you can listen to this podcast and read books all day long you can listen to thought leadership and gain a lot of insight i don't want to downplay it it's a lot of insight into theory and the mechanics of being a great engineer being a great manager at the end of the day applying those things in a practical manner looks different for a given day you can't apply to entirely different philosophies this is one of the critical uh uh factors of success for a good software engineer for a good manager and we'll call this a senior mindset a trade of a senior uh software engineer or a trade of a senior plus staff plus this is high level engineering conception here and that is to recognize constraints this seems so simple but recognizing constraints is a very difficult task to do you and it's not really just a task this is an ongoing mindset recognizing your constraints means that very often in fact most of the time you are saying no to great ideas most of the time you are ignoring the vast majority of wisdom the vast majority of advice that you receive the vast majority of opportunity this is because you are saying no to great ideas and you are saying no to great ideas and you are saying no to great ideas With constraint, you have to choose. You have to limit what you are willing to invest in. And this can be painful. It can be difficult to accept. It can be painful because sometimes you're wrong. And ultimately, the theory doesn't always describe the practice. An example of recognizing this and applying it in reality is to understand the list of experiments that you'll never get to run. Think about this for a second. If you have an experiment that you want to run that requires that your experiment time frame lasts, let's say, two years. Imagine that your experiment is a project at a startup. Not necessarily the main project. Well, this is a project. This experiment, no matter how well designed, is very unlikely to be acceptable to, let's say, the leadership in your startup. Maybe you have investors. It's unlikely that your investors are willing to allow you to run a true two-year experiment without really compelling evidence that this experiment is going to lead to insights that will lead to cash. This is a difficult reality to accept, because the experiment may be incredibly well designed. You may have a lot of confidence that you're going to learn something very important, but the practicality of the experiment is simply not matching up to reality. Similarly, you recognize the simple fact that you only have one career. And so running an experiment with your career, well, you don't really get a chance to do it. You don't really get a chance to get it over. The experiment is too expensive. And so most senior engineers are going to run those experiments only in their minds. They're going to do thought experiments rather than actual practical experiments. And so this dichotomy of learning all of this theory and applying a very small percentage of it really comes down to the ability to choose what is most applicable in a given situation. This is the trait that we're talking about today. That is the ability to recognize what kinds of advice, what kinds of theory or practice, what kinds of mental models to apply in a circumstance to yield the most important outcome for that situation. You can have... You can have all of this information available to you. And it is important. That's why we continue to do this show. It is important to have this wide variety to pull from. But there is a vast majority of this knowledge that you may gain that will never be used in a practical situation. And we have to be okay with that. If you are dissatisfied because you are not getting an opportunity to use your knowledge, you are not getting an opportunity to use your knowledge. You are not getting an opportunity to use your knowledge. You are not getting an opportunity to use your knowledge. If you are not getting an opportunity to use all of your knowledge, then it takes some time to come to terms with this. But you may need to take a step back and recognize what the purpose of this knowledge is in the first place. If you have knowledge that you never use, that doesn't necessarily mean that that knowledge was ill-gained. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. If you enjoyed this discussion, if you'd like to take it a step further, maybe you have disagreements, with what we're saying here, or maybe you have some addition or an addendum to what we're saying, I'd love to hear it. You can join me and a bunch of other software engineers and non-software engineers, for that matter, in the Developer Tea Discord community. Head over to developertea.com slash Discord to get started totally free today. Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, enjoy your tea. Thank you.