7 Pieces of Advice for New Software Engineers

From a founding engineer in a startup: Don't refactor or do more work than needed unless it's your own company. Prioritize your health and learning. In a traditional job, you're a number for management, and when things get hard, it's all over. Choose your game. Freelancing, consulting, and startup building are about finding clients and solving problems fast. Corporate is about having a great CV, networking with companies, and DSA. There's no perfect path here. Put yourself out there on social media. Don't let your reputation rely on one company; let the world know who you are and what you do. Learn how to communicate and ask high-quality questions. Never create assumptions about anything. Always be building and learning. If your job is not challenging you enough, challenge yourself. Try a new tech stack, get into a new industry, or try to dive deeper into the fundamentals of the tech you use daily (databases are interesting NGL). Read books about everything you can, not just technical ones. Psychology, sales, marketing... Coding is only a part of the job; the rest is people. AI won't replace you if you prepare. Master the fundamentals, develop technical taste, stay flexible to work across the full stack, and understand systems design, trade-offs, scope, and the product you are working on. I learned this the hard way, managing teams, pivoting the business, dealing with executives, working with on-call rotations, and taking care of 2 major apps in production