one of the things we like to talk about on the show often is the types of differentiators that you look for that signify that an engineer is a little more experienced is a little bit more senior. And these are differentiators both in the sense that you're looking for them as a signal. In other words, these are kind of signifying that the engineer has some kind of experience, but they're also desirable traits. And we've talked about these on the show before. In today's episode, I want to talk about one that fits both of these categories, that it is a signal of maturity. But generally speaking, it's also a desirable trait. A lot of the things that signify whether you are a senior or kind of more senior in your experience versus more junior are hard to fake. We've talked about this recently on the show and how to kind of accelerate your experience gathering processes. And that experience, we outlined that experience can be difficult to gain. And quickly. So finding ways of simulating and gaining experience through simulation is a useful endeavor. But I want to focus in on a specific psychological factor or behavior that tends to follow engineers that gain the most influence in their careers. I want to frame this through the lens of the typical job search. If you were to imagine. Most of you probably can imagine what a great interview looks like, especially one where you're being asked about your experience. Most people would probably agree that a great interview has questions that are germane, that makes sense to your experience, that you're able to answer those questions authoritatively. In other words, you can recall information that is relevant. To the question. But most critically, and this is where the star framework comes in, especially the R part of the star framework, but really the whole thing. The situation, task, action, and result. The most critical aspect of a great interview. Is that you are able to demonstrate your ability. To affect change. Let me say this again. The star framework. Is fundamentally about. Your ability to assess. The situation. Play your role in that situation. In a way. That affects change. And I can prove this to you. The average. Engineer, especially if you are younger in your career. A lot of what you're going to do. Is whatever you're told to do. And this is normal. There's nothing wrong. With this. Just for clarity. For clarity's sake. Especially for younger engineers. Being, you know, kind of taking the actions that you're told to take. Is a reasonable decision. There are other more senior engineers. Who have experience. They are helping guide you. So you can develop intuition. This is that part of that experience gathering. Part of what we were talking about earlier. Making a decision without that experience. You know, you certainly will learn. But. It's less informed. Right. So you're, you're most likely going to. You know, ask what it is. And that your job entails. And then go and try to execute. On those responsibilities. But. Even. As a young engineer. And it's certainly as a more experienced engineer. Your ability to direct your action. So that affects change around you. Not just that it checks a box. At the same time. is highly correlated with your ability to grow in your career. We're going to take a quick sponsor break and then I'm going to come back and give you a mental model for thinking about this as a principle. How can you think about this concept of affecting change as a principle? You don't want to just affect change blindly. You want to be able to affect the important change. I want to give you a mental model that will help you frame this and you can easily remember it as you move forward in your career and in your personal life. We'll be right back. It's been a long time since I last touched a website builder. 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All of that is neatly wrapped up in an automatically maintained infrastructure for total peace of mind. Work in a developer-first ecosystem. Head over to wixstudio.com. That's W-I-X studio dot com. So we're talking about the ability to affect change. To affect change. To affect change. This is really the way that you see yourself in the world. And so the mental model that I want to provide you is for any role in your life, and especially in your work role, to think about working in that role versus working on your situation. So working in the role is passive. You are trying to conform to the role itself. Working on the role or working on the situation is a more active posture. What does this look like? It looks like, for example, fixing systematic issues rather than just dealing with bugs as they arise. It looks like helping your teammates. Level up and investing in your team culture and the systems of building rather than just learning the next coding language. Some of this may feel counterintuitive because in your mind you might be thinking, well, learning the next coding language is affecting change, isn't it? Nobody's telling me to do that. It's proactive. And yes, being proactive is kind of the direction that this leads toward. Right. But just being proactive is not the same thing as operating on the world around you. My desire for anybody listening to this episode is to capture your agency. Your agency. What this means is you are an agent in the world. You can make decisions for yourself. You can make decisions about how you're going to behave on the role that you're working on. So if you are, just trying to conform, that's a reduced level of agency. So I want you to shift this thinking from in to on. What role are you in? Try to avoid this kind of mental model or framing for your job. You're not in a role. Yes, you have a title. Yes, somebody else might say you're in that role. But you're working on. And you could say, you're working on the role. You're working on the team. You're working on the problem. In fact, answering that question may actually illuminate a new pathway for you. A pathway of agency. What is it that you're actually working on? Are you working on the team? Are you working on the problems that the business has? Are you working on the culture? Are you working on yourself? Perhaps all of the above. But being very clear about what you're actually working on. What do you care about changing? That is the key question for growth in your current position. If you're not working on changing anything, then you're unlikely to grow. These things are kind of hand in hand. You're not working on changing. Therefore, nothing's going to change. These star questions that you would get asked in an interview. You don't really have many results. They're meaningful. Because nothing's really changing. I want you to understand that this is an attitude that you can adopt early in your career. It makes sense for you to think about what you're working on based on your experience level. Pushing the boundaries and trying to work on, let's say, company strategy, if you're a brand new engineer, might not be the best strategy. It kind of depends on your situation. But let's say you're a, brand new engineer, and you just joined a company, and the onboarding documentation just isn't very good. Well, one thing you could do is try to muddle through, get through the onboarding, tell your manager about it, and just hope that things get better. Or you could work on the onboarding. You could improve the onboarding for the next person. You can join the many late night debugging sessions that are caused by the incidents, that your unstable code base is creating in your organization. Or you could do some root cause analysis and some strategic thinking around, how do we avoid those problems altogether? Can we fix it upstream? Is there something we can do to reduce the number of incidents rather than just being able to respond to them? Thinking in this manner, changing your mindset from operating as a part of the world, rather than as a part of the world, rather than operating on the world. Move towards on versus in. This is a signifier for senior engineers, and it's going to give you a much better story for your career progression. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer D. Thank you again to today's sponsor, Wix Studio. Wix Studio is a developer-first ecosystem. It will allow you to spend less time on tedious tasks and more time on your work. And more on the functionalities that matter the most. Develop online in a VS Code-based IDE or locally via GitHub. Extend and replace a suite of powerful business solutions. And ship faster with Wix Studio's AI Code Assistant. All that is wrapped up in that automatically maintained infra for total peace of mind and a single-click deployment. Work in a developer-first ecosystem at wixstudio.com. Thanks so much for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed this discussion, you would probably enjoy talking to the other engineers in the Developer D Discord community. Head over to developerd.com slash discord. I hope you all are having a wonderful end of the year. And until next time, enjoy your tea.