#48 - Communicate to Become a Happy & Productive Engineer - Chris Laffra

“A lot of engineers are unhappy and a lot of that has to do with not being able to control their environment, or even articulate what they want to have changed in the environment. By becoming a better communicator, you will also become happier." Chris Laffra is an experienced and talented software engineer having worked in companies such as IBM, Google, and Uber. His wide variety of experiences ensures Chris understands what motivates engineers, what stresses them out, and how to help them get the most out of themselves. In this episode, Chris shared some insights from his book “Communication for Engineers” about why communication is such an important skill for engineers and how they should learn to improve it to become more impactful engineers. Chris also shared great insights and tips on how to deal with engineers’ typical sources of unhappiness–impostor syndrome, stress, and burnout–in order to become successful, productive, and happy engineers. Listen out for: Career Journey - [00:04:53] “Communication for Engineers” Book - [00:06:37] Why Engineers Have Difficulty Communicating - [00:09:51] Importance of Communication for Engineers - [00:13:18] Communication for Performance Review and Promotion - [00:21:54] How to Become More Impactful Engineers - [00:30:58] Impostor Syndrome - [00:42:01] How to Deal with Impostor Syndrome - [00:45:18] Handling Burnout - [00:53:58] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom - [00:56:40] _____ Chris Laffra’s Bio Chris Laffra is an experienced software engineer with a strong drive to help other engineers grow. Chris has been a manager, tech lead, technical lead manager, advisor, mentor, and staff software engineer with companies such as IBM, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Google, Uber, Plato, and Sourcegraph. This wide variety of experiences ensures Chris understands what motivates engineers, what stresses them out, and how to help them get the most out of themselves. Through decades of personal experience, Chris has analyzed and summarized the topic of software development into numerous blogs, presentations, and books. The summit of his work is his book Communication for Engineers and the accompanying interactive course. Follow Chris: Website – https://chrislaffra.com/ LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrislaffra/ Twitter – https://twitter.com/laffra GitHub – https://github.com/laffra Medium – https://laffra.medium.com/ “Communication for Engineers” book – https://amzn.to/3eP9FH0 Chris’s episode notes – https://chrislaffra.com/TLJ/ Our Sponsor Are you looking for a new cool swag? Tech Lead Journal now offers you some swags that you can purchase online. These swags are printed on-demand based on your preference, and will be delivered safely to you all over the world where shipping is available. Check out all the cool swags by visiting https://techleadjournal.dev/shop. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback. Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. Pledge your support by becoming a patron. For more info about the episode (including quotes and transcript), visit techleadjournal.dev/episodes/48.