Reading 'Growing Up Together'

A Book I Bought Twice

I finished reading Growing Up Together (함께 자라기).

It actually took quite a while from the moment I first decided to read it to actually finishing it. I started with a copy purchased through my company's team budget — but that was the problem. When I read something I want to retain, I absolutely need to underline it in pencil in a physical book. For leisure reading, any format works fine; but when I'm reading to learn, reading with only my eyes and no underlining is no different from writing letters in sand.

So I bought another copy with my own money, started over from the beginning, and only then was I able to read it properly.

What I Expected vs. What I Got

Given the title Growing Up Together, I initially expected a book about the importance of collaboration or techniques for improving teamwork. But once I actually read it, it reached far beyond the scope of collaboration and touched on a more fundamental question: personal career growth.

Before reading this book, I was carrying questions like these:

"Simply working hard doesn't feel like enough. How can I grow more efficiently — more explosively?"

"I think I keep the team running as a team member, but… what does it actually look like to create real synergy with teammates?"

"I'm not someone with exceptional social skills — how can I realistically compensate for my weaknesses in collaboration?"

The book gave fairly honest and practical answers to each of these questions.

What Kind of Developer Will I Be in 10 Years?

During my time at Hanghae (bootcamp), I met a lot of truly remarkable coaches. They were all outstanding people, and I could find something to learn from and admire in each of them. But looking at them always brought the same question:

"If I develop for 10 years, can I become like them?"

Honestly, my first instinct was: probably not. I felt a wall.

On the other hand, I've heard plenty of stories going the other direction — senior developers with over a decade of experience who fall far short of what you'd expect at their level. The idea that career length and skill level don't necessarily correlate seems like something everyone can nod along to.

So where does the difference between those coaches and those senior developers come from?

Quality and Deliberate Practice Matter More Than Quantity of Experience

The author argues that the gap between career length and skill level lies not in the quantity of experience but in its quality. How diverse your experiences have been is one of the factors that determines your skill relative to your years.

At first I nodded. But the more I thought about it, the more a question surfaced. Does a senior developer with 10 years of experience really lack diverse experience? As your career grows longer, wouldn't you naturally accumulate at least a proportionate variety of experiences, even without trying?

The concept that answers that doubt is what the author emphasizes: Deliberate Practice. Not simply putting in a lot of time, but learning in a consciously designed way — adjusting difficulty, seeking feedback, aiming explicitly at improvement. It's not the variety of your experiences but the way you approach them that determines the slope of your skill growth.

From there I took it a step further: the act of adjusting difficulty and seeking feedback itself comes from your attitude toward work. The conditions for deliberate practice aren't simply handed to you — you have to create them yourself. The reason those coaches tried harder approaches on every project, actively sought feedback, and folded that feedback into their next actions was, at its root, an active and forward-leaning attitude.

By contrast, a senior developer whose skills don't match their experience isn't a bad person. They simply let those 10 years pass passively — handling whatever work came in, not bothering to seek feedback, repeating familiar patterns. That attitude is what closed off the opportunities for deliberate practice.

In the end: attitude shapes environment, environment shapes practice, practice shapes skill. Even when faced with identical experiences, what you take away from them depends on how you approached them in the first place.

Addition vs. Multiplication

As I entered my third year, I found myself thinking more and more that simply working hard wasn't enough. "I feel like I'm putting in the effort — so why don't I feel like I'm growing?" (Though maybe the effort itself was lacking, too…)

The author divides growth approaches into addition and multiplication.

Addition is the familiar approach: work longer hours, increase available time, cut waste, sleep less. Simply piling on effort. Looking back, this is the approach I've been using all along — and honestly, it feels like the classic Korean way of working.

The problem is that this approach has a clear ceiling. The more complex life gets and the more there is to do, the less time you have to spend. Addition eventually hits a hard physical limit.

Multiplication, by contrast, is about raising collective intelligence. Instead of just doing more work, you change the way you work together — so that you not only get better at Task A (your main job) but also at Task B (improving how you work) and Task C (improving those improvements). Honestly, I understand it in the abstract but it doesn't fully land in practice yet. Still, I believe the direction itself is clearly right.

