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Ask Slashdot: What Do You Wish You'd Known Starting Your First "Real" Job?
itwbennett writes: ITworld's Josh Fruhlinger asked seasoned (and some not-so-seasoned) tech professionals what they wished they knew back when they were newly minted graduates entering the workforce. Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the best advice has more to do with soft skills than with tech skills. To wit: 'When [managers] say they are suggesting you do something, it's not really a suggestion — it is an order disguised as a suggestion. Plain-speaking is a lost art at big companies and corporate double talk is the name of the game.' What's your best piece of advice for the newest among you?
How to negotiate for a better salary.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
-Listen more, talk less, especially when you're young.
-Always meet a commitment you make.
-Keep every e-mail.
-Show up five minutes early to every meeting.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
You have to own your career.....no one else will do it for you. Negotiate a good salary. If you ever get passed over for a raise or a promotion, start looking for a different job. If the choice assignments aren't being given to you, look for a different job. Take ownership of your education....learn new skills before you need them and make yourself invaluable to the company. Take on the hard challenges.
Save more on 401k, Roth-IRA; leads to tax reduction. Also live frugal. You never know when your job will vanish -- so the quicker you get a nest-egg, better. And for any tax deferred savings time is your friend; so earlier you start is better. And set your goal to be financial independence.
All companies are out to screw you. So you are a fool. A complete fool, if you give the company any loyalty.
Do not be afraid or feel bad to jump ship to another company that is offering something better. Also don't ever be afraid to ask for more money, because I guarantee you are underpaid.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Possibly off-topic but now that I am a very seasoned tech worker facing retirement starting investing in your future literally is my vote. There is nothing like time and compound interest so new grads, setup and contribute to that saving plan (401k, 403b). Pay yourself first, you will not regret it.
Being right isn't enough. You have to be popular to effect change.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Yeah, and understand that when the PM says "well, if we all work 24x7 we'll be ontime" then PM is an idiot and should be told that.
Right idea, wrong tactic.
Instead of going head to head, it's a great place to be passive aggressive and start asking how you will be compensated for the extra hours and how they would like you to handle time off for job interviews.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
All of the major mistakes I've made over the years fall into the category of not playing well with others. That often occurred when I became overly committed to getting the job done. Big mistake. I eventually turned that into a simple motto: "It's more important to get along with others than to get your work done." Basically, you lose more points for being a social problem than you gain for being a technical answer. The penalty for the former can be quite severe. The reward for the latter usually is minimal.
Corny as it may sound, a simple prevention/cure for this problem is to read, follow, and live the advice in "How to Win Friends and Influence People," by Dale Carnegie. (Available for free at your local public library.) That will also help you in all other aspects of life, since the same dynamic applies throughout. Heck, even those ISIS folks also could benefit from it - especially them.
IMHO, this should be required reading for everyone entering the workforce. Since I've begun practicing those principles, every aspect of my life has improved. Oh, except that I get more annoyed at people who remain clueless on these simple - and now obvious - principles.
* That no matter how much you think you know, there is someone who knows more. That's called humility.
* That you will, invariably, look back at yourself in 5 years and think you were an immature kid/idiot. That's called growth.
* That the best managers are the ones who aren't necessarily domain experts, but whom are enablers and gurus in the sense that they guide you. That's wisdom.
* That little thing called a 401k? That you don't care about? CARE ABOUT IT. Max it. Then forget about it.
* That getting wound up in your co-workers drama is the worst thing you can do; stay clear, so that when the bomb goes off, you don't get hit with shrapnel.
* That being dependable, friendly, and willing to share your expertise is the only skill that *really* matters in the long run.
It's pretty much universally frowned upon by management, and if the relationship doesn't work out, both of you are stuck being around each other all day every day for the foreseeable future, which can be pretty horrible. OTOH, I met my wife at my first job out of school (but wisely, she refused to date me while we still worked together).
1. Please, do what you love, love what you do...
2. See #1 (otherwise, life sucks...)
3. Keep commute time minimal
4. Have a life outside of work, really, enjoy life, or at least try...
5. There is always something that is due ASAP
6. There will always be someone you really dislike at work, deal with it 7. Start contributing to 401k, max out your contribution, or at least do company match if it's available. Remember, it's cumulative, the earlier you start, the better off you are.
Off the top of my head, I'm sure there are many more and possibly better suggestions...
1) Managers with some degree of technical knowledge are almost always better for tech workers than managers that don't really have any technical knowledge.
2) One of the very best managers I ever worked for was a woman. The two worst managers I ever had were women. Women tech managers will either be fantastic or horrible beyond belief. The bad ones were orders of magnitude worse than the worst male managers I've ever had.
3) When a bunch of co-workers start leaving a job or the very best ones in your department start to leave, it's probably time for you to consider leaving too.
4) I've had jobs that were really great that became bad or started bad and became really good. Conditions change. Be prepared for it to happen. And if they change for the worse, it may be your signal to find a new job.
5) Try to get along with co-workers because as you change jobs in your tech career, you'll often find yourself working again with people from a previous job and you don't want to have those people have a grudge against you when you start a new job.
6) Don't be a hothead. Stay cool. I had a pretty negative opinion of a manager in a sister office over some things some co-workers told me when they worked under him in the past. My attitude got so negative that I remember once almost blowing up at him over something trivial, but I kept my cool. That guy got promoted and became my manager's manager and he went to bat for me with his management to get me a promotion at a time when it was really difficult to get promoted. You can misjudge people and if I had blown up at the guy, he'd have never gotten me the promotion. I really learned a valuable lesson on that one.
