Life Advice from My First Job

I’ll soon be moving on from my first job in tech (it was at KUNGFU.AI - they rule you should work for them) at which I learned much and many life lessons were garnered. I accumulated some of these lessons and put them down in writing here. It’s less of a “how to survive ur first job in industry/tech/life” and more of a “here’s some things I learned along the way”. Hope there’s some wisdom that helps you!

All relationships are human relationships.

You’re all coworkers, but more so you’re a group of people working together towards a goal. In the same way that friendships are relationships even if they’re not “romantic” relationships, all your working relationships are human relationships even if they’re in a professional context. Consequently, advice for strong and healthy “normal” relationships applies to working relationships. The most notable of these has been “As much as possible, be 100% honest.”

Being a Worker™

You can know your own strengths and weaknesses as a worker and plan around it. It’s not a failure to have weaknesses.

If you were a basketball player you would be aware of your own strengths and weaknesses in order to account for them in game as well as improve upon them. No different in your profession - the only difference is that the skill you do is not basketball, it’s whatever it is you do for work. I, for example, am good at prioritization and putting down code. I am less good at working long hours and tackling large problems with no structured approach. With this in mind, I look for opportunities to practice these things and improve from there.

Do things step by step, one by one, so that you know what changes are most important.

Be thorough and don’t rush. This goes for any experimentation that you do.

80% done is 50% done.

I continuously underestimate the effort the last mile of any project will take. Given that the end is the impression you’ll leave people with it’s especially important. Adjust your trajectory accordingly.

Emotions and Stress

If you’ve been somewhere before you can get there again.

By ‘somewhere’ here I mean ‘some state of mind.’ If you’ve felt good and had things well set in your life previously, you can get there again. You know how because what you did before worked. Trust yourself and get back there.

Everything feels more dire the more tired you are.

This is very literal. If it’s 12:30am and you’re stressing in your bed, know that it seems way worse then than it will in the morning, and know that it’s more of a consequence of your brain’s state than the actual severity of the topic you’re stressed about. This wisdom can be extended to the fact that the current state of your body (hungry/tired/stimulant fueled) affects your thinking. Another useful thought I had recently was “I am NOT letting myself get into an existential crisis about this until after I’ve eaten something.” Once I had eaten, it was clearly not worth crisising over.

Don’t stress yourself out more than the situation demands.

Follows from the last point, but I found that 90% of the time I was really worried about something at work, it was due to fake pressure I was putting on myself. Either an arbitrary deadline I set or thinking I needed to have something 100% completed and perfect at the next check in meeting. Do not do this it was never useful. It just made me really anxious to discuss my work and lost me sleep.

Teamwork

Positive recognition is a cheat code for creating camaraderie, while positively communicated negative feedback is a cheat code for improvement.

People love getting pats on the back! People love patting each other on the back! People also love getting good, and the best way one gets good is by doing things less bad, so as long as you communicate criticism with grace, they will like you more because you helped them be less bad. In my experience saying it nicely isn’t actually the hard part - the hard part is finding something to criticize. Unless there was an egregious error, in which case they probably already know about the mistake, it’s hard to find areas where people could do things a little bit better, ie some area you can help them go from 70% to 90% efficiency. Keep this in mind over the course of the time you work together in order to spot these opportunities when they arise.

People will rarely be upset with negative news if reported early, often, and transparently.

More often than not it’ll just get them to trust you more - you were being honest! Mistakes will be made, people will understand. Connects back to the first piece of advice about how the relationships are professional but follow the rules of normal, human-human relationships.

Each individual has a lot of impact of the group dynamics.

This is especially true for groups with numbers south of ~eight. If one person is being a downer then it’ll bring down the whole group dynamic. If one person is an upbeat goof everyone will be cheerier and happy to be there. This comes from a person who has experience as both of these archetypes and I guarantee one is 10-20x more useful than the other. A corollary of this is “One individual taking charge has a lot of impact.”

Reach out to people individually. They’re almost always delighted you reached out.

Something that’s worked really well in the past four years was DMing people and asking for help with as much specificity as possible in ~three sentences (huge paragraphs of text will leave people like Keanu). Something that’s worked really poorly in the past four years was posting something like “Hey has anybody ever run graphical programs headlessly in Docker?” in the #engineering channel and hoping there’s someone with experience in that channel that will see it and also be in the mood to help you out at that time before they click on the next message they have and totally forget about your plea for assistance.