Advice to my younger self - A retrospective on my career journey

Writing this doc based on my experience as a software engineer at Sundial and Fermat, Over the course of 2.5 years I was fortunate enough to work with exceptional people like Chandra Narayanan, Julie Zhuo, Shreyas Kumar, Rishabh Jain, Abe, Richard, Rajat and many more. Here it goes!

Don't work in isolation

As a engineer my first instinct was to just build stuff without asking for help or guidance, but that's not the case, collaborating with others help you get different prespective and bordens your thinking horizon.

Work with exceptional people

You're the average of the five people you spend the most time with, by just observaing the way they work you can learn a lot, also helps you build connections which is extremely important.

Be curious

Most of the time in your day to day tasks you might not be learning something new if you ever have this feeling, start by peeling one layer deeper. 99% of the frontend engineers only spend time developing basic components, but there a lot of other things to frontend development as well like you would use react query try to understand how it works.

Treat your career as a marathon not a sprint

You have a nice paying job your are happy with it and suddenly a opportunity comes which is risky, might need you to quit your just do it. It would all work out in the long run (How're you ever gonna know if you never even try?), change is very important it might take you to a place which is 100x better than your current one. Work in a lot of different kinds of companies startups (seed, series A) and big tech see which suits you early in your career. Try to identify companies which have a high growth trajectory that is the place you want to be.

Maximise your surface area of luck

By default no one would remember you. Learnt something interesting today? built something cool? right about it share it on different channels (product hunt, twitter, linkedin) share it within your network you won't event realise the power this has. Atleast people would know you are alive.

Find a good mentor

Look for people on linkedin or in your network who's career you really admire, reach out to them and ask how they reached there and would they help you in your career journey You might have a lot potential but it needs to be applied in the right direction and a mentor can help you give insights on how to apply it in the right direction.