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Junior Engineer Career Development Videos, Forum, and Q&A

How A Junior Engineer Can Grow Their Career

Almost every software engineer starts their full-time career journey here. The content here breaks down how you can start your career off with a splash and grow past this level as quickly as possible.

Finally got a job, what can I do to make my onboarding experience better?

Entry-Level Software Engineer at Taro Community profile pic
Entry-Level Software Engineer at Taro Community

After being laid off 8 months ago, I’m in a new role! 6-month contract that started earlier this November. The first two months revolve around holidays, so stuff might be slow, but things will pick up after. I want to do everything I can during the first trimester of my contract to earn fulltime with the company. This is a junior position. My manager is a kind person who says nice things about my ability to communicate, learn, and write documentation.

I reviewed the complete onboarding guide on Taro. Since I was a tad bit tired from my job search entering the company, didn’t have much direction with my first task provided in my first week, and my manager was the only person giving me communication, my initiative in my first week and a half of onboarding was lax. But now, I have sense of urgency to do more! 

I was learning company cultural norms, meeting people, etc. There was lots of stuff different from my previous employer. I also noticed there wasn’t a clear onboarding strategy. I was just given code to read through, and went over it with my manager. I’d ping my manager in the morning and in the afternoon with status updates summarizing what I’ve learned and used the formula from the guide to ask great questions. Due to my initial confusion, I decided to make an onboarding guide myself for future engineers! Eventually, I was given a senior engineer to shadow, who I also reach out to during the morning and afternoon just like my manager. I’m also building relationships with my teammates, slowly but surely finding out what teammates are in the give knowledge buckets vs the get knowledge buckets. 

I’m always vigilant to add impact. Just today, I noticed that anyone had edit access to some really important documents other than read, so I reached out to the person in charge of the documents saying “hi, I found anyone can accidentally edit these. To prevent a future mistake, I found this link that shares an idea of how to stop this.” 

Every week I make 3 goals for myself to improve on, such as “understand this code base”, “improve skills in SQL”, “make my first meaningful code contribution”, etc., and record my progress on these set goals throughout the week. My manager would have a meeting with my contract team monthly to discuss how things are going. 

My manager told me I’m still just in the onboarding phase, so I should just follow the formula, and everything will fall into place. Given all this, what else should I do?

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Posted 3 days ago
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If I like everything, what should I specialize in?

Entry-Level Software Engineer at Taro Community profile pic
Entry-Level Software Engineer at Taro Community

I just watched Alex’s ”Level Up Your Code As A Software Engineer“ course. I wanted to ask about the first portion of the “Better Code Strategy” module.

A part that resonated with me is where Alex said he sees many junior devs fall into a trap of full stack when trying to specialize, which hinders them in the long run. It makes total sense that people would rather hire a 9/10 on front end than a 5/10 at front and back. I was in this situation at my previous employer - new grad role with a 4 month ramp up program. I didn't do so well on front end in training, and was told that I’d be placed in a back end role, so it “wouldn’t matter anyway”. Guess who got placed doing front end work? I had barely any support so I had to figure out everything myself. I was the only front end person on that team - the only other dev there was an L6 in back end. I also wasn’t good at communicating back then, so I was hindering the team a lot. 9 months later, I started handling front end. And right when I got good at handling front end tasks myself, I was told the architects wanted the apps my team was working on to make API calls to the backend rather than mid tier… so the team shifted focus to backend. I lost all my gains on backend by then, so that sucked. Another learning curve, within 2 months I gained independence. A week after I was told I was doing really well, I was laid off. Many people at the company outside of my team voiced that they put me in a "bad" position. I also point the finger at myself, because there was a lot that I needed to take accountability for.

Eventually, I got another job, doing database work. When I look at SQL, I see consistency in SQL and other coding languages. APIs, cloud, data, it all needs databases! To understand the world of code, it’s like everything draws back to databases. In my current role, as long as I pass the onboarding phase, then I can achieve excellence anywhere I go in my career with incredibly transferrable skills. Although I feel like I found where I’d like to dedicate time to specializing to get to the upper echelon of software engineering, I noticed I’m somebody who doesn’t mind what I do because I like everything I’ve seen so far. That’s why I figured to go for the niche that is “best” for all around career growth. With this in mind, what do you think the best fields to specialize in are?

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Posted 7 hours ago
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