Improving our decision-making skills
In my opinion, making decisions can be one of the toughest challenges we can face in our life. Not being a hundred percent sure of what the outcome of the decision we made will be, is going to make it a really difficult task.
Making decisions is part of our day to day, we are accustomed to decide certain things each day such as “What should I eat for breakfast today?” or “Should I get up now or should I sleep for 5 more minutes?”. Basically, we go through our day taking a lot of decisions, some more important than others of course but after all, is one of the actions that we perform the most throughout the day.
As a software apprentice I consider it is really important to listen to what others with more experience in the area would suggest about how to approach certain tasks or projects, but this past couple of days I’ve been focusing on growing and improving on this area. I do not plan to continue all my life as a software apprentice, so learning to make decisions is something I need to focus on. Also, I have to be able to take decisions by myself, if I plan on growing as a software developer, I should not be guided by the hand all the time, I do have to learn to be autonomous.
Something that I consider key and that we need to be aware of is that mistakes will be made through our learning and growing process. We are all humans, one of the most imperfect beings in the entire universe, making errors or not making the right decisions is allowed, what is important and what we need to focus on in these cases, is to learn from the mistakes we made and improve to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Here is where communication comes in, communicating our decisions is important so others can be aware of our next actions and also provide any feedback because doing anything. This can prevent things from going totally wrong to have the expected results, that’s how important it is.
In a previous meeting, I was asked about the difference between an inexperienced engineer and an experienced one, my response was kind of obvious, an experienced engineer is most of the time someone that produces better code, has better organizational skills and that has a profound knowledge about the technologies he works on. In fact, I wasn’t providing an incorrect answer but it was more focused on the technical part rather than the engineer as a professional.
One of the things I didn’t have in mind at the time was the decision-making skills that a more experienced engineer has, and by now I completely understand and agree. Being a more autonomous professional, able to make decisions on our own it’s one of the main characteristics of an experienced engineer that denotes reasoning, intuition, emotional intelligence, and responsibility which are also really important soft-skills to have in any work environment.
At the current time, I am still learning and growing in this field. Making important decisions can be frightening and scary at the beginning since we will be responsible but let's not get completely overwhelmed by this feeling, take it as an opportunity to grow and learn. If things go bad, have in mind that first, we did it thinking it was the best, it wasn’t our intention to cause something to break or to stop working, and second, that almost everything has a solution, don’t be too hard on yourself.
Look at everything in a positive way and for sure you will grow and improve from it!