Hi all,
Last month marked my two year anniversary of working in industry. It snuck up on me - I didn’t realize it until the morning of, but it put me in a reflective mood…what are three of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in the two years since I’ve graduated, that I wish I could share with my past self?
I’ll dive more into that down below, along with a few great resources, a sneak peek of what I’m working on, and this week’s question.
- Kyle
Three Lessons I’ve Learned From Two Years In Industry
Playing The Long Game
To use an overly simplistic analogy: your career is a marathon, and internships are a sprint. As an intern, my focus was on ramping up as quickly as possible, contributing something meaningful, and hopefully getting a return offer…all within 12 weeks.
As a full-time? There’s a lot more emphasis on building a stable foundation, and then continually growing into a valuable part of the team. I had to remind myself that my job wasn’t ending in a few weeks - that I wasn’t going back to college in the fall - and that I’d be spending years working on this project.
It meant that:
I didn’t need to drill deep into one big feature right away - I spent a lot of time learning about different parts of the project, completing bug fixes and small features to learn my way around the codebase.
Building strong foundations with my teammates was important - you spend a lot less time working in a silo as a full-time, and your coworkers are an incredible learning resource for both your technical skills as well as your career.
I focused a lot more on writing production-quality code…not hacky or prototype-quality code. One of the biggest things I realized within a few months on the job was that I really had no idea how to write good code, which was definitely a learning curve.
College Is Really, Really Different Than Industry
A lot of what you learn in college will be (more-or-less) useless in industry. As mentioned in the last section, I completely changed the way I wrote code, but the workplace dynamic is also a lot different than what I experienced in college.
Without getting into the surface-level differences (not having classes, working for a boss, etc.), there’s a few really big things I want to point out:
You actually need to think about users - there’s a good chance that if you’re building software, someone else is going to be using it. Which means that even if your code is pristine and delivered on time…it might not be what your customers want, or need. Customer empathy is undoubtedly one of the biggest things I’ve focused on over the past two years, and I think it’s often incredibly underrated compared to the ‘technical’ aspects of the job.
You need to think about design - there’s a big difference between code that works ‘well enough’ to pass an assignment, and code that’s getting shipped to thousands of customers who are relying on it to be stable. This means spending a lot more time thinking about design (and collaborating with your teammates) to build something that’s going to be maintainable and reliable. Also, yes, you should be writing automated tests…it’s an important enough topic that I suspect I’ll talk more about it here in the future.
Your Progress Is Gradual, And You Probably Won’t See It
There was no single point over the past two years where I suddenly felt like I knew what was going on. Sure, I was learning a lot, but what quickly becomes evident is that there is always more to learn.
What does this mean? At times: imposter syndrome, feeling like you’re not progressing quickly enough, or embarrassment for not knowing something you feel like you should know. But in hindsight? I know so much more than I did two years ago. I’ve grown a lot technically, but I’ve also gained a lot of knowledge about working on a product for the first time.
If you ever feel like you’re not making progress, or that you’re not where you want to be - look at where you were when you started. There’s still a lot of stuff that I don’t know, but that doesn’t acknowledge just how far I’ve come over the past two years.
Things Worth Reading
In Case You Missed It
Sneak Peek
Here’s a few things I’m working on…coming soon!
(Video) Putting Learn-To-Code Platforms To The Test
(Post) The Truth About CS College Specializations In Industry
This Week’s Question
I want to hear from you! Leave a comment or email me at support@kylekeirstead.com with your thoughts/ideas.
To those of you with job/internship experience - what’s been the best (or worst) place you worked? What did you like/dislike about it?