A mentor gave me some tips a while back to help me move up the ranks and improve as a swe. With all the recent and impending layoffs, figured I'd offer you guys some advice that helped me back in 2009-10 when things also looked pretty bad. Good luck and keep your head up my friends!

1) Find time to work on your own passion projects

Creating your own smaller projects on the side, where you can really influence the direction of application development, e.g., what language, technologies, or framework you choose will help you in so many ways. Your regular contributions at work will generally be limited in scope. You're lucky if you get to impact at the foundational level. Experimenting on our own can quickly reveal our strengths and weaknesses. This is obviously helpful in determining whether we spend more time trying to cover up weaknesses or just doubling down on what we're good at.

2) A good programmer is a lazy programmer

Bill Gates said, “I will always choose a lazy person for a difficult task because they will quickly find the simplest solution” and honestly — believe it!!! 🍥👍

Even though the profession of a programmer is not about lying around all day we need to be determined to find the simple solutions that make the experience easy for the users. Simple is not easy for us because simple is very complex, so the more knowledge we have of potential solutions, the more we can decide the best option.

3) You don’t need to know everything

This is probably the most controversial one of all but I'm going to stand by my thoughts here. As a senior dev who has been on interview panels and have been asked by recruiters about this candidate over that candidate, what is important later in your career is not how much you can memorize, but how you think through a problem. Most interviews test basic knowledge of theoretical situations and concepts because it's the easiest way to sift through applications (remember being lazy). I think it would be more pleasant to work with someone who can write the correct structure directive in Angular than to tell me precisely what JavaScript prototyping is or how Garbage Collector works. We can google that answer quickly at any time.

4) Be willing to fight a little. Speak up

First of all, it is worth considering the pitfalls of this. When you are a senior leader especially, most people trust us too much. They will be lazy and miss things during the code review. It's easy to fall into this trap. Also, people will not want to disobey their seniors so even if there is a better solution or maybe even a question, no one will raise their hand. That is not good.

The best ideas resulted from discussions or quarrels with other developers because everyone had their point of view and the clash of all of them gave rise to many ideas. When we have such a strong opinion in the project, it is important to speak it so you can push everyone's understanding to the next level. Do not take it personally. That is hard I know. But don't you I love this feeling when, after a fierce conversation, everyone has reached an agreement and found a juicy solution that we can be proud of?