New Employee jitters as a veteran in a company?

I have been at my current company long enough to get too comfortable, but is that the case?

The years I have spent in my current job feel very much like 3–4 jobs. First, it is natural for a company to go through different types of leaderships roughly every 4 years. On top of that, there is the technology aspect and its changes over the years, and different types of projects I have been part of. All of these things painted a picture in my head as if I changed jobs 3–4 times, and in fact I have been with the company slightly over 12 years.

What is the secret to still getting “New Employee” jitters every week even after being with the company for so long?

(1) Don’t wait for your leaders to challenge you. You need to challenge yourself from week to week.

(2) You need to care.

(3) Appreciate what you and your team accomplished, but never be fully satisfied. Look at this from a positive angle. Look at it as an opportunity.

(4) Don’t judge somebody else’s engineering efforts that you inherited; you don’t know what circumstances they performed that under. Try to understand it, identify what can be improved and improve it; this will keep you on the edge because improving something you inherited is harder than just building it from scratch because you might not have an option to build from scratch.

(5) Create a great team so that you are in a room with a group of people who are smarter than you. For example, as a solutions architect I may be the one making decisions on designs/solutions, but every day I learn something new from my teammates and that’s a great feeling.

All of this adds a bit of that uncertainty and a new boost of energy from week to week. This is enough to still get a bit of “New Employee” jitters that make us prove ourselves over and over again.

Thank you for reading this article.

Almir Mustafic