Say no to burnout and stand up for yourself

In this talk, I will take you through uncertainty and its impact on our lives by looking at case studies from the cotton mill workers of 19th Century Britain to the fall of Nokia as the world's No. 1 phone maker and how change connects them both. Then, I will explore how the uncertainty of change can sometimes cause us to ignore, deny, distort, or even try to stop it from happening instead of working with it. 

This talk is little about why you need to say No to people more, and how things can go wrong when you don’t learn to do it enough. 

In my talk I will explain that this is generally a pretty bad idea; it won’t surface the best ideas and it doesn’t let more junior engineers develop their skills. Instead, I introduce some steps you can take to make sure that the idea adopted to solve a problem is the best idea available, even if you aren’t the one who came up with it. Perhaps counter-intuitively I will show how this increases your influence in your organisation and sets everyone up for success.

In this talk, Hywel will discuss the skills needed as engineers progress on different career paths (both technical leadership and people management), and how they can be learned outside the ‘production environment’ of the team.