How to surf the web to find motivating and insightful content

  “Wow! This was so cool!” my friend says. “How do you even find these things?”

I tell him that I got it from the newsletter of <so-and-so> website where people post interesting stuff.

And the next question goes, “Well, but how did you find out about the <so-and-so> website?”

And then I end up telling him about this person on Twitter whom I follow and how she tweets interesting things and how she is SO cool.

“Okay but how did you find out about this person?”

…

And every time, the conversation comes to an abrupt end either because my friend stops asking further questions at the risk of seeming too dumb (and ends up giving me an unsatisfactory “Oh Wow” reaction) or because I fail to remember the exact source (and end up telling something along the lines of — “I just found it while… hmm… browsing on the Internet”).

What I also want to say is that these cool webpages/people that I come across can come to anyone.

But that sounds like patronizing. Not helpful.

And I want to say that it’s all just easy and effortless.

But to the friend, it seems difficult, even impossible.

So, I don’t think any of those are helpful responses to bring this chain of questions to a satisfactory ending.

And this has bugged me for a long time now — what response could bring such a chain of questions to a good end?

I think I have come up with a good solution now. But before I discuss the solution, allow me to convince you why you should read this 2329-worded article on finding “cool” content online.

Why you should care about reading cool stuff online?

The Importance of Reading

Charlie Munger, a long-time business partner to Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway, as been known to say, “In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time — none, zero.”

Warren Buffett’s formula for his success is to keep getting smarter by learning and knowing more everyday.

Naval Ravikant once said that he values no other way of learning more than reading prolifically.

In his advice article, Patrick Collison lists “Aim to read a lot” as one of the few pieces of advice that he would like to give 10–20 year olds.

I think every successful person emphasises on reading a lot. They talk about reading books like it is the secret of their success.

“Go to bed smarter than when you woke up.” — Charlie Munger

Use the Internet to become “well-read”

But I believe that the Internet has amassed enough good, multi-dimensional content that a person can become well-read using the Internet.

The Internet is one of the biggest advantages you have over prior generations. Leverage it. — Patrick Collison

It is filled with high quality personal essays, blogs and micro-blogs, publications, communities of inspired people, interviews, newsletters. And it doesn’t stop at readable content.. you have podcasts, videos and beautifully designed websites. All there for you to consume and become wiser, a better version of yourself. All with a one-tap accessibility feature!

No, I am not being lazy. Neither am I arguing that the content over the Internet can replace the content present in good books.

I am simply asserting that if used well, Internet can provide you with content that is just as useful as books. If we can somehow just tap into this mega-ocean, the Internet can enable us to:

discover ourselves — search for what we love doing, find motivation to learn something new, be inspired and just be “around” people whom we admire (and even get admired back by them!)

be aware of the world — and I’m not simply talking about your daily news. I am talking about having an informed opinion about the direction in which the world is moving: the longer trends, the major global problems as they emerge, and the up-and-coming technologies.

push the boundaries of our physical whereabouts — be able to get inspired by and shape our opinions based what some of the smartest people alive on the planet are saying.

But it is the vastness of the ocean that makes it so difficult to leverage this power of the Internet. And that is why this article.

So without further ado, let me present my answer to the question —

How to surf the Internet to find motivating and insightful content?

So here I have distilled the process of surfing into 4 rules that you should follow to be a good surfer.

4 Rules For Discovering Better Content over the Internet:

Well, they are not so much rules as they are 4 good practices that you should follow for discovering better content over the Internet. And here they are —

Go to the source and try to find the goose that laid the golden egg. If you liked something on some website, go check out its homepage and About page. If some person tweeted/posted something good on some social media, check out their profile. Every once a while you will hit jackpot and it is going to become your new source of constant new cool information.

Follow the links and don’t be afraid of going deep into the rabbit hole. Interesting articles link to other interesting articles. Mind you, such links are often quite subtle, meaning that they don’t always explicitly read like “Check out <this link> to know more” but are present more inconspicuously as an underline on some word or phrase in the article.

