Advice for Freshers

Perspectives & advice from the community

General Advice

u/morning-coder on a post titled To all the developers who made it, how did you do it? shared the following advice:

Few points to keep in mind :

Your first job isn't your last job. Keep switching for money, learning if you feel stagnant.

Learn skills and prefer quality over quantity, in couple of years, you'll not have college tier or other things. So skills matter after 2-3+ YOE.

If you're at level L2, work like you're L3. Take ownership, deliver best from your side.

Communication is very imp, communicate in groups avoid DMs.

If any mistake highlighted by others, ack and go ahead solve it. Don't hide, show you're leader even at smaller level.

Be humble, never let your money or seniority introduce rudeness in you.

Most important : Job is part of life, Job is not life. So try to close your job work asap.

From someone who's started with 4LPA and now 85+ LPA with 6+ YOE.

Edit 1 : Tech-stack primarily Java Springboot, C++, Rest, Kafka, gRPC Mongo, Postgresql. Similar backend stuff basically. In starting it was only linux as I was a QA.

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u/stackaway on a post titled What did you notice in those "top 1 %" developers which made them successful? shared the following advice:

Continues Learning. Process. People. Economics. Business. Critical Thinking... maybe more, but's its the bare minimum.

In reality the the top 1% don't even know they are top 1%, because of the plateau in Dunning Kruger Effect. It's the rest 99% who often think they are the best.

It's a dark art.

There's an old post by Bruce Eckel - The Mythical 5%

5% of programmers are 20x more productive than the other 95%. Key takeaways -

These people are not those who can remember all the moves and have fingers that fly over the keyboard erupting system commands. In my experience those in the 5% must struggle to get there, and struggle to stay there, and it's the process of continuous learning that makes the difference.

Usually the things that make or break a project are process and people issues. The way that you work on a day-to-day basis. Who your architects are, who your managers are, and who you are working with on the programming team. How you communicate, and most importantly how you solve process and people problems when they come up.

You need to pay attention to economics and business, both of which are far-from-exact sciences. Listen to books and lectures on tape while you commute. Understanding the underlying business issues may allow you to detect the fortunes of the company you're working for and take action early.

Sometimes you need to pick out the good stuff and throw the rest away, and to do this you need to exercise critical thinking.

Everyone thinks they’re hiring the top 1%.

You can model any engineer's traits into four broad categories -

Personality, Decision Making, Team Mate Interactions & Programming Skills.

The top 1% would be most likely good to great on all these parameters. People can read the entire research paper here.

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u/MJasdf on a post titled How to find my niche? shared the following advice:

It's great that you're starting early. Full disclaimer it's usually a bit of a task keeping that fresh enthusiasm up, but you should try to keep it anyway. Finding your niche only comes through deeper research and reading. I'm assuming you're at least comfortable with any one language so it's not a complete blank slate. In which case start following some good tech youtubers. Don't digress with your average bhaiya didi DSA influencers. I'm talking real normal channels that post good content that's actually helpful. Fireship, ByteByteGo, mCoding, Be A Better Dev, etc. You'll know what you're looking for with these to start.

Second of all finding your niche requires more research and time spent down a rabbit hole. It's hard to say, especially behind a reddit thread, what your niche is. Get into reading some books around programming. You can google the best recommended and start there. It's a marathon not a sprint. Take your time.

Web dev may be saturated but it's only because it serves as a good entry point. And you can beat that saturation or avoid it altogether when you introduce more and more complexity into your learning journey.

Take. Your. Time. Start at one place don't just jump into the niche. It's like an RPG except you don't get your character abilities until later. Rn you're level 1, character abilities unlock later where you can decide if you wanna be a Hunter, Mage, Paladin or whatever else.

