Many of you reading this have a number of years working with technology. You might have 1 year or 20 years, but you’ve likely grown and learned along the way. Some of you may also know someone who has several years of seniority in a position but not that many years of experience. In this case, a person might have been working at this job for 5 years, but they really have one year of experience that’s been repeated 5 times.

That’s been a common complaint over quite a few years from people who interview others. They find candidates often have very limited experience, yet are applying for senior roles. These candidates are ones who have just a few years of experience, but have ended up repeating those few years over and over.

I ran across an interesting piece that contains 21 lessons from the author’s 14 years at Google. You might not think Google is the place where great software engineering takes place, or where great careers are made, but Google has been a place where it is challenging to get a job, they work on truly large-scale problems, and Google has had many engineers who have gone on to success elsewhere.

The first few lessons in here are things that I’ve learned in my career. Quite a few of them point to the value of being a team player, and remembering that being effective and efficient matter. It’s easy to be smart, or depend on one’s code to speak for our ability, but in many cases, we are working in teams. Our code is a team game, and others need to understand our code. It’s easy to forget that someone responding to a problem at 2 am might not understand the code. It’s also easy to forget that person might be you, and you might get confused.

Others also need to understand and believe in us. Lessons 2, 14, and 16 talk about the value of working with others and not creating resentment or ill will in others. Even with AI help, most software will require multiple people working together, so building those skills and habits is important.

I found this to be an interesting list, and there are other topics I want to discuss in the future, but the main thing I see here is that these are lessons from someone who has had to work as a technical engineer with others, while having success both at his job and outside of it. That resonates with me, as do these lessons. Individuals and teams that work in similar ways to those described in the piece have tended to have more success than those that don’t, at least in my experience.

Learn to be a team player as an engineer, developer. DBA, or any other job, and you will have more success than if you expect to only be judged on what code you write.

Steve Jones

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