My Strength and Weaknesses to Date

Feb 11, 2016

Through my recent layoff and my currently ongoing job search, I have had to answer a lot of interview type questions. One of those questions was, “What else do you think we should know about you?”. I thought to myself, what else is pertinent here? Let’s be honest and write about my strengths and weaknesses. And then it set in… my brain came to a halt. What are my strengths? I have non, but I have a ton of weaknesses. Then steps in the wife. According to my wife my greatest strength as an engineer is my attention to detail, and my greatest weakness as a developer is my tendency to try and be a hero and take on too much work in an iteration. Let me go into some more detail.

I think that my greatest strength as an engineer is how much I pain attention to detail. I pour my heart into every piece of code that comes from my fingers, or my pairs fingers. Due to my heart being attached to every piece of code, I do everything that I can to make my code a piece of art. I am obsessed with the nerdy things like whitespace, semicolons, same line curly braces, etc. I want the next person who comes along after me to be able to read and update the code that I write with ease.

I think that my greatest weakness as a engineer is that I tend to take on too much responsibility in an iteration, which makes me tend to work fast. This usually results in my code suffering in quality, and things like whitespace being wrong. I know, the world is going to end right! It is something that has been brought to my attention at my last employer, and it is something that I have been and am going to continually work on throughout my career. I can still live to my nickname of “FedEx”, and slow down and make sure that mistakes are not made.