Lessons I learned from my ex-coworkers

18 Dec 2022 #career

This post is part of my Advent of Code 2022.

Today I want to share some of the lessons I learned from three of my ex-coworkers. I didn’t take the time to thank them when I worked with them. This is my thank you note. I’m slightly changing their names.

1. Inspire Change

From Edward, the most senior of all developers, I learned to inspire change. He didn’t talk too much. But when he did, everybody listened. He brought new ideas to improve our process. Instead of doing things himself, he dropped a seed on us. “Hey, what if we do something? Think of a way of achieving something else.”

He was the kind of guy who inspired trust to ask him anything, not only about coding. I tapped his shoulder: “hey, Edward. I have a question about life.”

In emergencies, while everybody panicked, Edward was calm, going through log files and running diagnostics.

2. Stand on the shoulders of giants

From Jack, I learned to stand on the shoulder of giants. When we ran into issues, he always said “you’re not the first one solving that problem” and “smarter people with a higher budget have already solved that.” He made us look out there first. Every time I’m tempted to start something from scratch, I start looking at GitHub. Maybe I can stand on somebody else’s shoulders.

Recently, a coworker told me that reading an authorization token from a custom header with ASP.NET Core was impossible. And my first thought was: “we’re not the first ones doing that.” After some Googling, we definitively can do that. Jack was right!

Also, from Jack, I learned to read other people’s source code. He believed that’s the way of learning from others. By looking at his code.

3. Identify your users

From Paul, I learned to keep in mind who our end users are. More than once, I remember Paul asking designers to change fonts and increase their size. He said: “you aren’t the one who’s going to use this app. This is for your dad and granddad. This is for oldies.”

Also, from Paul, I learned to optimize for the most frequent scenario. Once we had to read and validate XML files, Paul suggested storing the XML documents first and then validating them and continuing with the rest of the processing. Because “90% of the time, those documents are valid.”

Voilà! These are some of the lessons I learned from some of my post coworkers. What have you learned from your coworkers and bosses? I bet they have something to teach you.

For more career lessons, check things I wished I knew before becoming a software engineer, ten lessons learned after one year of remote work, and things I learned after a failed project.

Happy coding!