Settling Into your First Software Engineering Role
By: Generation Veeva
Tags: Engineering, First Job, Job Search, Workplace, Software Engineering

By: Rahmatullah Nikyar, Associate Software Engineer

We’ve all been there — joining a new company or even just a new team can be a nerve-wracking experience. Thoughts such as “Am I doing enough?” or “Am I asking too many questions?” are common and may lead to uncertainty in your work. In this piece, I hope to give some tips on how to navigate that awkward phase until you feel more comfortable and confident in your new role.

Asking questions and dealing with uncertainty

So you’ve got your first project — that’s great! It’s time to show the team why you were hired in the first place. Seeing as you’ve just started your new role, it won’t be long before you run into a problem you don’t know the answer to. What to do now?

“What am I supposed to do now???”

Well, you’re probably going to have to ask someone for help. Typically, before I reach out, I try to resolve the problem myself first. If I still need help, I outline what I’ve already tried. Not only does this help my teammate with diagnosing and finding the actual issue, but it shows the effort I’m putting in to solve the issue.

A similar situation you might find yourself in is when you have been given a large task and are feeling unsure about how to implement it. This is a normal feeling for a new hire as you may not have enough context of the project to make the best decision. When I encounter this issue, as a rule of thumb I try to come up with three different ideas for how to implement my task. I brainstorm a list of pros and cons for each idea and present them to my manager, mentor, or whoever is in charge of my task and ask for guidance/feedback. Again, this method not only demonstrates the effort and thought you’ve put into the task, but it will also showcase your ability to be analytical in your work.

Another quick tip is to make sure you aren’t spinning your wheels for too long on your own. Usually, if I’m struggling with a problem and haven’t made progress for an hour, I reach out for help. Don’t worry about “wasting” someone else’s time by asking for help; in fact, by not taking the time to ask for help, you might actually be wasting time and money for the company.

Your most powerful asset: fresh eyes.

As the newest member of the team, you have the most objective view of the project. This can be extremely valuable to a team with members who have been working on a project for very long and may be used to some of its idiosyncrasies.

One way to immediately start contributing — even when your computer isn’t even fully set up — is to update the project’s setup/installation guide. Especially useful if the team is starting to grow when following the setup guide you may find that certain installations are not working as they used to due to upgrades to the software or the latest computer firmware. Reporting these issues and offering to update the instructions shows initiative and gives you the ability to add value even from day one.

Another way to utilize your fresh eyes is to speak up about things that don’t seem right to you. To give you a better idea, let me use an example of when I was working on a mobile application at a software startup.

I was being shown the registration process for the app when I noticed that there were a few parts of the UI/UX design that were a little unintuitive and clunky. I’m no front-end designer and I was worried that maybe I wasn’t qualified to pass judgment. Lack of confidence in my opinion and being shy as a new hire led me to not bring up those issues. Long story short, later on, these same issues ended up being flagged at the last minute as required improvements, adding more work to an already stressful deadline.

Just to be clear, the moral of the story isn’t to say that you, a new hire, are responsible for double-checking everything to date on your project (that’s ridiculous!) Instead, it should tell you that regardless of how little experience you have or what field that experience is in, your opinion is valid. Asking these types of questions shows your attention to detail and critical thinking early on.

When I do this, I make sure that I’m being tactful when I ask why something is designed or implemented in a certain way, as I would when providing constructive criticism to the work of a friend or colleague.

Final Thoughts:

I hope some of these tips are useful, but I think the best advice I can give is to not be so hard on yourself. Give yourself some time and you’ll be surprised at how well you grow into your role.