Retrospectives of the past three years

It has been almost three years since I started working after receiving my master's degree, so I would like to reflect on these years.

At the first company where I got a job as a full-time engineer, I left there early because I needed clarification about the company's response to Covid-19. I took the safe option and made that decision because there was still a lot that no one knew about Covid at the time. Still, I could have given myself more leeway in making that decision.

After that, I did internships at several companies and finally decided to work at my current company. This company had four employees. At the same time, I also received a job offer from a large company as a contract employee. It was with over 1,000 employees and a good reputation among engineers. I was aiming to get a job at that company when I left the first, but I chose my current company as the one where I would have more control over my work.

In my first year, I didn't know what I was doing right or left, and I needed to figure out what I should aim for as an engineer. I didn't know what kind of things a professional should be able to do. Shortly after I joined the company, my current colleagues joined us. All my colleagues were more senior engineers than me, and I had much to learn from them. Yet, I needed to clarify what direction I should be heading in.

The second year was similar. Or rather, I only remember a little. I had not defined my career goal, did not know the ideal way to work, and was randomly giving locally optimal answers in the dark. I wasn't doing very well at work. My evaluation in the assessment went up less than I had expected.

The third year has been a little different. I began to understand the role of a company in a capitalist economy, and I began to think about what responsibility engineers or I had to the users, investors, colleagues, and stakeholders. My career goals have also become more concrete. Since many people at my company are individual contributors, management roles inevitably tend to be vacant. Besides, I have also gained a better understanding of product and project management as an interest of mine. I read the latest PMBOK, Inspired, and books on user experience and design and did some quantitative research and user interviews. I started recruiting for user interviews, but gathering enough people took much work. I reread Agile Samurai for the first time in several years and practiced Scrum on a small project. It finally dawned on me the difference between Scrum and Kanban.

I still need to see the ultimate goal I want to achieve in the long term. However, what I want to aim for in the next few years is becoming more apparent than before. My current objective is to demonstrate servant leadership in product and project management while doing development as an engineer. As for the key results of the fourth year, I am still thinking. Considering the following candidates:

• learning three new languages,
• creating one new hobby service using these languages,
• reading ten computer science books,
• writing ten articles on what I learned from the books,
• and successfully manage three projects.

I will evaluate my results with 0 to 0.7.