The advice can be general or specific like ageism.
Ask HN: What is your advice to someone who is starting out in software industry?
1–10 of 70 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is your advice to someone who is starting out in software industry?
#2Dealing with people is half the job, so focus on your soft skills as much as you do your hard skills.
http://softskills.audio/ is a goldmine in this regard.
Re: Ask HN: What is your advice to someone who is starting out in software industry?
#3Imposter syndrome is real.
Kinda soon you'll be in a position where others look up to you, thinking they'll never get as good as you, while you still think you're a total noob.
If coding, don't do everything from scratch.
I've seen multiple people losing interest in their projects, because they didn't even really start them. It's almost always parsers, they (my old me included) write their own parsers for stuff and then lose interest in the idea behind it.
Re: Ask HN: What is your advice to someone who is starting out in software industry?
#4Be very wary of always chasing the latest and greatest. You can easily spend a decade or two pursuing the latest trends. Be open to new technology, but pick something and stick with it until you master it. You should probably pick something that is being used by many, e.g. Python or Javascript.
Your learning process should mainly consist of reading and writing code.
Re: Ask HN: What is your advice to someone who is starting out in software industry?
#5Whenever you join a new team, look at the work everyone is doing and try to identify stuff that isn't getting done as well as it should, or where the team is lacking skills, and aim to own that area. Learn what you can from the most skilled and able personnel for sure, but it's the team weak spots that you can make the biggest personal impact on.
Build something you can show off. A web application, or a mobile apps and stick it on Github or Gitlab. The fancier the better, but even if it's a fairly low effort tutorial clone that's a lot better than nothing. If you can pull out a phone and show off something you built in an interview, it certainly helps you stand out.
Re: Ask HN: What is your advice to someone who is starting out in software industry?
#6Your job is to deal with customer requirements (i.e. listening to people), and translate those into code other engineers (communicating with people) need to maintain, on a priority/schedule your management (also people), create to deliver business value. This is a people business, whether you like it or not. Develop those skills.
You never finish learning. People who tell me "I know [technology]", invariably are not experts. People who tell me "I am expert with [technology], but learn new things all the time", get it. If you don't like learning _every day_, get out now.
On that point: becoming an expert at a specific technology is great early in your career. You need to be great at learning new technologies as your career progresses, so consider learning how to learn as a priority over learning a specific language or framework, and be curious.
Working with good managers is more important than working with good engineers (trust me, the main difference between a FAANG and a failing startup is management skills), but working with bad engineers still sucks.
Using something that already exists that does 80% of what you need it to do, is normally a better win then writing something from scratch that does 100%. That 80% might even be too high - the real number could be as low as 50% or even 10%.
Mentoring is the best way to develop your own skills by orders of magnitude, but it's also one of the hardest. Look for opportunities to mentor and be mentored, all the time.
Re: Ask HN: What is your advice to someone who is starting out in software industry?
#7Stick with it. You'll go through periods of time when something seems super complicated (legacy code, new algorithm, new framework, new language etc.). But just stick with it, you'll figure it out eventually.
Re: Ask HN: What is your advice to someone who is starting out in software industry?
#8First make it correct, then make it fast.
Being nice is a superpower. So is staying calm (especially when others are not). Also, being helpful - especially to people outside your team. When people like you they’re much more likely to help you, possibly in ways you won’t even know you about.
Remember that your users/customers are also people trying to do their job, and get through the day or week, just like you are. Try not to make their lives harder than they already are.
Try to understand where others are coming from, especially in disagreements or multi-team discussion. No-one ever has the complete picture, but very few people (none I’ve ever met) are truly malicious. Don’t mistake a different set of priorities for incompetence or stupidity.
Re: Ask HN: What is your advice to someone who is starting out in software industry?
#9[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What is your advice to someone who is starting out in software industry?
#10Never give up, Never surrender.
You will face obstacles, problems, bugs, disbelievers, etc. The only way to succeed it to keep at it. You won't believe you can do it... until you do it.
One step at a time. Next thing? It's ten years later and your a senior developer who everyone looks up too.