What’s the worst advice you’ve got in your professional career?
In my org seniors often give random advice, most of it is useless. For example, they once told me that don’t work for money, work for problems, you’ll get money as a outcome.
I was an Intern at a <10 person startup back in college and when I asked on to career advice on growing in the software engineering career to the most senior person, they said - learn any 1 frontend framework (suggested Angular as it was trending at that time), any 1 backend framework and any 1 database (MongoDB was trending) and you will be sorted for the entire career. After I joined a big tech company, i realised how little they knew about software engineering world
Can you elaborate a bit more. I know you've to specialize in one domain but it never hurts to know basics of others.
Why it's a bad advice is that their view on building a career in Software Engineering was very narrow. Few examples if you think broadly on : 1. Large aspect of Software Engineering in large scale systems involve learning system design concepts, 2. Coding standards and best practices - You need to write clean, maintainable and extensible code, 3. Team work, Communication, Mentoring, Collaboration, Documentation etc are all part of Software Engineering, etc etc.
If we limit ourselves to one specific type of work (i.e., tie ourselves to specific framework or stack), we will be loosing out on the opportunities that Software Engineering world has to offer :)
What advice will you give to someone torn between working for money and working for dreams?
A senior of mine, took a job with 30% paycut after being laid off earlier this year. The work is okay, but no growth from what he can see (service based company problems)
He has a casual offer to move to Bangalore and work for a friend'...
What's the dumbest thing your boss has said?
I'll go first: "I want you to focus on doing good work and not on how much money you're making." Achchha aur mera rent kaun dega?
"2% is a good increment, considering the current environment"