Google for stuff. It is more effortless and the results surprisingly more satisfying than you think. Whenever I wanted to know about something, Googling for it not only gives me the answer to it but also helps me discover something new related to it.

Use Twitter. It is the media platform where some of the best thinkers (both popular and unknown) regularly publish their thoughts. No social media platform has that value proposition. Join it. Use it. Follow people of substance. And just as importantly, constantly weed out your timeline.

Don’t be afraid of doing the necessary housekeeping

So, Google is your oracle for pointing you in the right direction when you seek some information. Twitter is the aggregator that you go to when you don’t seek anything specific but still want to consume something of value. But they aren’t enough! You need to click links through to other links and navigate your way in the thick, amazonian forest in order to find a cave with the gems. And believe me, those are aplenty!

Let me demonstrate by telling you about one such surfing session.

Have you ever felt energized and motivated after a surfing session over the Internet? I had one such session last week..

That week I discovered:

Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of Stripe.

I had known about Patrick Collison and that he is a co-founder of Stripe for a long time then but it was this tweet by Paul that got me particularly intrigued about him —

Okay, now that is some serious appreciation coming from Paul Graham!

And add to it the fact that several of Paul’s essays thank Patrick Collison for reading early drafts. Such an immense validation from PAUL GRAHAM!

Okay, I was curious!

So, one day I decided to look him up. I googled “stripe patrick collison” and visited his weirdly simplistic personal website.

If you know the reason for this design, please leave a comment below… I would love to know about it!

The first link that I went to was the Advice page (because I am always craving advice). There, he has a few pieces of advice for the 10–20 year olds. The one that resonated the most with me was —

If you think something is important but people older than you don’t hold it in high regard, there’s a reasonable chance that you’re right and they’re wrong. Status lags by a generation or more.

But more importantly, it was the links, which that Advice page sent me to, that proved to be even more helpful.. they directed me to discover even more great content!

The paragraph mentioning the links

Here, let me expand on that and tell you about the cool stuff that I found in this surfing session that started with the above mentioned article on Patrick’s blog —

Emergent Ventures, which led me to discover a new podcast — Conversations with Tyler:

This is a fellowship grant to support entrepreneurs with high risk, high reward ideas. So, as I was checking out this website, I stumbled upon Tyler Cowen’s podcast — Conversations with Tyler. It was exciting to discover this podcast since now I will be able to know how one of the most famous economists of our time thinks…even though his economics blog is largely incomprehensible to me.

I have, since, listened to two of his podcasts (one with Sam Altman and the other with Peter Thiel), got another one downloaded (with Vitalik Buterin), and am totally excited for more!

“You can’t imitate a worldview. But you can form your own by listening and learning (and learning how to listen).”

2. The (n+1)st mention of Pioneer which finally led me to fill out my first Pioneer application:

From the Pioneer website —

“The differentiator of the Ivy League isn’t curriculum. It’s brand and network. Pioneer aims to scale those elements. Our goal is to build a decentralized network of young, creative and exceptionally motivated outsiders who don’t fit in to the traditional system.”

Now that is something that I want, too!

You need to apply with any project that you feel like and then you compete with your fellow Pioneers for the best progress made. I have applied to this month’s tournament with my Good Surfer newsletter (that I will briefly talk about in the end).

3. What should you do with your life by Alexey Guzey:

This is the densest article that I have linked to on this page. It is completely filled with links to other cool, interesting articles and pieces of advice across the Internet. If there was ranking list of the best article on the Web, which took the links present in the articles into consideration, this article would certainly top that list!

4. Alexey Guzey’s blog:

I also discovered Alexey Guzey in this surfing session. He is especially inspiring because his fame is very self-made. It is his blog. He lives in Russia but counts Naval Ravikant, Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen amongst his Twitter followers, of which there are just 1272 at the time of writing (It feels so good to be a part of an early cohort of something awesome!).

My secret jewel!

