High Growth Engineer
I’m excited to feature Micah Lerner , L6 Staff Engineer and Tech Lead at Google, and author of Micah Learns , a blog with recurring deep dives on technical topics.
Micah attributes a large part of his growth to reading technical whitepapers. In today’s guest post, he will share the value he’s experienced and how you can see similar results.
As a tech lead at Google, one of the highest-impact activities for my growth has been reading cutting-edge academic computer science papers.
For me, this practice led to redefining our team’s strategy in work I presented at the top industry conference on systems reliability, and repeatedly receiving Google’s top performance ratings.
Reading academic computer science will open your eyes to novel technical insights that you can use to level up your work within your team.
One personal story is from reading about Meta’s system for automatic software deployment, which discusses supervising new server releases based on business metrics and changes in user engagement. Because I had read this paper and others, I advocated for a new system designed by our team to gate all changes based on whether the new changes were negatively impacting users.
