High Growth Engineer Update/Break

What's changing and what to expect moving forward

Hi fellow High Growth Engineer 👋

As you can tell from the title, this article will be a bit different. The newsletter, and me, are going through some changes. I care a lot about your support and want to share what’s happening.

📖 TL;DR

Given the changes I’ll talk about, I want to make the takeaways as clear as possible upfront. So, for the first time, you have the TLDR at the beginning 😄

1. For the past 87 weeks, I’ve written an article on this newsletter. But now, I’m taking a break for at least 4 weeks. I want to get some time to recharge, think about what brings me the most value, and what to spend my time on.

2. When I’m back, I won’t hold myself to an “article every week” posting schedule. I’d rather focus on quality and writing when inspiration strikes. When I do post, it will always be at the regular time—Sunday at 8:30AM PST.

3. You’ll still see me on social media. I learn a ton from others and plan to continue doing that. I’ll also still engage and respond like I usually do.

4. The next article you see from me will likely be in January. I might take a longer break. I’ll share informal updates in the High Growth Engineer Substack Chat. In the next article, I’ll share any more updates you need to know.

5. With the extra time I’ll have, I have other ideas to provide as much value as possible to you. Read further to see!

I’ll repeat it, but thank you so much for making this newsletter what it is and helping me get to this point 🙏

🤔 What changed

I always want to do the highest value actions. A consistent, forced commitment to writing an article every week might do that. It was doing that when I first started. But right now, it doesn’t feel like that. When I started, I was learning and growing so much from everything I wrote about. Plus, I was growing my writing skills.

I’ve run into the classic economics marginal utility chart. The marginal utility of focusing all my effort on the newsletter isn’t as high as when I started.

High value jumps initially, but now it’s slowed down after so many weeks

All the benefits I’ve talked about are still there, especially when it comes to growing. The growth is just in much smaller increments. Thinking about it like a video game, my first few articles took me from a 0/100 rating to a 60/100. Now, at almost my hundredth article, I might be going from a 90 → 90.2.

There’s much more to this “value equation,” and mental health plays a big factor. When I first started, my energy was high, and I had a lot to write about. But each subsequent article slowly chips away at you without having a break. I tried scaling back on LinkedIn to help with this, and it helped a lot. Still, I feel like I need to take this one final step to allow myself to recharge and figure out what’s next.

Finally, there’s a changing landscape in tech right now. AI is taking over the world and there are so many cool tools to build. I’ve had many ideas over the last couple of years but never felt I had the time because nearly all of my free time went toward the newsletter. I plan to use the time I’ll get back to learn more about the AI space and potentially build some cool things for you!

📝 My plan for the future

I want to make it clear—I’m not disappearing. I have an amazing audience (you) of growth-minded people and tons of ideas. I just want to spend my time slightly differently and ensure I prioritize my growth and mental health.

• On the growth side, writing an article isn’t giving me as much growth as it used to. Plus, with the way the world is changing, AI opens up a lot of growth opportunities for me. I’d love to invest more there.

• On the mental health side, the “article every week” obligation has taken a toll on me—so I’m aiming for more flexibility.

So, here’s some ideas I have for the future:

• Build tools with AI and share those with you. I have mountains of content and notes I can use to create curated tools for you. I just need to do it! A couple of ideas here are:

  1. A tool to get feedback on your writing, design doc, slack announcement, performance review, etc. It would also suggest improved versions.

  2. A performance review builder. Feed it all your unorganized accomplishments and it would make your performance review for you. It would word bullets well and structure it how I’d recommend.

• Update what I share in the newsletter

  • Share insights from books I’m reading.

  • Share what I’m learning about AI.

  • Keep the writing a bit more light. I might share one or two things I learned that week and a reflection on it.

  • Do more podcast or video-style content, interview guests, and learn from their stories.

  • Do more Q&A style articles where I poll questions in the Substack chat for me to answer for an article.

• Write a book. I have tons of content to get you where you want to be—it’s just about putting it in an even more digestible form.

• Start a paid community where I host sessions to help you grow. We could do an “Article Club” (a book club spinoff) where we read an article and discuss the ideas behind it together to soak in the learning. I could also host live coaching sessions like the ones I love from Ethan Evans.

Note: These are all ideas, not promises. Let me know if you’re a fan of one of the ideas so I can consider prioritizing that.

😅 …This all might change

I’ve felt the need to do this for the past few months. But when I take a break, I might realize that writing an article every week is exactly what I need, and ultimately go back to what you all are used to. Sometimes you don’t know what you got until it’s gone I guess 😂.

The break should help me come to a realization of what to spend my time on, whether it’s to go back to a weekly schedule or do something else entirely.

I hope you understand 🙏

❤️ To my paid subscribers

I’ll send you a separate email to share what this means for you and what I have in store. Your support means the world to me.

Check your email for a message from me!

🙏 Thank you

To all of you, thank you again for such strong support. The personal messages you send about how the newsletter impacted you mean the world to me. It’s amazing to hear about the mindset shift it triggered, the job or promotion it got you, the stress that went away, the growth you’ve experienced, the process you incorporated, the list goes on. Thank you, truly ❤️

Again, this is not goodbye, but rather me just taking some time to figure things out.

👏 Shout-outs of the week

As always, here are some of my top reads this week:

• Emotions: A Code Book on Software Design: Tidy First? — Insightful article on processing your emotions and what they’re telling you. I started to do something similar subconsciously, but Kent filled in the rest of the picture for me.

• How I Prepared for a Staff Data Engineer Interview at Airbnb on DataEngineer.io Newsletter — Zach Wilson shares pro tips for interview studying. Even if you’re not a data engineer, hearing about his experience and how he studied should help you for your next interview.

• A Crash Course On Using AI To Save Time And Focus On What Matters on ByteByteGo by Peter Yang — exactly as it says. There are 7 practical strategies for using AI to save time in your life. I like the “YouTube transcript summarizing” strategy. I’ve been using it more on 1-hour+ long podcasts.