5. Hardcore History podcast:

Meandering through his website, I discovered another great podcast — Hardcore History by Dan Carlin. I find history interesting and I have wanted to keep in touch with subject ever since I read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code in the 9th standard. This podcast seems to be just the thing that I wanted!

Also I saw that Alexey talks about and links to Gwern’s blog a lot. That’s another thing on my surfing list now.

6. Patrick Collison’s Twitter account:

I also checked out Patrick’s Twitter and it looked meaty. Going through it —

showed me that Stripe’s work culture is particularly good.

led me to discover the podcast Minds and Machines by Andrew McAfee. He has interviewed Patrick Collison, Eric Schmidt of Google and Reid Hoffmann amongst others. (Yeah I love podcasts! I can’t wait for my next 90 minute trip to and from college when I can listen to them! :p)

Talking about the importance of doing what you love, Steve Jobs once said,

“The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work it to love what you do. If you haven’t found it (what you love) yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”

Okay, that’s all well and good. But where do I look? How do I search for what I love, Mr. Jobs??

I believe that surfing the Internet can be an answer.

Checking out all those websites and all these articles that inspire you feels like a step in that direction.

Reading about and seeing people do what they love, either through an article they have written or a product they have made, makes you want to imitate them. Makes you feel the urge to be just as passionate about something in your life too.

And above all else — it gives you motivation. It gives you the motivation to work harder when the physical environment around you does not. It can remedy the effect of having a bad, uninspiring, unfortunate environment.

If you feel that you are unable to find good content on the Internet maybe check out my free email newsletter — Good Surfer:

In this weekly newsletter, I try a different approach to answer the “How to surf” question — by sending you the interesting things that I found in a week and telling you how I found them.

My goal with this newsletter is to help you become a better Internet surfer and thus, enjoy the benefits of being a better reader.

“Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day.” — Charlie Munger

Thank you for your time! :)

Let me know your thoughts on the approach that I discussed in this article by commenting below. Or you can contact me via Twitter or LinkedIn or shoot me an email at nityeshagarwal[at]gmail[dot]com. Also, you can follow me on Twitter; I won’t spam you feed.

How answer — and ask — questions intelligently in tech interviews

   Everyone likes to hop from company to company to find the best position that fits them. Currently, I am applying for jobs in companies that have a culture of work/life balance.

I applied for a position as a software engineer at X-company. They were the most professional company that I have ever interviewed for. The interviewer was well prepared and left adequate time in our meeting to exchange questions.

In this post, I will share the questions the interviewer asked me (mixed types, behavioral and technical questions). Also, I will share the questions I asked him when it was my turn to ask him some questions.

I decided to document this interview because I believe it was a valuable experience in the technical and behavioral interview. Maybe it will help other engineers to get an idea of how to respond to those kinds of questions.

Q1: Tell me about yourself

This type of question is asked so you can express yourself in brief and get the full attention of your interviewer. So, you have to practice answering this question before experiencing it. I prefer to write an abstract summary about myself and practice saying it in a maximum of 30 seconds or an elevator pitch.

A1: I am a software engineer with a mechanical engineering background. I am passionate about cleanly written, organized, tested code. I have experience in scripting and functional languages.

I built many SaaS applications including authentication, authorization, and secure payments. I discovered coding through my previous career where I built applications to help in the design process.

Now, I am looking to contribute my range of skills to a team that needs a dedicated performer with a broad grasp of technologies.

Q2: Describe a situation where you didn’t have any resources, and you had to deliver a fully developed feature in a specific time frame

For this type of question, you have to explain three things to the listener — the issue, the solution, and the action — as a story.

A2: I was supposed to deliver a feature for a sprint in two weeks as a demo. The user story for the task wasn’t clear and not decided yet. Additionally, the product manager was a new hire and had no idea about the suggested feature. Meanwhile, I didn’t have enough resources to identify the inputs, outputs, and dependencies.

Hence, I decided to talk to the product manager and my team leader to brainstorm ideas about shaping a basic user story that could simulate the functionality. We had a user story approved by the product manager. Finally, I started writing business logic that implemented the feature.

