You are more than the sum of your parts. What you bring to any team is years of experience, knowledge, and wisdom that is priceless and hard won. This can’t be stolen because this is what makes you unique much like a fine wine which gets better over time.
In addition to your experience is your toolset which augments your skills and abilities beyond what you were born with. Your toolset is all of the hardware and software you’ve carefully curated over the years to make you faster, better, and more powerful because you’ve constantly refined this toolset to turn weaknesses into strengths while boosting existing strengths further.
All of this combined makes you an augmented engineer. A superhero if you will. Handicap — or worse — take this away and your ability to perform at peak performance is greatly hindered.
Let’s study what it means to be an augmented engineer and why it’s important to constantly be refining and folding in what you are learning each and every day into your thought process, workflow, and toolset.
Hardware
Using the latest and greatest hardware is important because advancements in CPU speed, multiple CPU cores, increased memory, faster I/O, and so forth is to key to maintaining top performance. Generally, this means your laptop (or desktop). You’re not limited to a single machine either. You could have multiple machines and displays in addition to good mics, speakers, and lighting that comprises your office.
Conflict arises when organizations try to delineate who owns such development tools. Some engineers think these should be provided by the client/employer. Sure, perks you don’t have to pay back are nice, but sometimes your machine is bought, paid, owned, and only loaned to you while employed. Even worse, it might come with preinstalled software, spyware, and other monitoring services you don’t need and definitely don’t want.
While on the surface these monitoring services are about security, their actual result is to sever an engineer from their tools. Your machine is an extension of you, like a third arm or even, in some sense, an external brain with additional processing power.
A useful analogy — albeit a slightly strained one — is that of a surgeon. When you go in for surgery, you don’t show up with your own amalgam of tools to give to the surgeon in place of their professionally assembled toolset. No! …and why would you? You’d not enjoy living with the consequences of that fateful decision. Granted, software engineering is not usually a life or death situation. Yet, you can appreciate the value of working with someone that is a master of their craft with a well honed toolset, customized to their needs, is more useful than one who is not.
The best and most experienced engineers understand the value of augmentation. While the hardware they use is not physically a part of them it is a very integral extension of who they are. Machines that come preloaded with random tools that forbid any personalization seriously limits the abilities of these engineers.
Software
Your software stack is built atop your hardware stack which gives you the freedom to tailor your hardware to your workflow. For example, this might mean maintaining the following:
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macOS Configuration: For rebuilding, setting up, and customizing your operating system.
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Dotfiles: For customizing your shell and applications in general.
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Sublime Text Setup: For customizing your editor/IDE.
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Pennyworth: For augmenting your digital butler (assuming you want more power beyond what Spotlight provides by default).
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OmniFocus and/or Obsidian: For note taking and second brain thinking.
Your software stack will most likely be much different but the point is that you have one and is tailored to your needs.
As with hardware, similar problems arise when you can’t install or use any of your paid and/or open source software. Often this is disguised as "security" measures in an effort to protect the company against bad actors but there is a great cost to this way of thinking:
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Assumes everyone hired is out to steal from or harm a company. Usually, this means the hiring process is broken.
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Devalues talent and diminishes what makes them unique and special. This also make it hard to retain talent or attract new talent.
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Reduces productivity because either the engineer has to learn new, company approved, tooling or the engineer has to get the company to pay for software they already own.
What’s insidious about this mindset is that it plants the seeds of a toxic culture that will become more so over time. This also means there is little motivation to excel or innovate further.
The alternative is to promote, educate, and teach best practices in terms of security practices, personal VPNs, full disk encryption, etc. In Dan Pink’s book, Drive, this is akin to Motivation 3.0.0 thinking where your drive stems from having autonomy, mastery, and purpose to be a true professional at your job. This is good for your team, company, and the industry as a whole because we all get better by raising the bar, not lowering it.
Digital Identity
When combined, your hardware and software stack is your digital identity including any and all personally identifying details. For example, on macOS, this is your Apple ID which has a lot of information associated with it:
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Name.
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Email.
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Phone number.
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Address.
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Fingerprint scans.
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Voice recognition.
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Digital wallet (i.e. credit cards and other identifying information).
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Internet accounts.
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Software purchased within and outside of the App Store.
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Location.
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Home network.
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Shared and connected devices.
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…and much more.
In a sense, your Apple ID is similar to your Social Security number or Estonia’s e-Identity, which you don’t want to share freely. You definitely don’t want this information exposed on any machine you don’t own. Yet, due to the fact that some employers are choosing to force their hardware and/or software tools upon you, this means you can’t share your Apple ID across multiple machines without giving up your digital identity, especially if you have no way to control and erase any information you put on a supplied machine.
This practice is a major security concern for you as an individual. Assuming whoever employs you is going to invest as much care in protecting you as you would yourself is very rare. Case in point, look no further than the latest breaches on the Have I Been Pwned site. To be more concrete, here’s the harm these anti-tooling systems causes to you as an augmented engineer:
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No ability to share Bluetooth connected devices. For example, being able to quickly shift audio between your laptop, phone, and or other device is a major productivity boost because there isn’t support for pairing the same device with multiple Apple IDs. This makes video conferencing, pairing session, and/or sharing of screencast tutorials much more time consuming and tedious.
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No ability to leverage macOS' shared clipboard which means you can’t pull information from a different machine — or even my phone — for sharing with your team.
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Reduced ability to synchronize configurations across multiple machines.
Conclusion
You are an augmented engineer whether you’ve thought of this or not because the hardware, software, and customized tooling combined with your innate abilities and years of experience make you who you are. Don’t ever let this wane because continuous learning and rigorous refinement is what makes you stand out above all the rest.