The New Grads Company Culture Guide: Lessons from Both Sides of the Growth Spectrum - Part 2

I recently completed 3 years full time experience. In my small career I had the opportunity to work in a fast paced seed stage startup like 100ms, a midsize innovative company like Disney + Hotstar, a Big MNC infamous for its culture and a Big MNC famous for its amazing work culture i.e Linkedin. Interestingly this puts me in a interesting position of understanding work cultures and expectations from new grads of companies in their different stages of growth,

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.

Set Aside some time for your learning

I see my work as not just a means to earn money, but also an opportunity to upskill myself. I have seen enough of my colleagues bicker about how they are not learning anything in their existing projects. I have a simple solution to this, whenever possible allocate 10-20% of time given to complete a task to reading and learning stuff related to the task, it might be completely possible that whatever you are learning might not necessarily help immediately in your current task. Let's take an example for this, Lets say your task is to deploy a redis cluster and use it to implement some sort of read through server side caching. In this case you can take some time out and try to understand what other caching options your team had apart from redis, why did a senior engineer decide to use redis over other options, what are other caching strategies apart from read through. How are you going to measure the effectiveness of this cache etc.

You can also invest some time in reading and understanding part of your team's codebase, on which you might have received an opportunity to work on. Most big companies have a lot of design documents written, they are a genuine gold mine for learning, read them. This side learning can enable you to contribute meaningfully when your team is trying to solve a critical bug or having a design discussion, this establishes the team's trust in you and sets you apart from your peers

Some of you might think that you are robbing time away from your company which you could have utilised for actually completing the task by reading enough just to complete the task ( in the age of Chat GPT, this approach has gotten pretty easier). But I see it as an investment you and the company is making on you to make you a better developer, which eventually should make you more productive and save enough time in completing any future similar task. Actually i dont think time is a problem for most of us, but laziness to just do enough to complete the task is a bigger problem in my experience. Most of us have lost interest in our work, that we fail to recognize learning opportunities or even if we recognize one we don't act upon it and conveniently blame the company or project for not providing any learning opportunity. I know I got pretty opinionated here, but that's just my take on the problem. Stay hungry, Stay foolish.

Have Boundaries

Work is just a part of your life and your identity, it's definitely not your complete identity or life. Life is beyond work, it's also about investing in your relations with your parents, friends, your hobbies and majorly about your health. In my case I overworked myself in the first 2-3 years of work, and ended up possibly having lifelong medications for some health complication which I think could have been easily avoided, had I prioritised my health a bit.

Prior to the IT boom, most employees had their personal and professional life segregated since you would have to be physically present in your workplace to do your work. Most of the Jobs were physical in nature, but times have changed. Now your mind is basically your workplace, even if you are away from your laptop you might be still worried about your work problem and trying to solve it. This prevents you from being present in the moment and give your best in your time allocated for other purposes. I have seen many of my senior colleagues having more than 7-8 years of experience struggling to cut off their mind from work and thereby hampering aspects of their personal life. If i have to be honest, even i am a victim of this problem, but i feel acknowledging that this is a problem is an important first step for a successful long term life.

Former CocoCola CEO Brian Dyson, famously quoted this situation in his 1991 Georgia Tech commencement speech,

Imagine life is a game of 5 balls that you manipulate in the air, trying not to fall these balls. One of them is rubber and the rest is glass. The five balls are: work, family, health, friends, and soul. It will not be long before you realise that (work) is a rubber ball. Whenever you fall, you will jump again, while the other balls are made of glass. If one of them falls, it will not return to its previous form. It will either be damaged, bruised, cracked, or even scattered. You have to be aware of that and strive for it. Manage your work efficiently during working hours, take the time to be assured of your sincerity, give the necessary time to your family and friends, take appropriate rest, and take care of your health. If you are gone, it isn’t easy to return as it was.

To be honest i am no one to decide for you how much time you should dedicate to work, maybe you are pushing for your promotion or your team is going through a crunch situation and they might need you to put some extra effort, Or you are going through some personal problems. Everybody is fighting their own battle in different timelines, so there is definitely no one solution that fits in for all of us. With every decision of yours to prioritise something, you are also taking a decision to neglect some other parts of your life and you are highly likely to regret not giving enough time to the neglected aspect, that's just how life is. But the least we all can do is acknowledge that work is not your complete life and then take some informed well taught decisions about allocation of your time.

Communicate Effectively

I strongly believe that it is okay to allocate 5-10% of your time in ensuring that you are communicating effectively about your work. This can include things like ensuring that the jira tickets are properly updated, ensuring that you are communicating your standup updates well, ensuring that you timely highlight the blockers in your work to your stakeholders and keeping them informed. Even if you are not able to complete your work commitments on time, it would make your managers and your life easier if you can communicate any delay in advance. Your manager can ask you to prioritise some impactful tasks over others to keep the stakeholders happy, can help to unblock you by involving some other stakeholder that are out of your reach, allocate more resources for your tasks or in the worst case he/she could communicate the delay well in advance. The last thing you would want is you losing trust of stakeholders because you did not highlight the blockers or delays ahead of time. Your manager is your guardian angel, keep him/her informed so that they can save you whenever required.

Watch seniors in your team, regarding how they handle expectations and ambiguous projects, and how they plan their projects/tasks, how they forecast the effort required for a task and how they highlight any blocker they hit. I think there is a lot that you can learn from your seniors here, so watch them carefully when they are handling any projects and learn from them.

In case you run into a situation where you are bombarded with work which is practically impossible to complete in the asked timelines, involve your manager here, ask him/her what should i prioritise among these tasks, don't just go ahead and try to overwork yourself blindly. Your Manager has a lot more context about the impact, priority of the tasks, they know which stakeholders they can handle if there is a delay or they can allocate some of your work to some other team member. Even if you are ready to overwork yourself to achieve the impossible, you don't want to be in a pitiful situation where no one knows and appreciates how hard you work or worse, blame you for not completing the tasks just because you did not communicate effectively. Your problems are your manager's problem, let your manager do his/her job man….