Advice for Junior Engineers – Part 1

As an entry level engineer, you ideally want to absorb as much information as you can and push yourself. That’s how you’ll evolve and become a good mid-level engineer. Some things to know:

• If you’re stuck, reach out and soon. Don’t try to figure something out for 2-3 days on your own before asking for help. But don’t overdo it and ask for help on every little thing. Don’t feel like you’re bothering people. You’re in a team, and your team exists to help one another at least in a healthy one. If someone is abrasive, that’s on them.
• Use your team lead. Ask for feedback, and provide feedback. They’re there to help you grow and succeed
• Let go of your ego. Many engineers let their ego prevent them from learning. This can take many shapes like small PR feedback to how you plan bigger scopes of work.
• Understand that in most companies your job is to provide value. Understanding how your role creates value for the company is important as it’ll frame how you approach your work. You want to enable yourself to create a lot of value, which makes you valuable to the company. And that’s not just things like feature development. That can also take the shape of improving the code around you, writing good/updated docs, helping others, etc.
• Understand that you need to bubble up what you do especially in larger organizations. Your lead will likely know your successes, but it’s always good to know how and when to send you up successes above you.
• Network! You don’t need to be friends with everyone, but understand that the people around you will be your network in your career. People will come and go. And you’ll eventually go to another company too. You want your network to get you a new job if possible as that’s the best and easiest way to get a job.
• Keep learning. This should never end really. Ideally you learn on the job. If you’re not learning, reach out for help to help reshape what you’re doing to help you learn as you work.
• Yes, respect people’s Slack statuses. If they’re do-not-disturb, then respect that. Hopefully your company has some communication guidelines to follow. If not: avoid sending a message to a very large group of people, and avoid things like @ channel because it bypasses people’s notification settings. Be mindful about how you communicate. Also apply your statuses for yourself. Do you need focus time? That’s fine, just communicate that in a way that aligns with how your team/company does it.