Add real value, don't be workaholic!

Friday night, 10 pm and keyboard typing sound can be heard on the floor. The one who is creating that noise in the silence is thinking,

it's only 10 PM, I can do much more!

Often freshers in the software industry think that they can add more value by working extra hours which in certain cases can be true if you are just reading and understanding the code or the product.

It's very important to understand what adding more value means. Some people think workaholic people add more value because they spend most of their time in office. As most of the studies have shown, productive work can be done in less than 4 hours a day and past that is the time you should start adding more value.

Following are some points which I think can really help you to add more value,

Upgrade your skills and knowledge

By Skills I do not mean only the programming languages but certain ways of doing things, libraries, methodologies etc.

E.g. You might be knowing how to do one thing but there can be other approaches to do it and some of them can be way better than what you were doing. Explore them and upgrade yourself.

Read books e.g. Clean Code, Clean Coder, Test Driven Development are some.

Help and educate others

Collaborating, discussing, reviewing can improve the knowledge of the team and upgrade the entire team to a new level. Generally, single point of view misses out some corner cases which can get revealed when you discuss the approach or the problem statement with your colleagues.

E.g. Conduct training sessions of the technology or methodology you know.

Take ownership

Taking ownership of your work is a very important quality. Be proud of what you do and take the ownership of it. Your managers (or the one who is above you in the hierarchy) will rely on you and will be confident about your work due to this.

If someone is facing issues in the module owned by you help them, if there is any issue raised by product verification team, peek it proactively.

Take initiatives

This is one of the important point to note. Not everyone has valour to act on this point. Most of the team members always think about doing something but they need someone to act upon it. You can be that person, who will be recognized by others.

Header image by Jonny Lindner from Pixabay.