Advice from the Top 1% of Software Engineer

• Every single person wants some kind of influence.

"I want to get a promotion" that's a form of influence you want to influence your manager or " I want to get a different job " so that's part of curriculum influence. 

• Influence is about likability and credibility.

• People will come to you for New Opportunities.
• If I'm building a new startup I'm thinking about who do I want on my team they're going to think of people who have the likability and The credibility together because if you only have one or the other you're okay you might be able to tag along but you're not going to be the first person they think

" It's not about which language you know because as a hiring manager I'm often trying to just understand are you a smart engineer? Can you code because what languages we're using today may not be applicable tomorrow so I want to be able to work with people who can learn new things pick up new skills and that's what I'm interviewing for when I talk to new software Engineers. "

If you are really good at all of them please choose one; what is your thing? what do you want to be known for?

• Blindly following Trends is recipe for failure because you're you're always going to be a step behind.
• So, I encourage people to be inquisitive and explore your passions what are you good at, what do you enjoy doing.

• We decided we're not going to do games we're not going to do gimmicks
• We're not going to throw in bunch of features just to appease every single person
• The way we are going to appease every single person is by focusing on the core utility features.
• Another word you can say is we focused on quality.

• We wanted to drill in to make sure it worked every single time
• Rather than adding on a bunch of new features we would get a lot of emails from people all over the world and they would tell us there was a natural disaster nothing was working the phone lines were down but I was able to use what WhatsApp to call the firefighters and I was rescued or I was in a car accident and I was rescued.

• One word - it's challenging but it was simplicity.
• Simplicity is really prioritizing; it's easy for us to say I'm going to do 10 different things and be really great at it but it's actually much harder to be focused on few core features and few core offerings that we will offer and prioritize them ruthlessly.

• We had ideas like okay we want to make sure even someone in the middle of nowhere with bad internet connection on an old device should be able to use our app.
• So we wanted to prioritize the user experience even people in remote places with bad internet connection on older devices can use our app.
• Every single person understood what we're building