Six Factors of Learning To Look For In a New Work Environment

Some environments support a higher personal/professional growth rate than others. Six factors to weigh when choosing a job or team, each with questions to probe it:

1. Fast growth. When problems outnumber resources, there’s room to make impact and take on responsibility, and growth attracts more talent (a virtuous cycle). Stagnation breeds politics and squabbling over scarce opportunities.

   • Growth rates of core metrics (active users, ARR, products sold)?
   • Are your initiatives a high priority with real support?
   • How aggressively has hiring gone in the past year?
   • How quickly have the strongest people moved into leadership?

2. Training. Strong onboarding and mentorship signal that the org actually invests in ramping people up. Lau cites Google’s engEDU classes and Facebook’s six-week Bootcamp; smaller companies won’t match the volume but good teams build their own equivalents.

   • Are new people left to fend for themselves, or is onboarding formalised?
   • Is there formal or informal mentorship?
   • What has the company done to keep people learning?
   • What have team members learned recently?

3. Openness. No growing org gets product, design or process right first try; the ones that win continuously learn from mistakes. Look for a culture of curiosity (questions encouraged) paired with openness (feedback and information shared proactively) — post-mortems, reviewing investment returns, etc.

   • Do employees know other teams’ priorities?
   • Do teams reflect on whether launches were worth the effort?
   • Are there post-mortems after outages, and how is knowledge documented and shared?
   • What lessons has the team learned?

4. Pace. Faster iteration means a faster feedback loop and faster learning. Long release cycles, heavy approvals and indecisive leadership slow you down; automation, lightweight approvals and a willingness to experiment speed you up. (Lau’s example: at Google, even experimental search UI changes went all the way up to a weekly review with Marissa Mayer.) Startups iterate faster but watch for burnout — find a sustainable pace.

   • Is speed reflected in company/engineering values?
   • What tooling increases iteration speed?
   • How long from idea to launch approval?
   • What share of time goes to maintenance vs. new work?

5. People. Surrounding yourself with people smarter and more creative than you means surrounding yourself with teachers. Who you work with can matter more than what you work on. Meet potential teammates before joining rather than leaving it to luck.

   • Did your interviewers seem smarter than you?
   • Are there skills they can teach you?
   • Were the interviews rigorous?
   • Is the culture solo work or genuine collaboration?

6. Autonomy. Freedom over what you work on and how drives learning — provided you have the support to use it. Established companies offer specialisation plus structure and coaching; smaller ones give far more autonomy but demand you own your own growth. (At Quora, Lau ranged across experimentation tools, real-time analytics, site speed, infra, recommendations, spam detection, mobile, plus training and mentoring programs — breadth that’s hard to get at a large company.)

   • Do people choose their own projects and approaches?
   • How often do people switch teams or projects?
   • How much of the codebase can one person touch in a year?
   • Do engineers influence product design and direction?

These factors vary by company and team, and their relative importance shifts over a career — onboarding and mentoring matter more early on, autonomy more later. When switching, ask the right questions to confirm it’s a good fit with ample learning opportunities.

Source

Edmond Lau, The Effective Engineer, Ch. 2.