I started my software engineering career back in 2010. From my 16 years of experience in the industry, these are my honest tips to help junior engineers level up their engineering careers.
It’s not the tools or engineering techniques that make you a great software engineer. It goes beyond the essential engineering skills you often think of. Here are my four tips to level up your engineering career.
Communication
Being able to understand what others are saying and to translate your thoughts into “kind” words matters the most, in my opinion. Being able to hold a conversation without being rude, biased, or sounding incompetent is a key element of it.
If you think language is holding you back, especially if you’re coming from a different background or spoke a different language before, like myself, this can be challenging. However, in this modern world, there are so many ways to improve your language skills if there is a desire to learn.
Context awareness
You might be excellent at developing/designing software. However, without knowing where your contribution is going, what value it brings to your current employer/project, or what value it brings to the end user, your knowledge is only as good as the few files currently open in your IDE.
Talk to your team members and people in other departments, and try to understand where your contribution fits in the wider machine. The more you understand the big picture, the more valuable your contributions will become in the years to come.
Attitude
No matter whether you are a junior or a senior, your own attitude can either break you or make you. Especially during your early software engineering career, you will be given tasks that are sometimes outside your comfort zone/programming zone; let’s say, doing something in Excel. You can say yes to the task and learn how to work efficiently in Excel.
As you get older (as it happens, it was my 38th birthday), people find change difficult. So saying yes to things outside the comfort zone becomes harder, and you end up missing out on vital learning opportunities. All because of ‘attitude’.
People
Whether you built amazing software or came up with a groundbreaking engineering idea, in the end people always remember how you came across as a person, your personality.
So how you treat your colleagues, how you help others, how you earn others’ trust – it all comes down to how you behave towards the people around you. Win the “right” people, and you win everything; lose them, and you win nothing.
In a Nutshell
Tools, techniques, and frameworks come and go. What sticks around and helps you boost your career is the human skills & your attitude. The more you invest your time in developing human skills & attitude, the better you become as an engineer and as a person.
If you are a junior engineer, where would you like to focus more? If you are a senior engineer, what would be your key piece of advice to a junior engineer? Comment below 👇
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