Career Lessons (Photo Credit: Google)
In February 2026, I completed 5 years of my career. During these 5 years, I served responsibility for 4 different designations. Started as a Software Engineer (Level 1) in March 2021. Next year, promoted to Software Engineer (Level 2). Year after, joined as Senior Software Engineer, and currently an Assistant Lead Software Engineer after last promotion.
So I feel I should share my learnings (so far) from my career. Maybe freshers or juniors can benefit from it.
Please note: all the points below are my personal opinions, and it’s completely fine to disagree. So let’s start…
Do’s
- Learn programming and write lots of code during the first 3 years of your university life.
- Do problem solving and competitive programming in university life.
- Do a side project at the 4th year of your university to showcase your capability.
- Join a job in the final year of your university, if possible.
- Do as much as work in your first 3-4 years of your career.
- Be flexible about tech stack, work, and opportunity.
- Gather and gain domain knowledge strongly while working on a project.
- Build genuine relationships with your co-workers.
- Imposter syndrome is natural. Nobody knows all the things.
- Challenge yourself and push your limitations day by day.
- Search for quality work after a certain time of your career.
- Always keep learning.
- Always take ownership and show interest in leadership.
- Raise questions about anything to judge its validity before starting to do it.
- Understand the business impact of your work. Make yourself product-centric.
- Be good at debugging and incident handling.
- Align, align, and align people with data.
- Make a prototype or demo while presenting any ideas.
- Office politics exist; learn to navigate them.
- Act then think. Sometimes too much thinking creates an analysis paralysis situation.
- Soft skills are important. So give proper attention to it.
- Keep attention on work-life balance, especially when you have passed a good amount of time in your career.
- Try hard even if you know you can fail.
- Interview participation is important to judge your ability and upgrade your capability.
Don’ts
- Don’t waste time of your university life; utilize it to build skills.
- Don’t avoid programming, problem solving, and competitive programming.
- In this competitive job market, don’t wait too long to join a job.
- In your early career, don’t think too much about job-life balance.
- Don’t be too biased about the tech stack.
- Don’t just focus on gaining technical knowledge; focus on domain knowledge gathering too.
- Don’t break trust and honest relationships with co-workers.
- Don’t get stuck in your comfort zone.
- Don’t get stuck in flat, regular, and not exciting work.
- Never stop learning.
- Don’t hesitate to take leave and break.
- Don’t just do what you asked to do; judge its ROI by questioning.
- Don’t try to avoid meetings because meetings will be one of the important parts of your job.
- Don’t think you are always an individual contributor. You need to be a people manager some day.
- Don’t lie while sharing feedback. Your sugar-coated feedback will not be helpful to others.
- Never afraid to fail.
- Don’t avoid the importance of soft skills.
- Never stop participating in job interviews, but make sure you don’t switch jobs too often.