Meet The Tech Team: What’s your best tip for people new to the tech industry?

Published in

FutureLearn

6 min readOct 26, 2020

In this Meet The Tech Team blog post we ask our team what their best tips are for people new to tech.

The Meet The Tech Team blog post series is a recurring series for us to introduce you to the engineers in our Tech Team, with each post featuring answers from some of our team. In today’s post, we asked our engineers:

What’s your best tip for people new to the tech industry? What‘s the best piece of advice that you’ve gotten over the years that have helped you become a better software engineer? What things did you wish you had heard earlier?

Jessica Leach — Software engineer

Build your own project — I think this is the most satisfying way to learn something, Google how to do things as you go, wait until you need to implement something to learn how to do it.

Make friends with people who are also learning. This way you can spur each other on and share the highs and the lows.

Ask as many questions as possible. If no one is getting annoyed by how many questions you are asking, it means you are not asking enough questions!

Anneka Sillitoe — Software Engineer

It’s fine to ask questions and to simply not know the answer. No matter how far you get in your career, good developers and good tech teams will always discuss how to build things and the right way to go about stuff. You can always learn from others, regardless of what you already know. That’s the beauty of a career in tech. Honestly, you just get better at being able to ask questions or how to google the right questions. That’s the big secret of it all to be honest.

Nicky Thompson — Engineering Manager

Build a habit of consistent note-taking and reflection. You need to do this both day-to-day while working on your projects, and as a regular weekly or daily bigger-picture reflection.

Keeping a todo list alongside your code while you’re deep in flow means you don’t get distracted by rabbit holes, and end up working on something other than what you planned, which stops you making progress on what you originally wanted to be doing. If you see something you think you should fix that isn’t related to your main goal, take a note and move on. Come back to the list when you’re done.

Reflecting on your past day or week and building a list of priorities for your upcoming time forces you to confront your recent wins and losses. What went well? What didn’t? What would you try again? What would you change next time?

A happy side effect of this habit is that you end up with a gold-mine of useful nuggets and notes and research to refer to in future. It makes you better in the moment, and better forever! Seriously — every single one of the best engineers I’ve ever worked with have all had some form of this habit and it’s something I wish I had done right from when I first started my career.

Filipe Moreira — Software Engineer

Ask questions: it is always important to be humble and realise it is ok not to know something and understand that it is ok to ask for help.

Always be learning: our area of work is always expanding and it is essential that we are always pushing ourselves into learning mode.

Don’t follow the latest fads: while it may be nice to learn and play with the latest tech, I believe that we should first have a good grounding on fundamentals. This will always help you because newer tech usually builds up on top of battle tested techniques.

Laura Martin — Site Reliability Engineer

Don’t be scared of breaking things! Breaking things tell you so much about how stuff works, and absolutely everyone does it. One of the tenets of being a Senior Engineer is having an instinct for when something might cause a problem, but they only know this from experience.

Don’t assume any one person knows everything! Nobody knows everything. Some people know more than others in a particular subject, but it’s almost guaranteed you know something about something that they don’t. The longer you’re in this industry, the more you get used to saying “can you explain that to me?”

Elena Tanasoiu — Software Engineer

I’ve met a lot of people that are very good. And I’ve met a lot of people that love learning and are curious. My conclusion is that it’s more important to be curious and excited about what you’re doing than it is to be an expert. And if you meet people who support you and your curiosity, make good use of them and ask them to teach you. They’re the ones you want to work with because they offer you respect from the start.

Also, you’ll learn more by breaking things than by making them work.

If you’re serious about improving yourself, it would help to read blog posts from people that are working in tech. The more you know in advance about a topic, the easier it will be for you to understand it deeply and have new ideas. If you find yourself not knowing anything about a topic, sit down and research it. Then ask questions.

Melinda Seckington — Engineering Manager

It’s okay not to know stuff! Early on in my career I thought asking too many questions or admitting that I didn’t know something, was a sign that I wasn’t good enough to be an engineer. But there’s way too much out there for any one engineer to know. Don’t feel bad if you don’t know something — ask for help, ask questions or google things. Even the most senior engineer knows when to ask for help!

Louise Swift — Software Engineer

As well as the other good suggestions here, I recommend (carefully!) using social media to help discover good people and good companies in the industry. It can be tricky at first to filter out the less useful stuff, and too much social media is never wise. But keeping an eye on who’s joining (and leaving) certain companies, who may know a recruiter who’s really good, which companies show dedication to certain values over the long term, and so on, is valuable data to gather as you progress in your career.

Mat Moore — Tech Lead

Try to get comfortable with stating what you do and don’t understand. If you identify an area you are lacking knowledge in, try talking through your current mental model with someone else so they can help fill in the gaps. You don’t need to figure it all out yourself.

Also practice asking clarifying questions when there’s ambiguity about what needs doing or why. Even if it sounds like the answer is obvious to everyone else, it will bring assumptions to the surface and make things clearer for everyone, not just you.

Make sure you spend lots of time reading code as well as writing it. Try and understand how the existing code is structured, and why, before you make big changes. If you think other people might disagree with how you are solving a problem, it’s often worth asking for an early review, or pairing with someone else for a bit, so you can avoid unexpected rework later on.

If you’re interested in joining the FutureLearn Tech Team, we’re currently hiring for several roles (a Technical Lead, a Front-end Technical Architect, a Data Engineer and an Information Security Manager), which you can see on our jobs page.