Good Enough At Go

One of my biggest takeaways from the 80000 Hours rabbit hole so far has come from reading their advice on career capital. Previously I have told myself that simply being at a company like my present employer was sufficient in order to accrue meaningful career capital - I was gaining years of experience at a good company on my CV, which will help me get my foot in the door at most places. I’ve mostly been focused on trying to improve my understanding of Golang as much as possible, largely to satisfy my own ego; I tell myself that I am very suited to programming with a very high ceiling, and I’ve wanted to prove that to myself by understanding the language at a very fundamental level. I’ve now re-evaluated and have decided that my efforts could be much better spent focusing on developing other skills; the most important abilities to have in order to have an impact as a software engineer revolve around being able to deliver as much value as part of a team as possible, of which technical language proficiency is only a small part. Given I am already good enough at Golang to be able to tackle pretty much every problem I face day-to-day (at least in the technical sense), it can now go on the backburner and I can now shift my attention towards the bigger picture, like how to refine the development process both for myself and our whole team, how to architect and strategise about technical solutions, and how to collaborate effectively.