Strengths Are Your Weaknesses

“People are package deals; you take the good with the confused. In most cases, strengths and weaknesses are two sides of the same coin.” — Steve Jobs I’ve noticed something interesting about almost every engineer I’ve managed: their biggest strengths and their most frustrating weaknesses are often the exact same trait showing up in different contexts. I learned this lesson personally when I was still a junior engineer. My ability to code quickly made me very productive — I’d often ship features in half the time estimated. My manager praised my speed constantly. Well, until one day… During a particularly painful postmortem, we discovered that a production issue happened because of an edge case I had missed in my rush to complete the feature. My strength (coding speed) and my weakness (occasionally overlooking details) weren’t separate traits — they were the exact same characteristic showing up differently depending on the context. This isn’t just true for me or a few people — it’s n ... Read full article.