The Software Developer's Career Handbook

Chapter 36. Check Your Work, Ask for Help, and Slow Down

The quality  of your decisions is the currency of leadership.

It starts easy. The stakes are low. There is a legion of leaders around you who understand you’ve just begun, so when they see the decision in front of you, they proactively offer helpful advice. If the decision appears too complicated, excessively risky, or obviously high stakes, your manager raises her hand and helpfully suggests, “I got this one.”

You are thankful because you had no idea how to decide.

It gets harder. The stakes increase. There are more blank stares from trusted peers when these decisions appear not because they don’t want to help but because they don’t know. They have never seen this type of decision before. However, they can, like you, know the importance of this decision and the necessity of it being your decision. Your manager will offer to help, but she’ll wait longer to offer this help because she understands the value of you learning how to make this decision.

Then it seems impossible. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Trusted peers grin nervously as you walk by. They feel equal parts empathy for the difficulty of the decision and relief that it’s not on their shoulders. You have zero intuition on how to make this decision. No, it’s worse than that. You don’t even know how to decompose the problem to start to understand how to make a decision…or decisions?

Easy, hard, or impossible. The decisions merrily show up each day unaware of your ...