The book explains this in the context of collaboration, but reading it, I naturally started connecting it to individual growth as well.

As an individual, addition looks like studying for more hours or squeezing in one more side project. Multiplication, on the other hand, looks like using retrospectives to look back at how I'm working, raising the density of learning through deliberate practice, actively seeking out environments and tools that will amplify my growth — and perhaps most importantly, building relationships with colleagues and mentors who can give and receive good influence.

Not putting in more time, but building a virtuous cycle that enables better growth. That's the multiplication I need.

Great Developers Are Great Together

There's a strange culture in the tech industry: the idea that developers having somewhat poor social skills is just normal. In some ways this stereotype even functions as an excuse — an excuse to stay comfortable being socially underdeveloped.

I know myself well. I'm not someone with exceptionally strong social skills. So it was always a concern of mine: how can I create more genuine synergy with the people I work with?

That concern actually led me to think: An extroverted developer would have a real edge in the market. Developers who are genuinely good at collaboration aren't that common.

The popular image of a genius developer is someone locked alone in a room, hammering away at a keyboard. The assumption that poor social skills are fine as long as you're technically excellent — or that being technically excellent means you're probably socially awkward — has somehow become accepted wisdom. The equation "good at development = bad at socializing" has been taken for granted.

But the book says this is a myth.

The research is fairly direct: 70% of outstanding developers mentioned collaboration with colleagues, while fewer than 20% of mediocre developers did the same. The more skilled a developer is, the more they prioritize excelling together over excelling alone.

What struck me even more was the expert team experiment. When a group of experts was assembled into a team and left to work on their own, they performed significantly worse than a team of non-experts who collaborated well. Who is on a team matters far less than how those members interact with each other.

The part that resonated with me most was this: any technical methodology, to be applied in the real world, requires social capital. No matter how technically skilled you are, if you haven't built trust with your teammates, you'll never be able to introduce the technology you want to bring in. Technical skill can only be exercised on a foundation of relationships.

So how do you build that social capital? It reminded me of the Woowa Brothers' (우아한형제들) slogan: "Small talk is power." Not something grand, but the light conversations and playful little interactions you have with teammates every day. That's how the foundation for collaboration is built — slowly, but steadily.

When I was struggling to figure out how to compensate for my lack of social skills, I expected I'd need some kind of grand solution. But the most realistic takeaway from this section was that it can start with small things.

So Here's What I'm Going to Do

Throughout the whole book, I was underlining with my pencil and nodding along — and at the same time, one question kept following me around:

"So what am I actually going to change?"

Being moved by a book and actually incorporating it into your life are completely different things. I believe that truly reading a book means something actually changes. So as I wrap up this piece, I'm going to write out some concrete next steps.

First, I'll make retrospectives a routine. Every Friday afternoon — even briefly — I'll take time to reflect on what I worked on and how, and think about how I can improve going forward. I actually already built a retrospective template in Notion, but I wasn't doing it every week. The intention was there, but the execution wasn't. Now I'm going to block the time on my calendar. To start doing something you haven't been doing, you need a system.

Second, I'll move from addition mode to multiplication mode. Studying more hours, buying one more course, staying late to finish one more feature — that's addition. Creating output from what I've just learned, setting a time limit when I'm stuck and immediately asking a colleague if I go over it, submitting PRs in small chunks to get feedback in short loops — that's multiplication. The first step is simply becoming aware of whether I'm operating in addition mode or multiplication mode for whatever I'm doing.

Third, I'll create small interactions with teammates every day. Reaching out first, lightly sharing something I've learned, responding thoughtfully. The desire to work better together can start to improve from exactly these small things.

The book is titled Growing Up Together, but in a way it could also be read as Excelling Together. Working hard alone isn't enough. To grow well, you have to learn well; to learn well, you have to work well together. And all of that starts with small daily attitudes.

Since I bought this book twice, I want to get back more than twice the multiplicative change. Book review for Growing Up Together — finally done!