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.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.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.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.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.It is stressful, there are long hours involved, but the experience hardens one for sure.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.