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Ask HN: I just started my first real workday, any tips?

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Re: Ask HN: I just started my first real workday, any tips?

#51

Take care of your health. Eat well and exercise. Sleep is important. Learn about personal finance and the power of compound interest. Create a budget and start saving for retirement. Contribute to a 401k/IRA/etc. Your goal should be to save 12-15%. If you can't save that much today, start lower, but increase it every 6-12 months and every time you get a pay raise. Save 6 months of expenses for a rainy day fund -- thi…

What would some recommended reading about saving for retirement? For example, I have a healthy amount of savings but none is invested and it sits in an account doing nothing (@ 0.1%). I read the obvious subreddits, have a basic working knowledge of financial concepts, understand that I should just invest in the broad market / ETFs and not touch it for decades. But when I go to invest, I feel I have no idea what I'm a…

No affiliation, just a happy long time user of wealthfront.com. It goes one step further than investing in domestic index funds and diversifies into foreign stocks, emerging markets, bonds etc.

Their fees are slightly higher than just index funds but still lower than actively managed mutual funds and it's very acceptable in my opinion.

betterment.com is a similar service although I haven't used them

both these services are known as robo-advisors and they have an algorithm that decides what to invest in as opposed to an individual person

Re: Ask HN: I just started my first real workday, any tips?

#52
- Personal Analog Assistant: literally just a small notepad where I jot notes and To-Dos. A cell phone or desktop app could work just as well, but I like the paper approach.

- "Spellbook": any command that's not something bog-standard and simple gets added to a Notepad++ file; e.g. a bunch of Cisco commands go in the Network Spellbook, SQL queries go in the DB Spellbook, Linux one-liners in the Bash Spellbook, etc.

Re: Ask HN: I just started my first real workday, any tips?

#53

- Personal Analog Assistant: literally just a small notepad where I jot notes and To-Dos. A cell phone or desktop app could work just as well, but I like the paper approach. - "Spellbook": any command that's not something bog-standard and simple gets added to a Notepad++ file; e.g. a bunch of Cisco commands go in the Network Spellbook, SQL queries go in the DB Spellbook, Linux one-liners in the Bash Spellbook, etc.

Your tip reminds me of an amazing app for the Mac: Boost Note [1]. It allows you to have all the spellbooks in one place.

[1] https://boostnote.io

Re: Ask HN: I just started my first real workday, any tips?

#55
Congratulations on your first day!

Here are a few thoughts that you might find helpful.

Be teachable. Prioritize learning what you didn't know you didn't know.

Don't try to be an expert. I call this the "amateur expert" phenomenon. It's OK to want to be an expert and to strive for that every day. But it takes time. And the only way to get there is to listen and learn.

Be approachable. Don't be too busy for people. Yes, everyone appreciates a good work ethic. But it's more important for people to want to work with you. If you don't make time for other people they won't make time for you.

Don't make it a goal to impress anyone. Your work will speak for itself. Focus on making steady progress every day and you will naturally stand out.

Triple your estimates. No matter what you're asked to do, until you've done it several times it will take you a long longer than you expect. If you have the option to influence how much time you're given to do the work, under commit and over deliver. This is way more important than some people think.

Be nice to others, but not too nice. If you're super nice to people, they'll expect that from you every day. And when you have the inevitable "off day", people will get way more upset with you just because it's such a big contrast. So be nice, clearly. But again, let it flow naturally. Don't try too hard.

Learn how to make mistakes well by placing small bets and learning from your mistakes. You're going to screw up. Sometimes you'll screw up and people will tell you. But if you keep screwing up two things will happen. First, people will stop giving you opportunities and you'll eventually wither and probably either leave on your own or be asked to leave by your boss. Second, people will stop telling you when you screw up. They will lose faith in you. And this is a terrible place to be. Avoid this at all costs by simply learning from your mistakes.

Batch up your questions. As you learn all the ins and outs of a new environment you'll have many, many questions. And no matter how much you learn over time, every time you move to a new environment you'll go through this process again. You'll see things in the code that don't make obvious sense. You'll have ideas about how to improve things. Some things will start to make sense as you just spend more time with them. Other things you will need help with. What you want to do is try to be as efficient with other people's time as you can. If you ask questions constantly it will begin to annoy your co-workers, even if they say it's ok. So write down your questions as they come up. Make an honest effort to figure things out on your own. Then schedule time once a week or so with more senior people. They'll appreciate you making it so easy for them to help you and some of them may even become your champions.

Invest in relationships. As you take on more and more responsibility your ability to influence other people will become more and more important. It won't be enough to simply solve problems. People won't follow you just because you have answers or experience. But when people feel connected to you and know that you care about them as people, they will want you to succeed and go a long way to help.

Continue to learn on your own time. You will have some opportunities to learn on the job. But you will also make a lot of mistakes as you learn. Think of the time you invest outside of the office as study time and what you do in the office as the test. Contributing to an open source project is a great way to try things out and get feedback from people with more experience.

I wish you the best out there. Take care and enjoy the ride :)

Re: Ask HN: I just started my first real workday, any tips?

#56

Try to understand what your colleagues have done. This will help you get to really know the team culture. If you're a programmer, read through some parts of the codebase, if possible, to get a sense of how your colleagues are doing their work.

As in just open random files and read? Or open up a UI and see what it does under a debugger? Or open up the test files first to see how things are supposed to be called/used? I wonder what your structure is.

If the code base is huge, maybe just read some of the code your team has been writing (if you have a fixed team). Seeing how things are supposed to be called / used is also very important if you're collaborating with others on a project. Probably you'll find some internal libraries written by others useful.

Maybe start with reading the parts related to what you expect to be doing?

This of course comes after getting their consent.

Re: Ask HN: I just started my first real workday, any tips?

#58

Congrats on starting! One bit of advice I would personally give is to remember that work is just work. You will have responsibilities, deadlines, arguments, critisms and one day you might find yourself anxious and stressed out. When that happens, it's nice to remind yourself that the critical bug or whatever you're working on is meanigless in the grand scheme of things. No matter how passionate you are about your com…

This is an amazing back to basic tip that I actually fully implement. My variation is: work is just work, and when working make the most of it during the time that you work. Without that addition, one could interpret the "work is just work" too negatively. The discussion that this advice has created is something that I'll reread a few times as I have experienced similar experiences while I was studying at university.

I only just noticed your reply, sorry for the late answer. I agree with your variation. Work can certainly be enjoyable!

> I'll reread a few times

Me too! I'm glad to hear my comment sparked something helpful :)

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