Q3: Tell me about a situation where you had to escalate the issue to a higher authority than you

A3: I had to write unit tests for another developer’s business logic to increase the coverage. There was a bug in the code which caused the unit test for a particular block to always fail.

I started a debugging session to find out where the bug was so I could fix it. I found the bug — a database query. I checked for the feature owner and sent him a detailed email about the problem to fix it. He responded that I had to adjust the unit tests to the code that already existed with the bug because we had a sprint demo the next morning. He wasn’t sure if he could fix it before that.

In that situation, I decided to escalate the issue to our team leader — writing unit tests for a bug is like driving a car in reverse. Our team leader investigated the matter and asked him to fix the business logic.

Q4: How do you make sure that the instructions given to you are precise and correct?

A4: I can make sure that the instructions are correct by audit and scrutiny. For instance, when I need to learn a new thing from a written tutorial, I try to check the output at each step that I did to make sure it matches what is written in the tutorial.

Q5: How do you make sure that your data is successfully stored in the database?

A5: There are several ways to do that. I can use a helper method to check that piece of data in the database. If it exists, put a flag and set it to true, else set it to false. Maybe different ways are smarter than this one, but I prefer the visual confirmation.

Q6: How do you make sure that the output is the exact output in the user story?

A6: When I have my assigned task, I draw a visual flowchart that demonstrates inputs, outputs, and dependencies to make it easy for me to catch up quickly in case I get distracted by other things. Additionally, it will be easy for someone else who isn’t familiar with my business logic to help me in a situation where I get stuck.

Q7: Tell me in detail about a situation you’ve countered when you decided you should stick to the company’s policy?

A7: I haven’t faced such a situation in my personal experience, but I have seen it happen to one of my team members. He had to make an invocation to an external service to test the business logic and make sure that he got the desired output. To make that external call, you should have a certificate to enable a proxy that will redirect you to external sites. My colleague waited for permission according to the company policy.

The interviewer then asked me if you were him, what you would do until you got the permission?

If that happened to me, I would prefer to help other people in their tasks, as I hate to sit around without doing anything.

Then, the interviewer thanked me for my responses and told me that he was ready if I have any questions for him. I believe that the interview is a two-way process. I did my homework and prepared some questions that could help me understand the company culture and if it was a suitable fit for me.

Note: It is crucial to prepare at least two questions from the job description that are meaningful and thorough that indicate your interest in working on that position.

Q1: What are your performance metrics that you use to judge if a project/sprint has completed or failed?

In that particular question, I was looking for their quality in implementing features. Do they care about only making a sprint pass or do they care about quality?

Q2: How do you estimate tasks? And who does the estimation?

I wanted to know if they pushed developers and gave them tasks without asking, or if they didn’t care about a practical time-frame.

The tasks estimation can be done theoretically using a simple Fibonacci number with a collaboration with developers estimate — mixed between theoretical and real.

Q3: Who supports project documentation? And How often do they update it?

Here, I wanted to make sure that if I got that job, I wouldn’t be stuck waiting for other people to mentor me and walk me through the project to get familiar. If there was well-written documentation, it would be easy for me or anyone to catch up quickly without pain.

Q4: What tools do you use to profile your software/project?

Profiling software is necessary because it does two significant things:

Bugs can be found early before deploying to the production environment — saves a lot of time.

You can optimize your application easily.

You can explore the complete flow of the software including database calls, etc.

So, I believe that if they have such a tool, they are a professional company, and I have an opportunity to grow my skills.

An example of profiling software is Miniprofiler for both Ruby and Node.js

Q5: Do you have any test coverage statistics tools?

My aim with that question was to see how much they care about the code quality. These tools show in detail the coverage for line coverage, which means writing essential test cases.

Anyone can write code, but good developers care about test cases before they write any line of code. I care about quality.

Q6: Does your company launch tech talks periodically?

I was curious about whether they care about their developers concerning career growth and improving their engineer’s skills.

Q7: How flexible is the work schedule? Do you have WFH days?

