The New Grads Company Culture Guide: Lessons from Both Sides of the Growth Spectrum - Part 1

Welcome

So I decided to write my set of advice, I would have given to myself if I had to start my career all over again. This blog is pretty opinionated and you might not agree with all the opinions of mine. And that's completely fine, we all have different life experiences and we all tend to look at and solve the same problem in different manners.

Measure Impact

As Engineers we tend to get focused alot on implementation and technicalities of a task. But as humans we tend to appreciate work whose impact we can appreciate. So whenever you are given a task, ask questions about the impact that this task will bring to the team/company. Sometimes the impact can be easily quantified, but most of the time it is hard to quantify. Knowing the impact of your work helps you in many ways. It helps you appreciate your work and keeps your morale high. It helps you justify your work during promotions and appraisals and if you decide to leave the company it helps you showcase the importance of work to your next recruiter. Sometimes to measure the impact of your work you would have to emit some metrics, create some dashboard and go slightly out of your way. In my experience even if you have to go take some extra efforts to quantify your impact a good tech lead or manager won't stop you, for the simple reason that your impact is also an OKR for them and they also use it to represent the teams efforts in multiple forums, so its basically a win win for all.

Now let's give an example of a person documenting a task.

Created Database indices for faster to improve api latencies and thereby improving homepage load time.
Created database indices for frequently used queries, which improved API latencies and homepage load time by 20% and increased user retention by 40%.

Notice that both the tasks are the same but highlighting the impact in the second approach makes you appreciate the task more. Basically you are your own advocate at your workplace.

Not always you might receive work that has a good impact, that's fine in short duration but if this is happening for a very long time, talk with the manager about this and make him understand your concern. A good manager will always understand your concern and make some plan for you, if not immediately but eventually. But if you decide to just stay silent, when you are up for promotion, your manager can simply deny you the promotion by saying you don't have good enough impactful work.

Setup 1:1

Please take some time out and set up 1:1 meetings with your manager and if possible with your tech lead as well. I personally realised the importance of setting up 1:1 with my manager pretty late in my career. These meetings are the place where you speak your mind out regarding your work, what do you expect from your manager, what things are concerning you, what do you think that the team can improve, asking for any support that you might require from your manager, and asking for timely feedback from your manager. This is also the best place to strike your discussions regarding your promotions and what are the company's expectations that you need to fulfil to move to the next level. I would also strongly suggest having your promotion discussions at least 1 year before the date you are targeting your promotion, Since promotion is mostly a complex process and you and your manager might have to work on a lot of things to make your promotion happen for you.

What I have seen is in all the mature companies having sizable employees, their managers set up these meetings and strike this discussion with you. In case your manager has no or pretty little idea about your work and contributions this is the best time to tell him/her about your contributions. And please please don't hesitate to set up these meetings if your manager has not set up any meetings ( that was one of my mistakes i committed ), as i have always said you are responsible for your career and you have to take up all the steps required to make yourself successful.

Write your work

Irrespective of whether anyone asks you or not, have a running doc of all the impactful work that you have done. If possible, also try to map all your contributions to expectations from your current or next level. This document comes very handy when you have to keep your manager informed about your contributions during 1:1 or during your appraisal cycles. As mentioned previously please also document the impact of your contributions. Ensure that you regularly keep this document updated, so that you also dont miss the track of work that you have done.

So this is it for this blog, thank you so much for your time, Incase your are interested, here is the Second Blog of this series