The Little Things I Did to Level Up From a Junior Software Engineer

I dreamed about the glamorous life I thought I would one day live working at a FAANG company when I was in college. When I started my career as a Junior Software Engineer at a startup, I was given a healthy dose of reality in terms of my compensation. Thankfully, I have been able to advance in my career since then. While I have gotten more proficient in my technical skills over that timeframe, I think the little things I have done outside of coding really helped me to grow in my career.

Ask “The Right” Questions

When I started my first job, I was lucky to have great mentors that encouraged me to ask a lot of questions. Man, did I ever take them up on that offer! I realized at the time that there were certain questions that were better off not asked…. right away. For example, let’s say you are new to Ruby on Rails and someone tasks you with adding a new API endpoint. Even though you may not know where to begin and it would be faster to ask someone on your team how to do it, I found that it was better to take the time to search for documentation and try to apply the concepts I read in the documentation to the problem on my own. Then, when I asked a colleague a question, I could explain to them what I tried and ask for guidance on where I went wrong. This was helped me advance in my career…