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Ahmet Sönmez
Ahmet Sönmez

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Here are some tips to help you become a better engineer.

No matter what sector you work in, if you are an engineer, these humble suggestions will be useful to you.

You should learn the domain you are working on very well

No matter which sector you work in, you should not get stuck in the scope of your responsibility. Whether you are working in e-commerce, healthcare, automotive or even in a completely unique niche area, you need to know the entire process and dynamics of that sector well.

The most important advantage of this is that it will reveal the differences in your interpretation of future demands, in producing solutions and in your perspective on problems. Otherwise, you will only be evaluating all stages from your own small window.

Writing may be difficult but it is necessary!

It is vital to document all the stages you have just introduced into the process, planning or production. Adding this power to your life will have many advantages.

You will be able to quickly recall the changes and innovations made in the future, from the needs and demands that arose, to the reasons why such a decision was made at that moment. Also, you don’t want to have to explain all this work separately over and over again each time. This will work for everyone else but you. As an engineer, you will avoid the time cost and document it.

Every idea requires a demo!

If you have an idea and want to put it into practice, make sure you do a tangible and visible demo of it. This will make it easier for the people you tell about your idea to understand you better and give you feedback. It’s easy to dream, but you don’t produce that dream in the same way in everyone’s world.

The shortest and most practical way is a demo. In this demo, it will be much more effective, especially when you concretize the gains before and after with numbers. Clearly demonstrating the difference will play an important role in getting approval for your ideas. Just as every claim requires evidence, every idea requires a concrete work.

Keep everyone up to date!

Finalize the work you have started or taken over. The most important criterion at this stage is to inform stakeholders about interim updates. This could be your manager, teammates or customers. Keep them informed often without people asking you where they are with the latest status. This will increase trust in you. It will also save time and trust as the people who are responsible for you won’t need to follow up with you.

You must support!

You are not only responsible for your own team. If you are asked for support, do not turn it down, according to the possibilities and planning. Make the best use of these requests with effective methods in short periods of time, without disrupting your own work.

Keep in touch!

Good communication with all the stakeholders and teams you work with will improve both the quality of your work and the tolerance towards you in a positive way. After all, we work with people and even though we work professionally, we cannot ignore our emotions.

When we manage to communicate our human sides and emotions in good faith, we will see that many things are already solved more easily. This is not a relationship of interest, but rather an effort to do something without forgetting that we are only human. This will remind us of the idea of remaining human in every success or failure. We have less tolerance for people we don’t know and don’t converse with. However, when we do know people, we can guess how they think, what their mood is at that moment, and we can look at things from a broader perspective.

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