This questions reveals a lot about the work environment. It gives you a clear picture of what type of company it is. I asked that question after several technical ones to prove myself first to the interviewer. Have their respect first, then ask those personal questions.

Q8: What do you especially like about the company? And what do you love about your team?

I wanted to see if he likes working at the company or not. As an interviewee, you can know this easily from their tone — either they are happy or neutral. The excitement in the answer will guide you whether this company deserves you or not.

Closing notes

Leaving a good impression on your interview is imperative. That will make sure your interviewer never forgets you. The conversation is a chance to learn new things from your interviewer. Ask smart questions that will leave a positive impression and will let them know that you will be an added value to the team. Keep asking as long as you have the opportunity. I hope my experience can help other developers in their interviews.

Finally, if you liked my post, please follow me here on Medium or leave a comment. You can follow me on twitter @salmaneg. Thanks for reading and good luck with your job hunting!!!

How answer — and ask — questions intelligently in tech interviews

  Everyone likes to hop from company to company to find the best position that fits them. Currently, I am applying for jobs in companies that have a culture of work/life balance.

I applied for a position as a software engineer at X-company. They were the most professional company that I have ever interviewed for. The interviewer was well prepared and left adequate time in our meeting to exchange questions.

In this post, I will share the questions the interviewer asked me (mixed types, behavioral and technical questions). Also, I will share the questions I asked him when it was my turn to ask him some questions.

I decided to document this interview because I believe it was a valuable experience in the technical and behavioral interview. Maybe it will help other engineers to get an idea of how to respond to those kinds of questions.

Q1: Tell me about yourself

This type of question is asked so you can express yourself in brief and get the full attention of your interviewer. So, you have to practice answering this question before experiencing it. I prefer to write an abstract summary about myself and practice saying it in a maximum of 30 seconds or an elevator pitch.

A1: I am a software engineer with a mechanical engineering background. I am passionate about cleanly written, organized, tested code. I have experience in scripting and functional languages.

I built many SaaS applications including authentication, authorization, and secure payments. I discovered coding through my previous career where I built applications to help in the design process.

Now, I am looking to contribute my range of skills to a team that needs a dedicated performer with a broad grasp of technologies.

Q2: Describe a situation where you didn’t have any resources, and you had to deliver a fully developed feature in a specific time frame

For this type of question, you have to explain three things to the listener — the issue, the solution, and the action — as a story.

A2: I was supposed to deliver a feature for a sprint in two weeks as a demo. The user story for the task wasn’t clear and not decided yet. Additionally, the product manager was a new hire and had no idea about the suggested feature. Meanwhile, I didn’t have enough resources to identify the inputs, outputs, and dependencies.

Hence, I decided to talk to the product manager and my team leader to brainstorm ideas about shaping a basic user story that could simulate the functionality. We had a user story approved by the product manager. Finally, I started writing business logic that implemented the feature.

Q3: Tell me about a situation where you had to escalate the issue to a higher authority than you

A3: I had to write unit tests for another developer’s business logic to increase the coverage. There was a bug in the code which caused the unit test for a particular block to always fail.

I started a debugging session to find out where the bug was so I could fix it. I found the bug — a database query. I checked for the feature owner and sent him a detailed email about the problem to fix it. He responded that I had to adjust the unit tests to the code that already existed with the bug because we had a sprint demo the next morning. He wasn’t sure if he could fix it before that.

In that situation, I decided to escalate the issue to our team leader — writing unit tests for a bug is like driving a car in reverse. Our team leader investigated the matter and asked him to fix the business logic.

Q4: How do you make sure that the instructions given to you are precise and correct?

A4: I can make sure that the instructions are correct by audit and scrutiny. For instance, when I need to learn a new thing from a written tutorial, I try to check the output at each step that I did to make sure it matches what is written in the tutorial.

Q5: How do you make sure that your data is successfully stored in the database?

A5: There are several ways to do that. I can use a helper method to check that piece of data in the database. If it exists, put a flag and set it to true, else set it to false. Maybe different ways are smarter than this one, but I prefer the visual confirmation.