7) My dad told me years ago not to ever kick people when they were down because circumstances change and people who are down today may wield great power in your organization later and they will definitely remember who was good to them when they were at the low point of their career.
you'll never know, when you'll need to prove that you spent time on something. and, if you want to make a career, don't be humble and think that your work speaks for itself. advertise yourself - you won't get fired for bragging, just promoted.
I wish I had known how mundane and utterly banal most software development is.
I spend 99% of my time on bug fixes, documentation, configuration management, and writing new code that quite frankly, aside from exact implementation, isn't that much different than code I wrote 10 years ago.
"I need to shuffle data from point A to point B."
"I need to hit an API and stuff the result somewhere."
"I need to make sure the user doesn't enter something retarded into this form."
Maybe 1% of the work I do is even remotely interesting. Why? Because of the flood of software frameworks and libraries that take care of all that interesting stuff for you. A vast majority of us don't have to care about the best algorithm for X, for example - that work has already been done. Software is more like legos these days. You take the pieces you want and put them together.
That is good in that making software is easier and faster than ever before, but it is murder for people who did this stuff because it was interesting. There's very little mystique these days.
Love sees no species.
It is annoying to write down everything, but when PHB gets off the phone with you, they immediately start morphing everything that was said into their version of what they think you said. If you don't do this, you will find that you over-committed even when you didn't and you will hear all sorts of things that everyone else thinks that you promised.
At the end of each call COVER YOUR ASS. Eventually, if you are lucky, they will stop calling you altogether and will simply START with email, since you aren't letting them get away with the famous "I thought you understood what we discussed" reality bending mechanism. You probably won't have to re-forward it PHB when they lose their mind in 3 weeks, but if you do, you will have it.
To: PHB
cc:team
June 2015 Release
Thanks for talking this through with me, I will go forward with A, B, and C as discussed and I appreciate that you agreed to delay D, E, F until after the milestone build is stable for the June 2015 release.
Most people are terrible at salary negotiation. Based on various studies with some degree of variance, overall they suggest about 55% of men do not negotiate their wages, and about 70% of women do not negotiate their wages. That is NO NEGOTIATION AT ALL.
Bear in mind that a lot of people are pretty desperate to get a paycheck. You can pretty easily take yourself out of the running for a lot of jobs by trying to negotiate salary (or by doing so clumsily) particularly when there are multiple qualified candidates for the job. Not saying that more folks shouldn't negotiate their salary but many times they are not negotiating from a position of strength. It's one thing if you have a nice pad of savings and can afford to say no to an offer. Not everyone is so lucky. I've been in both circumstances myself at different times so I understand how hard it can be to negotiate when not getting the job at all is a worse outcome than getting paid a sub-optimal amount.
That said I agree completely with what you said. Negotiation is a very valuable life skill. The sooner you get good at it the better.
The obvious response to which is, "Sure, but in exchange, I'll need copies of the pay stubs for those working for you in comparable positions."
To which the company will likely say "thank you for your time and we'll show you to the door".
To be clear, I agree with you but being right carries a non-trivial risk of not getting the job. That may or may not be a good thing.
Development is programmable; Discovery is not programmable. (Fuller)
Seriously. I thought all the shite jokes about corporate America were made up. I was very wrong.
file:
As a manager, here are the two pieces of advice I'd pass on:
1. We don't use passive voice in our memos. College is wrong. I've been out of college for a long time, but I always want to write to the business writing prof I had and let him know. We stress active voice.
2. I picked this up from a Murawski course (which deals with active voice writing). It was, "Doing work is bringing your supervisor a solution, not problems." That is, me going to my boss and saying, "Hey, I've got a problem here," isn't doing work. The work is going to my boss and bringing him or her a solution to the problem. Now, sometimes you get stuck and need help, and that's fine, and I'm happy to help - but your goal as an employee should be to bring me proposed solutions to problems (or, better yet, just take care of it, if you can).
1. Start saving early.
2. Live below your means.
3. Keep debt to a minimum. Never put on a credit card more than you have in your savings account.
4. Debt isn't evil, but you should treat it as if it was. Keep it to a minimum.
5. If you're buying a house, don't take out a mortgage for more than three years gross salary. And when you do get a mortgage, get a fixed mortgage.
6. Invest as much as possible in low expense ratio index funds.
7. Open up a Roth IRA early and maximize my investment in it every year.
8. NEVER use an investment advisor. Read a book instead. (Common Sense on Mutual Funds by Bogle is an excellent start. If you want something simpler, The Boglehead Guide To Investing)
9. NEVER buy investments through your insurance company.
10. When you start having kids, start a 529 plan for each ASAP.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Luck has nothing to do with it. If you don't have savings, it's because you fucked up by spending too much of your income.
Spoken like someone who has never been in a big financial or social hole or had a severe medical condition. Sometimes hard work and talent and making good decisions isn't enough. If you grow up in a depressed area with a poor family there is a non-trivial chance that opportunities are going to be hard to come by. Sometimes people have severe medical conditions that put them in a financial hole or make it difficult to work. Get sick and you might find yourself in a deep financial hole through no fault of your own. Sometimes you find yourself in a bad situation because someone ripped you off.
It's easy to say luck has nothing to do with it but that simply isn't true. It is a LOT easier to get opportunities if you are in a good financial position to start with. It's a lot easier to make money when you already have money. That isn't to say you can't make it if you don't have a silver spoon but it is a lot harder and that is a matter of luck. Being healthy is largely a matter of luck. My mother suffers from ALS and cannot work and that is NOT her fault. Your romantic notion that all that matter is hard work and fiscal discipline is a nice story but a false one.