Micro-promotions and mentorship: impact of small actions in engineering culture
I am struggling to phrase this comment in a non-abrasive way. Please read on charitably.<p>I, similarly to the author, was hired into a position without necessarily having a huge amount of skills. The reason I was hired was due to me showing an aptitude for being able to be dropped into a new situation and find my own way out of it. My hiring experience was baptism by fire. There was no onboarding, just JIRA tickets and some architecture diagrams.<p>My team races at a million miles per hour, and frankly doesn't have the time to hand-hold a juniour as they learn the ropes. I was put on pagerduty and started putting out production fires within 3 weeks of being hired. With no prior experience.<p>That is not to say that my team didn't help _at all_. However, I distinctly recall trying to limit my questioning to daily stand-up, and only asking further questions if I was very stuck on some proprietary technology (because Google searches can't help you with in-house tech.) My manager during performance reviews would heap praise on me for being so green and yet so low-maintenance.<p>Now at this point I'm programming, doing "infrastructure as code" in the cloud, and working on baremetal hardware. Coming from basically nothing. Allow me to brag a little bit. I'm proud of myself.<p>It is stressful, there are long hours involved, but the experience hardens one for sure.<p>Maybe I'm just experiencing a sort of Stockholm syndrome. Maybe I was put into a terrible situation and just accepted it as normal, even good. Experience is subjective like that.