Q6: How do you make sure that the output is the exact output in the user story?

A6: When I have my assigned task, I draw a visual flowchart that demonstrates inputs, outputs, and dependencies to make it easy for me to catch up quickly in case I get distracted by other things. Additionally, it will be easy for someone else who isn’t familiar with my business logic to help me in a situation where I get stuck.

Q7: Tell me in detail about a situation you’ve countered when you decided you should stick to the company’s policy?

A7: I haven’t faced such a situation in my personal experience, but I have seen it happen to one of my team members. He had to make an invocation to an external service to test the business logic and make sure that he got the desired output. To make that external call, you should have a certificate to enable a proxy that will redirect you to external sites. My colleague waited for permission according to the company policy.

The interviewer then asked me if you were him, what you would do until you got the permission?

If that happened to me, I would prefer to help other people in their tasks, as I hate to sit around without doing anything.

Then, the interviewer thanked me for my responses and told me that he was ready if I have any questions for him. I believe that the interview is a two-way process. I did my homework and prepared some questions that could help me understand the company culture and if it was a suitable fit for me.

Note: It is crucial to prepare at least two questions from the job description that are meaningful and thorough that indicate your interest in working on that position.

Q1: What are your performance metrics that you use to judge if a project/sprint has completed or failed?

In that particular question, I was looking for their quality in implementing features. Do they care about only making a sprint pass or do they care about quality?

Q2: How do you estimate tasks? And who does the estimation?

I wanted to know if they pushed developers and gave them tasks without asking, or if they didn’t care about a practical time-frame.

The tasks estimation can be done theoretically using a simple Fibonacci number with a collaboration with developers estimate — mixed between theoretical and real.

Q3: Who supports project documentation? And How often do they update it?

Here, I wanted to make sure that if I got that job, I wouldn’t be stuck waiting for other people to mentor me and walk me through the project to get familiar. If there was well-written documentation, it would be easy for me or anyone to catch up quickly without pain.

Q4: What tools do you use to profile your software/project?

Profiling software is necessary because it does two significant things:

Bugs can be found early before deploying to the production environment — saves a lot of time.

You can optimize your application easily.

You can explore the complete flow of the software including database calls, etc.

So, I believe that if they have such a tool, they are a professional company, and I have an opportunity to grow my skills.

An example of profiling software is Miniprofiler for both Ruby and Node.js

Q5: Do you have any test coverage statistics tools?

My aim with that question was to see how much they care about the code quality. These tools show in detail the coverage for line coverage, which means writing essential test cases.

Anyone can write code, but good developers care about test cases before they write any line of code. I care about quality.

Q6: Does your company launch tech talks periodically?

I was curious about whether they care about their developers concerning career growth and improving their engineer’s skills.

Q7: How flexible is the work schedule? Do you have WFH days?

This questions reveals a lot about the work environment. It gives you a clear picture of what type of company it is. I asked that question after several technical ones to prove myself first to the interviewer. Have their respect first, then ask those personal questions.

Q8: What do you especially like about the company? And what do you love about your team?

I wanted to see if he likes working at the company or not. As an interviewee, you can know this easily from their tone — either they are happy or neutral. The excitement in the answer will guide you whether this company deserves you or not.

Closing notes

Leaving a good impression on your interview is imperative. That will make sure your interviewer never forgets you. The conversation is a chance to learn new things from your interviewer. Ask smart questions that will leave a positive impression and will let them know that you will be an added value to the team. Keep asking as long as you have the opportunity. I hope my experience can help other developers in their interviews.

Finally, if you liked my post, please follow me here on Medium or leave a comment. You can follow me on twitter @salmaneg. Thanks for reading and good luck with your job hunting!!!

Lessons I learned in my first months as a non-traditional software engineer

 

I am about 3 months into my journey as a new software engineer. I work at a place where the bar is high for what it means to craft quality software. My peers are well-educated and highly disciplined engineers with many years of experience. Those conditions alone would be enough to cause someone new to wonder things like “Am I good enough to be here?” or “Will I be able to keep up?”

