Skip to main content

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

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Teaching kids the importance of information security — A simple fun example with encoding/decoding

Teaching kids about information security is very important today because the social network websites and applications are blurring the line between what should be shared securely and what not. Everybody is busy over-sharing the good, bad and ugly over the internet and in the process of doing that forgetting the basics of information security or never taking the time to learn it. Or is it that nobody is introducing these concepts in school? It is something that needs to be introduced in our education systems from early days. Do you remember the days when we used to send those short messages on a piece of paper in our classrooms? Some encoded those messages because you did not want another person in the middle to open it and understand what it says. How were those messages encoded? The simplest example is: You create a simple mapping for each letter and number in the alphabet. Then you encode your message and write it on a piece of paper. Then the person on the other end decodes...

Daylight saving time and A Software Engineering state of mind ?

You may be wondering what the Daylight saving time has to do with a software engineering state of mind. When thinking about writing this article, at first I thought to start with the following joke and I am: “ Did you know that the Daylight saving time was started because a software developer coded a function that does smart timezone and configurable calculations and then this developer created a problem to solve to use the algorithm; hence, the Daylight saving time was born. ” This is a joke, but  on a more serious note , this brings me to a state of mind in software engineering that make this joke a reality to some degree. How many times did we find ourselves in situations where we learned something new in programming and we looked for ways to apply it at any cost? How many times did we see a cool new feature from a creator of a framework and we decided to use it even though that was not the right solution for the problem or maybe there was no problem to solve in the ...

Language of Software Engineers and scrum-master skills (quick thoughts)

Language of software engineers and skills of scrum-masters? All software developers speak the same language and that is pseudo-code :) However, there are still communication issues among software engineers specifically with other teams. That's where the role of great scrum-masters fits in. That great scrum-master does not necessarily need to be technical but he/she needs to have the skills of hearing roadblocks that engineers communicate in their technical language. I said "hearing" and hearing is not the same as listening. Listening is just a pre-requisite for hearing. Once you hear it, now you need to know how to action it and mobilize the right people. Coaching comes along with all of this, but that is a separate topic because it is also a responsibility of the tech manager. These skills separate great scrum-masters from others. Almir Mustafic P.S. Disclaimer: On any given day, I wear a hat of a solutions architect, engineer, scrum-master and tech manager.