Maximize Your Productivity As A Software Engineer
Software engineers aren't paid an insane amount of money out of the goodness of tech corporations' hearts: It's because they need to consistently deliver while under the weight of sky-high expectations.
Now here's the problem: It is extremely easy to be unproductive as an engineer, even if you're working incredibly hard. There are so many software engineers out there who are working 80+ hour weeks but barely meeting expectations.
If you're frustrated with how little you're getting from your time, let's fix that and turn you into a rockstar who also has respectable work-life balance. After going through this course, you will:
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💯 Know the true most important productivity booster
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💡 Champion the right mentality to foster productivity
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🏃♂️ Use the right tactics to move faster
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🛡️ Have shields to prevent you from wasting time
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🤔 Learn how to debug a lack of productivity
At the end of the day, time is the only resource that matters. With every minute of your day, you have an effectively infinite amount of ways to spend it, most of them inefficient. In a nutshell, this course will empower you to make the right decision with every unit of your time so you can get more done with less of it.
Alex Chiou is a proven Silicon Valley engineer with 10+ years of experience across top tech companies like PayPal, Course Hero (now Learneo, a $3.6B unicorn), Meta, and Robinhood, where he was a high-performing tech lead making $750,000/year working ~30 hour weeks.
FAANG Rockstar
Alex spent the biggest chunk of his career at Meta (~4 years), a company that's notorious for ruthlessly cutting low-performers and demanding the world from their engineers (literally forcing them to go from junior -> senior within 5 years).
Despite this, Alex got an "Exceeds Expectations" rating or higher in every single one of his performance reviews? How did he do it? Simple: By getting far more done than most other Meta engineers. During his later years at Meta, Alex got the following done every half (6 months):
- Landed ~270 commits (Top 5% code committer)
- Reviewed ~720 commits (Top 1% code reviewer)
- Got 100+ public thanks
- Mentored ~5 engineers to promotions (more than several engineering managers)
Alex was able to do this despite averaging ~40 hour weeks at Meta, rarely working weekends and late nights.
Work-Life Balance Champion
Alex has always believed that the healthiness of your personal life and career are deeply interconnected, striving to live that reality by hyper-efficiently spending his time. From Meta to Robinhood and now Taro, Alex has:
- Spent time with his parents every week
- Found time to regularly hang out with his friends
- Done all the cooking for himself and his wife
- Done a bunch of other chores around the house
- Gotten consistent sleep and exercise
- Made time for his hobbies (any other Genshin Impact and Magic: The Gathering players out there?)
It may seem impossible, but you can indeed have it all, even if your goal is to be a high-performing engineer at a top tech company. You simply need to be smart with your time, and Alex is living proof of that.
This course provides highly applicable content. After nearly a month of studying at Taro, I've become more productive and continue to improve each day.
Before I used to sleep for < 5 hours and achieve less, but ever since I started sleeping for more than 7 hours, or less than or equal to 8 hours (7 < hour <= 8), I achieve a lot for my day and I enjoy programming more than ever.
This course is amazing, there's so much learning from it. The biggest takeaway for me is having a bias towards action and focusing on producing vs just consuming. I love that the course talked about having a foundation which sets up the stage for being hugely productive. Even if I take a few action items from this course like reflection, using decomposition, and have the right mindset which Alex talked about extensively I think it'll take me very far.
The self-1/1 meeting was a great tip. Thanks for the course Alex, it was great as always :)
My favorite tip was to make sure you work on the right things (including how to identify these) and how to push back when others try to push random tasks onto you.
Great tips and ideas. Super helpful.
Great advice :)!
Amazing course! The last lesson in particular with the action items is gold 👌