To top it off, however, I have the fact that my background in software is non-traditional. My degree is in music and I am self-taught in programming. You can probably imagine the kind of impostor syndrome  that someone in my position might feel when surrounded by people who are so smart and credentialed.

The self-doubt could have been paralyzing. But, somehow it didn’t last very long at all.

So, how did that happen? How did the doubt give way to the enthusiasm to learn and grow that I mostly feel today? I made a list of 31 experiences that helped me embrace being new and non-traditional rather than fearing it. I studied the list and in it noticed three patterns, which I’ve formed into lessons, that I’d like to share with you.

To keep this post at a nice length, I kept the actual list out but you can  view it here if you’d like to read about each experience. I cite related experiences in brackets throughout the post (e.g. [23]). Below are the three lessons that I gleaned from pondering the list and reflecting on each experience.

Be Vulnerable

Resist the urge to hide your ignorance. It is natural to want to appear invulnerable. You don’t want to look like you don’t know what you’re doing, right? I’ve observed, however, that any effort put toward appearing invulnerable is an effort that does not go toward overcoming your ignorance. It makes it much harder to learn and grow if you never let yourself feel safe.

An easy way to check that you’re in a safe place is to show some vulnerability. If someone asks you whether you understand something, try revealing that you may have gaps in your understanding [11]. If you find that your vulnerability is met with support and encouragement, you are among great people. You are in a prime environment to learn and grow.

Thankfully, the place I work makes it pretty easy to show vulnerability [1, 10, 15, 17, 18, 19]. It makes it much easier to show vulnerability when those around you do it, too, especially those in leadership positions [15, 17, 18, 19].

Value your relationships as much as your technical skills

When you’re ramping up, technical skills are important but they are only part of the equation. It’s easy to focus too narrowly on “what you know” and “what you can do” and neglect the benefits that come from connecting with your peers. I’ve experienced, however, that the greatest strides in ramping up are made once you’ve established a relationship with your team.

Many of the experiences that helped me feel more comfortable as a new engineer were not related to gaining or demonstrating technical skills [4, 5, 8]. Even the experiences that had some technical qualities about them [6, 27] were helpful to me not necessarily because they involved technical achievements but more so because they involved accomplishments I made with my team.

Overcoming your ignorance is a lifelong journey, so go at a pace that makes sense for you

It is a journey but you may sometimes feel the compulsion to treat it like a race. If you’re like me, you have a “things-to-learn” list that only seems to get longer and there never seems to be enough time in a day for crossing things off of it. But that is just a perception. If you carry that perception, you will find yourself rushing.

Rush for long enough and you start to appreciate just how long the trail really is. Rushing is tiring. Pause for a moment and realize that you have the rest of your career to cross things off that list. You need to find a pace that is sustainable for the long haul.

The right pace will be different for each person depending on their home situation, their personal goals, and their career goals. I have a family at home but I manage to find regular time for professional development because at this stage in my career, it is a high priority for me.

My current pace is 60–90 minutes every night or so after my family goes to bed. I spend this time either getting extra practice with the tools I use at work, playing with technologies that I’m just interested in, or reading books and blogs [31]. It’s only been about 3 months, but I can already tell that making this investment is like taking steps on the long trail toward overcoming my ignorance.

I’m fortunate that my employer regularly hosts events that promote continual learning [13, 21, 22, 23, 25]. It helps me remember to travel with patience when I see that my peers of all skill levels are traveling, too.

Final Thoughts

Despite the odds described in the intro, I come to work not fearing being new but actually relishing it. Many small but meaningful experiences have helped me go from “Am I good enough to be here?” to “I can learn, grow, and contribute here”.

If you are an experienced engineer or in a leadership position, I hope reading this will encourage you to foster an environment where vulnerability, strong relationships, and lifelong learning are encouraged. If you are at the beginning of your journey like I am, I hope you found something here that you can take back and apply to your own story. Thanks for reading!

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