Best practices at work for software engineers.
These are a list of many things you can do. One doc doesn't suit all the cases. So, I'd expect you to make wise choices and not treat it as a holy book.
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When you join a company, note down all the difficulties you face during your first month and you can work on tasks which improve the process for the new joiners
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While the business has its sprints and backlogs, you should have the tech backlog you planned to work on. Get your ideas reviewed with your peers and work on them with some time dedicated to them.
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Maintain a work log and update it weekly or bi-weekly. At any point in time, you should have the info for the question "What did you get done so far?". One upside of this doc is You don't have to spend more time writing the yearly self-review and with this doc, you have a better version than something which is written in a hurry.
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Always join Debugging/Incident calls even when it's not yours. You can learn with low stress. While you may not know about the complete context, it's fine. You will learn how to respond better to such incidents
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When you face an issue and you/someone resolves it. Your next step is to build tooling around ensuring the same issue doesn't happen again. It creates good impact and visibility.
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Schedule 1-1s with other team members to learn what interesting things they are doing and share what you are doing.
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Do not keep changing your priorities and work on one / two things at once and stay consistent in it.
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There's nothing like over-communication. Keep sharing with the team what you are working on instead of working in silence
- When sharing the feedback, dilute your language and do not give strong opinions at once.
- Collect a lot of examples before sharing the feedback. We don't want to call out any one-off action. We are interested in a behaviour which makes them to be harder to work with or make our life better.
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Make people comfortable to give you feedback by building such relations, Examples:
- Hey we did great here! Next time we should try to do even better, do you see any scope for minor/major improvements here? Feel free to nitpick as well
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When someone shares feedback with you, just appreciate them for highlighting it and mention you'll work on it
- Do not take the feedback personally and feel bad - there's no right/wrong here. It's just a preference mode they chose
- If you don't agree with their feedback, do not reject it immediately ( next time they will not feel like sharing with you.)
- Take it slow and work on it and check with them if they are happy with what you did and need any more changes.