Shipping is the foundation

There are lots of skills involved in being a successful engineer at a big tech company. Running effective meetings, writing good design docs, fleshing out tickets and epics, improving team processes, tech leading small groups of engineers, and so on. But all of these rest on the foundation of being able to ship. In Dota 2, the early game involves “laning”: competing with an enemy player to collect resources from a small area. There are many, many strategies and considerations involved in laning. But the simplest possible approach is just to run at your opponent and attack them until they’re forced to either run away or die. All the other laning strategies must solve that problem first, because it doesn’t matter how well you play if you’re forced out of the playing area. If you get that wrong, it doesn’t matter how much else you get right. In Magic: the Gathering and Starcraft, many players adopt an “aggro” strategy of building an attacking force as early as possible before the enemy…