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Soft Skills

u/Ashishpayasi shared the following advice on a now deleted post:

Here are a few office soft skills:

  1. If the meeting was designed to have an open discussion to bring about points and other agree and disagree with valid reasons / rational keeping in check their professional tone then it is what is expected.
  2. However it the meeting was to discuss ideas and someone deliberately starts to push the agenda of discussing something that was not the idea but because it just happened, then it is not advisable. It is recommended to share a point of view to people and see if that make sense to others , agree with them; if they shoot down; sometimes even if it was right idea; its not the right time. Sometimes you have to let natural process flow because it is a necessary lesson for others; at that time they may still be open to listen. Its like you have a younger brother and you know the way he rides a bicycle he will hurt himself, you may try to prevent it as well but if he does not value; you have to let him fall. Unless he learns the lesson that he should have listen to you, there is no point of argument.
  3. When a boss yells; even if it was ego drive; and he is wrong to do so; you have to realise he may have felt compelled to stop you or anyone to bring the topic to an end as he, by very nature of his position, need to end a topic. Same example if you are out with your family and you and your brother starts an argument on one specific menu item, and rather than coming to agreement; both starts fighting, am sure your father will have to assert his dominance to stop you both from fighting and focus on ordering; or worst he choose something you both don’t like. So don’t take this personally.

Here is how to avoid to be in such a situation:

  1. In a meeting never give unsolicited advice; unless you are asked for?
  2. Always focus on discussing the point and finding a solution not on winning an argument
  3. Even if it unintentionally goes to an argument mode, Keep a watch of when it is heading that direction and bring the discussion to solution than focusing on argument.
  4. If there is a boss in the meeting; present it to him rather than arguing with other person; respect other person idea as you would want to be respected when you present your idea.
  5. Even if boss yells at you for no reason and if there was no fault of yours and you have not made a mistake, you can always go to boss ( one to one) and tell him/ her, you may not have all the experience he / she has and you look up to him/her for guidance but the way you shouted at me in front of everyone is not appreciated. Watch the reaction; if boss is sensible he /she will apologise and chance of making that mistake may not repeat, but if it goes other way round; you should know your boss is not open for feedback and thus you should choose to work with your head down or get out.

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u/alok4 shared the following advice on a now deleted post:

here what I've learned after 10+ years in industry and 5+ companies of all scale,

listen more and listen carefully, speak accordingly .

most of the times people dont know what the hell they are talking about. they are also figuring out things.

don't attack anyone personally and never get into arguments over something like what lib they want to use or framework .

do your job take paycheques and phuck off dont attach yourself to a job or a company.

for your situation let it go , talk privately with manager , and if it becomes regular thing start looking for another job.

Source

Social Skills

u/boumboum34 on a post titled Never worked so Formally with people, first time working in a group. shared the following advice:

A lot to respond to, here.

You are way too hard on yourself. I think the failure of the group project was primarily due to those toxic people in your group, not you. They didn't even want to be in your group or do the project, did they? They just wanted to bully.

How I can I help you to see all of this differently? Hmm...

Let's start with the severe self-criticism. I used to have that problem, too. But then I read abook, "There is Nothing Wrong With You: Going Beyond Self-Hate" by Zen Buddhist nun Cheri Huber. She was amazing to read, as she explained where all the self-hate and self-criticism came from and how to overcome it.

Basically, in summary, it starts when we are toddlers, where we learn quickly that approval is conditional. If we did things our parents didn't like, they punished us. And from that, we "learn" that punishment is the way to be good, to be worthy of good things in life, because that's what our parents did to us, right?

We want to be good... So we try to punish the bad out of us. We internalize the voices of our parents and other authority figures. And if our parents are abusive, then our inner voices in our heads also becomes abusive. We become used to feeling bad, and seeing ourselves as..unworthy of anything good.

Problem is, you can't punish yourself into being happy. It just doesn't work like that.

That voice in your head that says hurtful things to you...that voice is wrong. Because being emotionally hurtful to yourself doesn't make you better; it makes you worse.

It also makes it very easy for other people to hurt you, because you already believe bad things about yourself.

