7 common misconceptions among young (French) engineers
After onboarding several dozen software engineers for their first jobs at Mindsay after graduation or for an internship, I’ve noticed a trend of common misconceptions held by these recent graduates that hold them back in their first roles.
Here are 7 of the most common misconceptions held by recent grads when starting their first software engineer role:
1. You should spend most of your time solving problems
At school
You are focused on finding the solution to a given problem. The best students are the usually best problem solvers.
At work
You should first focus on redefining or challenging the problem before finding a solution. Problems are rarely well crafted, so you should spend up to 80% of your time finding the right problem, redefining, or challenging it. The best employees are those focused on what really matters (and it’s usually not obvious).
2. You’re expected to be right
At school
Errors are not encouraged. The most admired students are those who give the right answers. People sometimes laugh when somebody fails, so you become afraid of making mistakes, which are synonymous with bad grades, punishment, shame, etc.
At work
Most of the time there is no right or wrong answer (one can achieve the same goal in many different ways) and it’s likely that your idea on how to solve a specific problem (or know what the specific problem actually is) is better than anyone elses. If you don’t make mistakes, you are not trying hard enough. You’re expected to learn fast, and that implies making a lot of mistakes. Employees who advance the fastest are usually those who fail the most.
3. You are never good enough
At school
Because you are expected to always give the right answers, you are expected to change when you can’t do that. You are constantly evaluated. Teachers might tell you, “If you don’t improve, you’ll never succeed.” You might think you are the problem, and that your goal is to become perfect.
At work
The more you grow, the more you learn about yourself. You learn that nobody is perfect, because one quality always comes with a shortcoming and vice-versa. If you are an extraordinary finisher, great with details, always handing off amazing work, you are most likely not the best at starting a new project and trying 100 different options extremely fast. People who are extremely disorganized tend to also be extremely good in emergency situations, where everything that was planned fails. And the list goes on. Of course, as you grow you learn to be more balanced in every situation, but it takes a lot of time, and you’ll never be the best everywhere. So your first goal should be to learn about yourself, NOT change yourself. What am I really good at? What am I less good at? What do I like less? With these answers, try to find people that are complementary to you. Your work will be so much better when you work alongside them.
4. If you want a successful career, you need to manage people
What you might think
I am only important if I have power over other people. Even if I am not interested in it, management will be a must at some point if I want to earn a better living and be better considered.
What is actually the case
Modern companies realize that being amazing with software and with people development are two completely separate sets of qualities, equally important to the company. And it also translates into salaries: in US tech companies, for a similar number of years of experience, software experts are even slightly better paid than managers. As you grow in expertise, your impact on people will also grow, albeit in a different way than in management. You’ll teach, coach, promote, help, etc. Thanks to you, the company will build much more reliable and flexible systems, making happier customers and staff.
5. You should avoid asking for help
At school
Some people develop incredible autonomy, taking pride in never asking for help, doing everything by themselves.
At work
We expect you to give yourself the means to reach your goal. If you remain stuck out of pride or fear of asking, you are not working in the best interests of the team. You should ask for help as much as possible. Of course along the way you will also develop very useful skills which will make you more autonomous (and your life much easier): reading documentations, searching the web (no, it’s not always straightforward), prototyping, following tutorials in the most effective way, etc.
6. Communication skills are only for business roles
At school
Most of your work is written. It is more important to have the right answer than to explain it to others. You are concentrated on your own success.
At work
Your own success is no longer a good metric. The success that matters is the success of the group: your team, your company. So it becomes increasingly important to share what you do and learn. This often comes through oral communication, which allows you to more easily understand people from their reactions and adapt your communication on the spot.
7. The ends justify the means
At school
If you were successful, you probably learned to focus on being right as much as possible, and maybe started being mainly focused on that. The quality of your communication with other people had probably absolutely no impact on the grading of your essays. Most of your work was done alone (and it was intended that way).
At work
Like I outline in point 1, problems are incredibly more complex, by several orders of magnitude. Nobody actually knows precisely the real problems we’re trying to solve. You only have hints: something seems broken or can be improved. Without an obvious problem, being right or wrong means so much less than during your studies, and more importantly, very few things can be achieved alone. Building a great product does not happen if you don’t understand your customers, and you realize that you and your team alone cannot make a difference without the help of the Sales team (if you don’t listen to them, your product can’t be sold and the company closes), Operations (if customers struggle using your service, you’ll also end up the same way), Finance (when you realize that’ll you need a big team of complementary developers to help you), HR, etc.
Conclusion
I hope highlighting these misconceptions can help new graduates more efficiently bridge the gap between school and work. Out of everything outlined here, the last point is certainly the most important: the quality of your communication with everyone will probably be the single most important ingredient of your professional success.
