Lessons Learned, One Year of Work
One year ago I was a brand new, freshly minted graduate starting my job. During that year I’ve made so many mistakes learned so much. The transition from student to employee probably would have been smoother if I had a better idea of what I was getting into, so here are some tips for recent grads.
Note: These are in no particular order
- Getting excited about work drastically increases the quality of your work. I can’t stress this enough.
- Keep your personal life at home and your work life at work. It’s really important that you don’t bring baggage from one into the other. It’s also incredibly easy to violate this rule.
- 95% of emails don’t require an immediate response. OK fine, the number is arbitrary, but the number of emails that require immediate response is very low. The cost of rushing to respond to every email that comes in is high. At work it’s a context switch and at home you risk not being present. It’s OK to let your phone flash at you for half an hour.
- Thank your coworkers. Even if they’re just doing their job, always thank your coworkers.
- You will spend more time at work than you will with your family or significant other. This is a really hard truth to swallow. Make sure you like the people you work with.
- Ask questions and speak up for yourself. Seriously, ask questions when you don’t understand or want to know more. Get curious. If there’s a better way to do something, share.
- Your peers are a resource. Similar to the one above, if you want to learn about a specific domain, ask your coworkers.
- Set your own expectations. Don’t rely on the people around you to set expectations. If you’re expected to work more than you believe you should, maybe the company isn’t the right fit. Conversely, work as much as you feel you need to, even if that’s higher than expectations.
- Do something on the side. I think it’s important to commit most of your productive time to your job, but you should have something on the side. A blog, a project, whatever. Just produce something outside of work that you can call your own.
- Keep learning. Teaching yourself to learn on your own takes some getting used to after living in the bubble of an academic environment for 16 years.
- Always keep a written list of your to dos. Unless you’re eidetic, you’ll lose track of tasks you’re responsible for.
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