Stop believing that voice in your head saying hurtful things. I know it feels true, feels like reality. It is not.

I'm pretty sure you were the best of the 6 people in your group, overall. You knew the most. You cared the most. You tried the hardest. You tried really hard to be decent to everyone.

You're not a failure. Big difference between "failing" and "being a failure". I've studied many, many successful people, and one think I notice....those who succeeded the most, also failed the most.

The salesperson who sells the most and has the highest income, also gets rejected the most. They've learned not to take failure personally; failure is simply how you learn; a necessary part of learning how to be successful.

People learn far more from failing than they ever do from success. Failure often contains the seeds of future success, if you will learn the right lessons from them; not to be mean to yourself or think of yourself as worthless garbage, but "oh...it just means I have more to learn. That's all it means. How can I do this better next time?"

Social skills are learnable. You are more than capable of learning them. Youtube in particular has many videos teaching social skills, including how to deal with toxic people, how to deal with narcissists, how to be charismatic, how to get bullies to regret bullying you, how to gain respect and be listened to. It's all on Youtube and you can learn it. And videos on how to be a great leader; though you'll learn a lot more from practice and getting feedback than you will from passively watching videos.

Bit like those driver training classes. Usually they make you watch some driver training videos first; a necessary step. Having a teacher next to you, to show you what to do, when, helps a lot, too. But the videos and the teacher won't make you a great driver; getting a lot of practice driving, will.

Same with social skills and being a leader of any kind.

It does take practice and study. The more you practice anything, the better you get at it. It's how you became the most knowledgeble person in your group; you studied and practiced more than they did. You cared more.

See if you can find people at your school, who are people magnets, and "natural" leaders, to learn from. I guarantee you it isn't the toxic ones.

Though the ones who learned how to be good leaders are far better at teaching it than the "natural born" leaders who can't put into words how they are doing it.

I can feel you hurting. I've been there too. Sucks...but also very normal. It's okay to hurt. Just don't let it stop you. Keep going. Learn more.

Any successful people can tell you stories about how they failed very very badly when they first started...they laugh about it now. Some famous moviestars and rock stars who are multi-millionaires now, were even homeless and broke, with no idea if they'd ever succeed. But they kept going. They learned. They got better. And eventually they did succeed.

The more you socialize with people, the more your social skills will improve.

There's Youtube videos showing how extremely charismatic talk show hosts like Craig Ferguson and Graham Norton, actually have a set of rules, they learned that made them charistmatic.

There is a video of how Robert Downey, Jr. dealt with a toxic interviewer who tried to make Downey feel bad about his former drug addiction... Downey handled it masterfully...you can learn from him.

People can dish out toxic stuff. You don't have to take it. You don't have to believe anything they say about you. They're not honest views; they're saying whatever they can think of that they think will hurt you, out of sadism, and to give them the upper hand over you. They have nothing to say worth hearing.

And sometimes people will say potentially hurtful jokes, simply to test you. "Roasting". It's not intentionally hurtful; meant to be funny, not hurtful. If you can tease them back the same way...they often will suddenly decide they like you and think you're actually a great guy. There's youtube videos about this, too.

Practice being as kind to yourself as you are to people you care about. Study how to not feel hurt when someone rejects you or is trying to hurt your feelings.

One thing I learned...when someone is being critical of me, especially if they've only known me a few minutes, it's very rarely about me; it's because I remind them of someone else in their past who hurt them.

Women guarded and wary with me...almost always it's because I remind them of a man in their past who mistreated and hurt them and they don't want to be hurt again.

It takes time for these women to feel safe with me. I've learned never to push, but just be kind, be playful, fun, caring, supportive. Let them watch me be kind and supportive and playful with everyone... Eventually they start feeling I'm a terrific guy after all.

The more practice you get at socializing, the more confident you will become. And confidence is very attractive. It's very learnable.

You become like the 5 people you spend the most time with. So try to find the best people you can, the people you want to be like.

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