Three years ago, I was the sole employee/founder of my startup. Today, I'm CTO of a 21-person company with a 6-person dev team.
As an individual developer, my default loop is "Find something to do. Do it. Repeat."
As a CTO, my default loop is "First, cycle through all my employees and make sure that I have equipped them to be happy and productive in their jobs. Second, find something to do. If possible, delegate it; if not, do it. Repeat."
"First, cycle through all my employees and make sure that I have equipped them to be happy and productive in their jobs. Second, find something to do. If possible, delegate it; if not, do it. Repeat."
This is what I did in my role as team leader and earned the equivalent of Employee of the Year at a large firm. Its quite simple to say, more difficult to successfully implement and often even harder to quantify during a subsequent job interview, because when you do it well, to you its common sense or straight forward doing your job. As a result, its not necessarily easy to train into the behaviour of others. But it is quite easy to undersell (its easy for you) or oversell (can sound arrogant) how you did it and doesn't have the impact it should or could have on a hiring manager. Obviously referrals from those you worked with can be a much better testament to the impact you provided.
As a CTO, my default loop is "First, cycle through all my employees and make sure that I have equipped them to be happy and productive in their jobs. Second, find something to do. If possible, delegate it; if not, do it. Repeat."
I have nothing to add except that this struck me as such an excellent distillation that a mere upvote seemed inadequate.
As an individual developer, my default loop is "Find something to do. Do it. Repeat."
As a CTO, my default loop is "First, cycle through all my employees and make sure that I have equipped them to be happy and productive in their jobs. Second, find something to do. If possible, delegate it; if not, do it. Repeat."