I am guilty of some of the points that you included here especially no. 1, 2 and 3 but I'm working on that 😌
If I may add one thing, it will be:
Do not be limited by your role or job title.
Just because your title says you're a frontend engineer, backend, etc, it does not mean that you should limit your team or project involvement in that specific area only.
Participate in the team discussion when there's a new feature, an issue occured and you're all coming up with the best solution.
Trust me, you will gain a deeper knowledge on the project, it's overall architecture like how the API is structured. Because even though you don't have a lot of experience on that area, you can provide a different perspective on how to approach the problem.
What you suggested may not be the solution but your insight can help your team members look at the problem in a different way, they can build upon it to come up with a better solution.
Thank you for the kind words, Ana! We all have been guilty of these at some point in our careers, but hey this is how we all learn.
Do not be limited by your role or job title.
This is a great point I think, this is how you grow as an engineer/dev/programmer. If you want to be a leader in the team this is the right way to go. Having a 360 view of things also helps you put your work into perspective and understand how everything fits together.
True. However, depending on the culture or individual sense, even if you feel that you are not tied down to a title but you have a decent idea and it's not your area, you can have pushback... do not worry. I ended up speaking directly to others to gain more understanding and it made it easier moving forward for my ideas and troubleshooting.
Being seen as just x or just y is not encompassing of all our abilities and it sucks when people push it on... when you have also their education as well or other experiences they may not know about.
Have respect and listen to your teammates, please. Good ideas come from everywhere and better ones come from more than one person as its worked on, vetted and applied. There is not just one single person.
The mistake is not one limiting people to title, it is also assuming things, and thinking only one person has "the idea" and that's it. It takes the team.
In my personal experience, there were times where the answer came from a different source. For example, there was a time where we experienced several server downtime in a day, our backend engineers initially thought it was caused by an unoptimized code and so they optimized it but still the problem keep occuring. It was not until I suggested that maybe it is a DDOS attack and it was actually a DDOS attack.
Another time was when I was the one facing a problem on the frontend, our iOS engineer came up to me and suggested me "why don't you do this instead". He came up and suggested me a brilliant idea which we used to come with the solution. I was really grateful to him for that, it saved me a lot of time.
Build on each others ideas.
And speaking of that, here's a quote from Isaac Newton which I believe is relevant to that idea.
"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."
Yep, this is a very good example. I am sure your confidence and the feeling of belonging to the team went high after participating in something that was out of your job description. It's these little things that help us stay motivated and move forward!
You're totally right, participating in those kind of discussions also add some sense of camaraderie among our team since I know that I can always rely on them and they can rely on me during challenging situations.
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Awesome list Haseeb 👏👏👏
I am guilty of some of the points that you included here especially no. 1, 2 and 3 but I'm working on that 😌
If I may add one thing, it will be:
Do not be limited by your role or job title.
Just because your title says you're a frontend engineer, backend, etc, it does not mean that you should limit your team or project involvement in that specific area only.
Participate in the team discussion when there's a new feature, an issue occured and you're all coming up with the best solution.
Trust me, you will gain a deeper knowledge on the project, it's overall architecture like how the API is structured. Because even though you don't have a lot of experience on that area, you can provide a different perspective on how to approach the problem.
What you suggested may not be the solution but your insight can help your team members look at the problem in a different way, they can build upon it to come up with a better solution.
Thank you for the kind words, Ana! We all have been guilty of these at some point in our careers, but hey this is how we all learn.
This is a great point I think, this is how you grow as an engineer/dev/programmer. If you want to be a leader in the team this is the right way to go. Having a 360 view of things also helps you put your work into perspective and understand how everything fits together.
True. However, depending on the culture or individual sense, even if you feel that you are not tied down to a title but you have a decent idea and it's not your area, you can have pushback... do not worry. I ended up speaking directly to others to gain more understanding and it made it easier moving forward for my ideas and troubleshooting.
Being seen as just x or just y is not encompassing of all our abilities and it sucks when people push it on... when you have also their education as well or other experiences they may not know about.
Have respect and listen to your teammates, please. Good ideas come from everywhere and better ones come from more than one person as its worked on, vetted and applied. There is not just one single person.
The mistake is not one limiting people to title, it is also assuming things, and thinking only one person has "the idea" and that's it. It takes the team.
In my personal experience, there were times where the answer came from a different source. For example, there was a time where we experienced several server downtime in a day, our backend engineers initially thought it was caused by an unoptimized code and so they optimized it but still the problem keep occuring. It was not until I suggested that maybe it is a DDOS attack and it was actually a DDOS attack.
Another time was when I was the one facing a problem on the frontend, our iOS engineer came up to me and suggested me "why don't you do this instead". He came up and suggested me a brilliant idea which we used to come with the solution. I was really grateful to him for that, it saved me a lot of time.
Build on each others ideas.
And speaking of that, here's a quote from Isaac Newton which I believe is relevant to that idea.
"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."
Hmm... Word! @Newton's quote.
Yep, this is a very good example. I am sure your confidence and the feeling of belonging to the team went high after participating in something that was out of your job description. It's these little things that help us stay motivated and move forward!
You're totally right, participating in those kind of discussions also add some sense of camaraderie among our team since I know that I can always rely on them and they can rely on me during challenging situations.