Hey, this is John Sonmez from simpleprogrammer.com and I’ve got an email today from someone
who has a career question about working for a company versus working for yourself.
This email is from Danny and Danny says, “Hey John, I want to pick your brain on something.
I'm sure you’ve encountered along your career path in regards to working for a company versus
working for yourself.
Have you ever found it difficult as a developer working with a team versus working by yourself?
In the past I have been the sole developer on projects and I find it difficult at times
to work in a team environment.
Any feedbacks/advice would be greatly appreciated.
P.S.
I love the hat, tank top and beach look.
Go with it.
Never mind those nay sayers.”
I appreciate that Danny.
I’ve got my hat and the beach look for you since you emailed me.
No, to answer your question here on basically working on a team versus working for yourself,
I’ve also found what you said to be true that sometimes it’s difficult to make that
transition.
I probably have a lot of difficulty doing it now since I’ve gotten so used to working
for myself.
I guess one of the big things that I’ve encountered is the efficiency.
You can’t expect the same efficiency working with someone else or working on a team as
you would by yourself.
You’re going to be able to … When you’re working on your own on a project you can just
sit there and code all day and get a whole bunch of stuff done whereas when you’re
working on the team you got to actually listen to people and you have to take their input.
Maybe you could code this thing up really fast but maybe they have some input to put
into that.
It ends up not being as—you end up not being as productive but you can also produce higher
quality content.
Having multiple people working together on a project you might not be able to produce
as much raw output, but you probably can produce something better especially if you have a
really good team.
That’s the tradeoff and that’s something to keep in mind is that sometimes we can be
really, really focused on how much we put out as opposed to what is the quality of what
we’re putting out.
That’s where a team, especially a team of diverse skills and opinions can really help
out is because you might be able to find a better solution.
A lot of times when I’m coding and working on my own I could spend 6 hours trying to
solve a problem one way and then someone else from a team could—if I was on a team could
have saved me 5-1/2 hours and figured out a way to do it in 30 minutes just by bouncing
the idea off of them.
I often use that even today, right?
I work mostly by myself on the things that I work on, but I miss with a mastermind group.
If you’ve listened to my podcast, if you haven’t go check it out, Entreprogrammers
Podcast.
It’s at entreprogrammers.com.
I’ll put a link below in the video.
I meat with a weekly mastermind group which a mastermind group is a bunch of people that
are sort of like in your industry trying to do similar things that are at the same level
as you or maybe even a little bit higher level than you and you meet with them weekly and
you discuss your ideas and you discuss what you’re doing and you give feedback to each
other.
That really, really helps me.
I see a huge value.
In my business it started to grow a lot more since I started working with a mastermind
group.
By yourself you can only accomplish so much.
That’s a key thing I think to think about.
You just got to get your mindset in the right frame which is that you need other people
if you want to really be super successful.
No one makes it all on their own, right?
You’ve heard of standing on the shoulders of giants.
It’s important to have someone else to work with at some level.
Now, on a day to day operation will you be—there’s a balance here.
You might be more effective working by yourself mostly, but you still need that interaction,
you still need that team or someone else to work with in order to be extremely effective.
My advice to you would be if you’re having a struggle with is a lot of times if you understand
the core which is the value of working with a teammate then you’re not going to—you’re
going to have an easier time.
Focus on the core.
Rather than giving you practical solutions of working with people and dealing with that
change, I’d tell if you I can communicate to you what the value is of working with other
people then those other things will work out and also the expectation.
Do not have the same expectation in output that you would have working by yourself.
Don’t get so frustrated when you’re thinking, “Oh, I could just whip this out in 10 minutes
and be done with it” and you have an hour long discussion about it instead.
That hour long discussion may end up saving a lot of time overall and that’s the price
of doing business, of having a team and working with people.
Hopefully if it’s a good team that price, that extra overhead and time is worth it in
the increased output overall or the quality output.
If it’s a bad team then it’s different.
Then you might need to get out of that environment.
All right, well, hopefully that advice is helpful to you.
If you have a question, if you feel like this advice could help someone else send them this
video or email me at john@simpleprogrammer.com and I’d love to do a video answer for you.
Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel.
I would greatly appreciate it.
Take care.