8 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I Started my Career as a Developer
Today marks the two year anniversary of when I started as a full-time developer. I went from a CS graduate who had no web development experience to a full-stack developer working at a startup. When I first started working, I only worked on the front-end and eventually moved on to write server side code as I grew more and more competent. I wanted to share some advice I wish I had received when I started out after two years of experience.
Google is your best friend, you’re going to spend more time googling than working some days when your teammates are too busy to help or when you’re learning something new.
ALWAYS do your best to find the answer yourself first, take a reasonable amount of time based on the difficulty on the task searching for answers yourself, but if you’re really stuck, ask for help, that’s what your teammates are there for.
Be assertive, but respectful and don’t let your manager or anyone disrespect you, that is, if someone says something unnecessarily mean, let them know that it isn’t helpful for anyone to be like that — this allows you to maintain healthy boundaries.
Don’t be afraid to challenge the status quo, if you think some code is wrong or there is a better way to do something and you’re sure, you should share it — worse thing is your manager says it’s wrong, if they react extremely defensive, consider moving.
Share knowledge with your teammates, if you learn something cool and think they may not know it, let them know about it. Even if they already know this may start a conversation and you’ll learn even more and they’ll be more likely to reciprocate in the future.
Bring your work home when you first start a job, until you get to a point where you’re very comfortable with the codebase and know what you’re doing. You’re not going to know what the fuck you’re doing or what is going on for the first week or two (at least for me) and you’re going to wonder why you’re there (I had extreme imposter syndrome), but you WILL figure it out if you want to bad enough. They hired you for a reason!
Test any code you write A LOT and make sure you understand any possible side effects of your code. You must think critically about the code you’re writing and try to account for edge cases or cases which veers off the “happy path” (default condition w/ no exceptions or errors).
Spend time outside of work coding and improving. You should aim to be working on personal projects and using different languages/frameworks/programming paradigms as well as reading daily outside of work. This will teach you new things and they will also help you showcase a personal portfolio when looking for new jobs. You don’t want to stop learning!
If you found this article helpful, please hit the 👏 button. I would love to hear others share their advice or concerns!
