Your First Working Year

This post covers a couple of things to consider when you are ready to work after graduating.

Disclaimer: I have been working since ~ 2020. As I gain more experience, I will refine and edit my advice accordingly.

Learn vs Earn

If you can afford it, when you are comparing job offers, give more weight to the learning than the earning aspect. By the learning aspect, I mean the job in which you will learn more. By the earning aspect, I mean the job in which you will get a higher salary.

The difference in salary that you are compromising at the beginning is incomparable to the difference in salary between an experienced 10-year-experience employee and an inexperienced 10-year-experience employee. Not all seniors are experienced and not all experienced seniors are on the same level of experience and will be offered the same salary.

If you find a job that has both, then that's perfect.

Technical Mentorship

Try to work in a team in which there's an experienced technical senior(s) that will be accessible to you. Note, again, that not every senior is experienced and humble enough to teach you. If you work with these experienced and humble people, they will radically shorten your paths.

Try to do some research about the team and the people you will be working with and what the juniors working with them think of them.

Career Mentorship

Try to work in a team whose manager is experienced and humble enough to guide you.

• A good manager will help keep you happy with what you do.
• A good manager will help provide a safe environment for you to learn and ask freely.
• A good manager will help in guiding you on what is the best next career step for you depending on what you are good at and what you are passionate about.
• A good manager will shield you from a lot of managerial bureaucracies that would otherwise absorb a lot of your energy that should be better spent on learning and doing.
• A good manager will balance between what will benefit you as a person and what will benefit the business.

Don't Rush Promoting

Don't stress yourself to climb the promotion ladder more quickly than you need. Don't put that as the ultimate goal. Putting it as the ultimate goal can lead to you taking the wrong decisions whether technical, ethical, or long-term career decisions.

Put learning and using what you learned in the good as your absolute goal and let the promotion come naturally when it's obvious how skilled you are. If you are in a team with a good manager, they will make this part much easier for you and you will feel no need to fight for it.

And remember that everything has limits; so at some point of injustice, this advice will not be applicable and you will have to fight for it.

Ask

It's hard for me to imagine that there's any senior employee that will answer "no" when asked whether they expect the juniors to ask questions or not.

Everyone is expecting you to ask questions at this point. There's indeed a limit and a strategy of when to ask questions as you need to choose a suitable time and you need to do some effort to find the answer yourself first.

Remember that the more time you spend on the job the less you will be expected to ask questions and the more you will be expected to answer so use this early time wisely.

Work-life Balance

As early as possible, try to get used to balancing your life and work, or otherwise, you might discover a little late that you spent more time working in your life than you wanted to.

Fix the number of hours that you don't want to exceed while working in a week.

• Maintain the time you devote to learning about your religion.
• Maintain your family time.
• Maintain sports time.
• Maintain time in which you read things you like even if they are not work-related.
• Maintain time to meditate and relax.
• etc...

You don't have to be the quickest person to climb the promotion ladder to have a happy life.?

Learning Time

I'd suggest maintaining some time out of work to learn more about your profession. You will not always have the chance to explore or learn about everything in your profession as it will not always be required to do the immediate job you are doing.

This knowledge can help you to avoid overfitting your knowledge on what the current job/product/system you are working on and will open the way for you to work in other areas/companies/systems.

Soft Skills

Although technical skills are super important, soft skills are also very useful. Learn from the people around you how they talk, convince others, approach problems, talk about their work, provide feedback, present, etc...

And of course, measure everything you learn against your values before adopting it.

Habits

Try to get used to good working habits that suit you as early as possible. As with any other thing in life, it's hard to change habits the more you are used to them.

Not all habits are suitable for everyone but some habits that I found useful for me are:

• Fixing the time in which I start and end of my working hours.
• Getting used to a healthy sitting posture.
• Fix the time in which I eat and pray so that I don't miss them on a busy day.??