21–28 of 28 posts
Brilliant jerks, people who incessantly complain are not worth your time. :)
I was 23 at the time with about 3 years of experience, so still a junior but I was the longest-tenured employee on our team. We kept picking up new hires, but never internal transfers. That put me in a position where I was the most familiar with our tech, stack, and business intent. I really enjoyed teaching everything to our new hires again and again, as it helped me further understand the how and why of my job.
Ultimately I realized I wasn't growing as much as I wanted to and looked for another position. Being in charge was fun, but I felt like I needed to surround myself with better developers.
And on a budget of "zero or as close as possible" too.
For instance, here are some benefits of working at least one job where you're the 'smartest' in the room:
1. You get to experiment more with new technology, and learn more skills and languages that you may not otherwise have bothered with.
2. There's no one to turn to if things are tough, hence you're given a real reason to put the work in and learn things for yourself. Being the 'dumbest' in the room all the time makes it too easy to coast on the knowledge of others.
3. It gives you a chance to experience what it's like when a major responsibility or project is on your shoulders, as well as how you deal with working under pressure (like say, being the one guy who has to fix a major client's website after the database crashed at 4pm on a Friday).
4. You get the responsibility of teaching others, rather than always being the one taught by them. Again, that's a nice thing to have experience with, especially if you want to get started with conferences and ebooks or what not.
5. And if you're literally the lead developer there, it also teaches you a lot about how to talk with management and make your case for new technology, best practices, etc. Yeah that's more people skills than tech ones, but you really need both if you want to do well in your career, and being the go to guy forces you to get better at that.
So yeah, I'd say while it's important to be with peers you can learn from, you also want at least a few jobs where you're the one other people are learning from as well. Don't always be the dumbest or smartest in the room, mix it up a bit and use both situations to learn as much as you can. You'll be a better developer or software engineer for it.
What I have mostly learned is that everyone has different opinions as to which approaches are best and that engaging in discussions with your peers is an important part of teaching each other different aspects and perspectives of your work.
Learning programming languages and its quirks are generally things you can learn on your own, but there are a lot of little tidbits and good practices you can pick up from peer code review. As my horizon expands from working with different people on different projects, I feel more confident with my work and while coaching others afterward.
I've worked remote at a previous job for 8 years. The company really didn't handle communications with remote employees very well. Between that and not having the daily "coffee" chat with other employees, I felt I was missing out a lot. You can read all the stuff you like, but at times there is nothing better then bouncing ideas off your co-workers and seeing what sticks.
I'll second this. So many bugs become easy to solve when you try to explain the problem to a co-worker. At my last job, we had a rubber-duck in the middle of the development floor. The first test was "Explain your problem to Ducky". About half of the time, the developer doing it would have a sudden epiphany half way through the explanation. You could even book meetings with Ducky on Outlook... "Five-minute standup me…
Aside: I’m rather sad Stack Overflow didn’t keep their April 1st rubber duck feature. I wonder if it actually worked “too well” and cut down on questions submitted...