Not long from now we will be seeing a surge of new interns enter the tech space for winter 2022, along with a surge of fresh hires starting their IT journeys.
If you have reached this far, congratulations! You have already convinced your employer of your unique talents that make you best suited for this role. Keep that ball rolling and show the rest of your team why you belong there as well!
Make a strong first impression, arrive early, and submit deliverables on time — all of which are generic advice heard at the beginning of employment. Let us skip the boring-alities and head straight to some of the meat and gravy that will make you highly successful, fast.
At the core of it, both leadership and your team members are looking for integration. How well do you fit in on a daily basis? Can you work together with the team on similar problems while bringing your own creativity to the table?
If you got up and left tomorrow, will the team even notice?
Your worth on any team must be visible — highly specialized/siloed initiatives do not count.
For this piece, we will dive into what some of the technical pieces you can embark on to reach new levels of involvement that will build a strong foundation to help you integrate with your team, and the overall organization.
Partake in Code Reviews
Ideally done in pull requests (PR) or other forms, you will be playing a direct role in a project’s life. By reviewing peer code, you are expected to help enforce company and code/framework standards. This is also a prime area to inject feedback if you believe there is a better way to approach a problem, or to better understand the problem in the first place — a common issue from long stretches of development.
As a new team member, it may be challenging at first to enforce standard since your knowledge of the project is limited. At the same time, there is no greater way to learn more about the project and its inner workings than understanding the problems team members are trying to solve with code while spotting areas that can be improved on.
The PR process is a great way to track and discuss changes, so use this to your advantage and start by reviewing small ones. Work your way up the food chain — what is the base that depends on these smaller commits, and what is the relationship? The next thing you know, it will be your code under review.
Join Incident War Rooms
When the sugar-honey-ice-tea hits the fan, especially in a production/client-facing environment, you will notice core members assembled faster than any normal meeting. Pulled from different teams, they form their own little Scooby-Doo gang, each bringing their own specialty to the whiteboard. The clock starts ticking, and the war room session begins.
As one of the most disruptive and expensive maneuvers a tech department can make, these sessions always lead to the eventual remediation and eventual resolution of that issue in order to bring service back to customers. It is also one of the most hectic, confusing, and tiresome part of anyone’s day (and sometimes night). Despite all this, the outcome of these sessions is often times pretty remarkable, just like the scientific and technological leaps that stem from actual war.
As a new team member, joining these sessions is a fantastic way to gain intimate understanding of not only your project, but your organizations systems as a whole. You will also be training yourself in gaining a 1,000 foot view of these systems, an invaluable trait for a team member to possess.
Actively Contribute to Sprint Planning
Last but not least, be proactive in both you and your teams upcoming role assignments during sprint planning/grooming sessions. This is a great way for your team to understand the applications for your interests and skill while also showcasing that you are an active team member, and not a busboy waiting for the next work-item in queue.
This is personally one that I love to see taken advantage more by new hires, as I have discovered that the willingness to take on work directly correlates to its ingenuity and quality.
Throughout my career in several internships and junior/intermediate roles, I have realized that one’s existence in a team member boils down to two things:
Either you are a valuable team member — one that can complete any task you throw at them, or a valued team member — one your team can not do without.
Abiding by this advice will help you achieve the latter, for while technical skill can be learned and applied, it is the constant exercise of systematically involving yourself, of systematically injecting yourself, into the team that matters most to your peers and to leadership
Interns and entry-level positions are frequently low-risk, as in there’s little expectation from your team to you. So, whether you are a software engineer, devops engineer, cloud engineer, or any kind of operational/IT role, take this advice and grow beyond these expectations into somebody your team can never forget.
— Alvin Ramoutar, Content Writer @ TOHacks.ca
