If you're a junior engineer, I think one of the best ways to stand out to senior engineers/leadership is writing documentation in something like Confluence. Whether it's just updating the onboarding docs (or creating some if there isn't any), creating work plans on how your team uses X tool or how to troubleshoot/resolve Y error, etc. Taking the initiative to document the process for the next person who gets hired on, or to help prevent your Senior engineers from being overloaded with the same questions can go a long way.
As a junior, you should: 1. Be very motivated and willing to learn. 2. Talk less, listen more. Trust, but verify. 3. Find the balance between grinding on your own and asking for help.
I find 3 to be the most difficult for people to do. There's this false idea that senior engineers don't want to be bothered and early career engineers do whatever they can to grind on their own often at the cost of their own productivity. As long as you show due diligence when asking for help people usually don't mind helping and unblocking you. It's the responsibility of a senior engineer to unblock their team and keep the flow going.
If you're planning on making more of these interview-/discussion-style videos, I think it would be great if you could resume Kernel Panic podcast and put them there 🙂
Thanks! I've just started a new podcast (just the "tutorialinux" podcast, I think -- on Spotify, Apple, Google, etc.) and will be uploading exactly these kinds of discussions there. Appreciate the feedback.
David, thanks so much for this video. What’s your opinion of getting certs when you’ve already been in the industry for some years? AWS SAP, RHCSA, Terraform associate etc? Or do you think it’s better to just get good with a language like Go
I think if you're trying to make a larger move (e.g. software to infra/ops), getting a cert can definitely make sense. It shows you're not totally new to the space, know some basics, and can self-learn as needed. If you've already been in the same space for a while or you already have a few certs, I personally wouldn't invest time/money into additional certifications. RE: programming, I think if you aren't already a decent programmer then your time is almost always best invested there (the specific language isn't even super important, just the fact that you're a good programmer in *something*).
I'm really glad to hear that. Yeah, my hope is to show people that there's no mystery here -- it's just another industry with its own problems, upsides, downsides, and regular people making a living.
Hi Folks! Awesome discussion & very helful! Please can you also take into consideration folks who are on work visa from different countries when discussing salaries, technical skills, some experiences that you’ll think you’ll observed that can be improved! Thanks!
Honestly I don't often know (or ask about) anyone's work visa status. I think the things we talk about here transcend any specific work situation and apply to most engineers.
2 topics came to mind listening to this wonderful discussion. 1) Importance of coding. How much difference does it make if a person comes in with a tech support, sysadmin or developer experience into a team like you have in mind? 2) Often people who didn't have good experience or good mentorship in the field would come into workplace with negative attitude towards co-workers, management, junior staff, etc. Personally, I think such person is not beyond redemption and needs some perspective and mentorship. Would you take a role of such mentor and/or what advice would you give them?
These are great topics! 1) All of those experiences have value to the team. Support Engineers often have fantastic debugging and communication skills. System Engineers often have wonderful automation and scripting skills. Software Engineers often have great programming skills. All of them have things to learn from one another. I've seen fantastic Software Engineers that couldn't communicate their code changes in a pull request body. Fantastic Support Engineers that were scared to touch the code. Fantastic System Engineers that didn't have a customer focused mindset. Learning to code can be taught, but having some base level knowledge to build from is important, even if it's not strictly coding. 2) I agree! I believe everyone deserves a second change. You have to give people the opportunity to change at least once, otherwise it's you with the bad heart. I've had a negative attitude towards others in my career and it has hurt my career progression in the past. A lot of times people with negative attitudes towards others are suffering from some sort of frustration. Something is wrong in their situation that is leading them to be frustrated and communicate poorly. I think a good leader would take the opportunity to understand what's really happening and try and filter through the frustration to find the root cause. Then you can work towards fixing that. Obviously only if the negative person is showing some signs of remorse or willingness to change though.
