispodcast.com/devtea and leave a review!. Leaving a review on platforms like iTunes is very impactful and helps other developers discover the show.

This episode addresses the fear surrounding industry changes, such as AI and potential outsourcing, and offers actionable advice for engineers, managers, and leaders to navigate these challenges. You'll learn why shifting your focus from just developing skills to embracing ownership and responsibility is crucial for long-term career resilience and agency.

• Understand the fear and concern that traditional skills may lose value due to industry changes, including AI and potential layoffs.
• Discover the critical shift needed in your career focus from solely developing skills towards embracing ownership and responsibility.
• Learn why responsibility and ownership are becoming increasingly valuable and are difficult to outsource or export, contrasting with skills which may become more fluid.
• Explore how human agency, including judging success, setting goals and direction, and translating inputs into action, complements or supervises work potentially done by machines or outsourced teams, with the human taking ultimate responsibility.
• Gain practical advice on how to apply this shift by discussing where your responsibility, accountability, and ownership can grow in conversations with your manager.
• Recognise how focusing on increasing the things you are personally accountable for builds trust and reliability, qualities that extend beyond your technical skill set.
• Understand that accountability, ownership, responsibility, and reliability are becoming core behaviours for a good engineer as skills become more fluid.
• Find support and discussion with other engineers by joining the Developer Tea Discord community.

If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.

If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today! You can also directly message the host on Discord.

If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you. You can also find this episode and all past episodes on developertea.com.

This episode provides tactical ways to own your time, reduce meeting load and obligations, and regain agency, especially when feeling burnt out. You'll learn how to use a simple two-part model focusing on Pliability and Volatility to evaluate your tasks and meetings and make intentional choices about how you spend your time.

• Learn how owning your time is a critical first step in combating burnout, tiredness, and feeling worn out, helping you evaluate whether you feel agency over your time.
• Understand the principle that not all time is equal, whether it's sacred personal time or different times of day at work, and why you shouldn't treat it equally.
• Discover a simple two-part model using the characteristics of Pliability and Volatility to evaluate your obligations, such as meetings and tasks.
• Learn the definition of Pliability – how easily an obligation can be moved, changed, or cancelled, representing its flexibility.
• Understand the definition of Volatility – the risk, downsides, and potential compound negative effects associated with changing or not attending an obligation.
• Evaluate your tasks and meetings using their Pliability and Volatility scores to identify obligations that can likely be moved, made smaller, or cancelled with minimal downside, particularly those with low volatility and high pliability.
• Explore why our perception of the criticality of our obligations is often inflated, and how the actual ramifications of changing them are usually much smaller than what we expect.
• Learn how applying this model can help you consolidate obligations, create longer blocks of focus time (especially useful for engineers), and ultimately regain ownership and agency over your schedule.

If you enjoyed this episode and would like me to discuss a question that you have on the show, drop it over at: developertea.com.

If you want to be a part of a supportive community of engineers (non-engineers welcome!) working to improve their lives and careers, join us on the Developer Tea Discord community by visiting https://developertea.com/discord today!

If you're enjoying the show and want to support the content head over to iTunes and leave a review! It helps other developers discover the show and keep us focused on what matters to you. You can also find this episode and all past episodes on developertea.com.