15 Lessons I Learned on my First Job

I had tweeted this a while ago, reproducing it here

Your first company is super important for your career. Mine was Infosys where I learnt a lot of important lessons that still guide me.. for eg

— Madhur Chadha (@madhurchadha) April 25, 2019

Your first company is super important for your career. Mine was Infosys where I learned a lot of important lessons that still guide me. For eg

1. Coding is just 30% of software development, literally. If a dev would take 1 day to build something, we would give an estimate of 3 days for delivery.
2. A good process rocks. A bad process should not be allowed to exist and MUST be replaced
3. People who look super incompetent may actually be rock stars in other aspects. A dev in our team who everyone rooted against became an MVP in the team once the manager offered him to play on his strength testing. was the onsite lead and this person saved so much time for us that his name became synonymous with quality. I was sometimes tempted to deploy directly if he signed off.
4. Work is not the most important thing for many people in life and that’s OK
5. There are great managers and there are really terrible ones. Great managers make you stick. The main reason I stuck around for so long was because of my awesome manager Samar aka Shashi
6. Bad managers are great teachers of what not to do. I still remember the times when one such manager did not treat me and my colleagues well and vowed to never do that if I became one.
7. What you care about as a dev is very different from what users care about… My first lessons in product management
8. Patience in building something pays off
9. Team >individual always
10. Talented Assholes should be avoided at all costs. A lesson I keep learning again and again
11. One of the biggest factors for talented people leaving is fairness, perceived or real
12. Trust is built by a series of incidents but broken by just one
13. Sexism at work is mostly invisible to men unless someone points it out(usually another woman). Regular training and reminders are effective and still necessary.. hopefully, one day they won’t be
14. Pitching team members against each other in reviews is the worst thing you can do. The bell curve is one of the biggest motivation killers
15. In the end: people remember