Tools: My Best Advice as a Software Engineer

Hello There 👋🏻 ## Introduction ## Don't just ask "What should I do?" ## Moral of the story ## Thanks for reading My fellow developers, coders, and amazing engineers, welcome to this post where I wanted to share the best piece of advice I've gathered throughout my career as a junior software engineer trying to level up. Without talking much, let's get to it. I have made a post before about my experience as an entry-level (junior) software enginee, where I shared some highlights and things I've learned during that period from my day-to-day job, and now that I've been getting myself into many different things in my work, I started learning something that I wasn't aware of when I first wrote that post. I started my job a year and 6 months ago, with every one on my job being way more experienced than I was given it was my first ever professional job, and working in a startup that's in the field of cybersecurity and security services, everything was fast moving and it wasn't just about the technical gains I would have to make, but also wrap my head around a domain I'm not familiar with at all. Over time, I began learning some basic things to understand the domain, and luckily, I didn't have to worry much about the technical things, as my C# and .NET familiarity helped me a lot, so I had spare time to ask other people and learn from them about concepts that at the beginning were mysterious. In startups, the fun thing is code is always being prepared and shipped, unlike large corporates where change is slow, and on big features, the seniors would discuss architecture along with the architect and stakeholders, at least that's how it is for us. When I wanted to really improve, I began pushing myself into those meetings even to listen to what's being discussed, and that was the eye-opening turning point. This is my best advice, literally. Hear me out. One time in the discussion, everything was being laid out from the Product Requirements Document and design mockups. I didn't understand what the best solution was, but I knew I wanted to take a big part of the feature. So I reached out to the team and took ownership of the feature. It wasn't super high-priority, so I had the time. I started researching possible solutions, writing things on paper, and making simple flows with FigJam until I came up with my final solution. I then pitched it to the team, it was approved, and then I started my implementation. It turned out to be a success and admittedly, some tiny bugs showed up, which I was able to resolve easily. In another breaking feature, I did the same, approached the problem by thinking of solutions, writing things down and then pitching out my idea. At this moment, I wasn't just asking What should I do? or What should I work on?, I was asking How would I solve this? and What works and what not?, What are the trade-offs of this over that?. Now looking back at my decision to not just take a task and work on it, to rather own an entire feature from initial solution drafting to production, I can say it was the best decision in terms of growth and learning. If you want to really level up in whatever you do, don't just limit yourself to being someone who just executes something, like take a task and just finish it, ask questions, go explore, and ponder on how to solve problems, because the moment you stop asking What should I work on?, you open your mind to a bunch of ideas and ways of doing things that you never knew existed, you simply become a problem solver, you see a problem and realize, oh, we can do this this and that, oh, this can be solved this way, and we have these options to use as a solution. I hope this experience I just shared benefited you even in the slightest means possible! Templates let you quickly answer FAQs or store snippets for re-use. Are you sure you want to hide this comment? It will become hidden in your post, but will still be visible via the comment's permalink. Hide child comments as well For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse