This page contains some of the most valuable pieces of advice I have collected throughout my internships. Often, these are responses to the question, “Knowing what you know now, what advice would you have given yourself when you were starting out your career / where I am at now?”
The intention is not to ask for overly generalized advice — which are often too broad to be useful — but to learn directly from the career mistakes or lessons that senior folks have.
I have deliberately omitted names and companies because I don’t think they’re relevant to the advice.
- Manager (remote)
- Communication is important. Having insight into what I'm currently working on without having to ask me (e.g. because I proactively communicate via chat or during video calls what I'm working on) fosters trust more quickly and easily, to the point where I can be trusted to be an effective and independent contributor to the team.
- Coworker
- See what’s out there early. Even in tech, there’s so many different types of work that you can do. It’s easy to get stuck in a role / company that you think is decent or are comfortable with, but you might find yourself enjoying a different company so much more.
- Coworker (senior)
- There’s a huge difference between a compensation-optimized career and a non-compensation-optimized career. When you’re young, it’s easy to convince yourself that money doesn’t matter that much, especially since salaries in tech are extremely high. But once you’re supporting a family and actively planning for college costs for your kids, your costs start to add up. Simple things such as talking to your manager about compensation can go a long way towards improving your compensation.
- There’s often a stigma attached to discussing compensation for work. There’s a feeling that talking about the money with your coworkers or manager makes it seem like you don’t care enough about the work and that you’re just “in it for the money”. You just need to be upfront with the people you’re talking with (manager and coworkers), that the money isn’t your only priority at work, but it is still important because it does have real-world implications.
- Mentor (remote)
- Take initiative / be proactive for the work you do. That may mean deploying earlier, asking other people for design feedback, or coming up with what to fix or work on next. This is probably the first step to leveling up (at least from where I’m at right now).
- Ask more questions, especially when starting out / during my internship. There's a lot of conventions and idiosyncrasies specific to {company} that you can probably only learn by asking.
- Skip level manager
- Everyone should get better at writing. Software engineers are unreasonably terrible at this. Whether that means writing documentation, writing blog posts, or communicating with other people, communication is an overlooked skill that can help anyone. Writing blog posts about the work you do helps with this.
- Skip skip level manager
- Take risks while you’re young, both in terms of career and in life. That may mean trying out different teams, traveling more, working on ambitious ideas, or generally following your heart’s idea. It’s much easier to do this when you’re young, but as you get older and have a family, stability becomes more important, and the institutional knowledge you gathered through your years of experience becomes your main asset. Consequently, as a manager, you are most effective by staying in your current role, so there is much less risk-taking available.
- “I wish I had taken a database course in college.”
- Coworker (early career)
- When you’re starting out your career, especially during internships, it’s easy to feel pressured to devote most of your time working hard on your desk instead of socializing with other people (interns) or going to events. Eventually, you’ll look back and see that working that hard probably doesn’t matter as much.
- Coworkers (3 senior)
- Working at a company where {there is a blameless culture, little to no office politics, people work together for the benefit of the team} is very refreshing and surprisingly not that common in the industry.
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