Life is too short to repeat somebody else's mistakes, you should make your own!

I have been a part of software industry for about 6 years working with three highly reputed MNCs-Novell, Citrix and Amazon. During this journey as a software professional I have accomplished some distinguished feats and also have committed many silly mistakes. While having informal chats at different occasions with different people, I noticed a pattern as they revealed about the mistakes they think they did during their initial years. It's interesting that not only the mistakes made by different people working in different organizations were quite similar but also could have been avoided had someone guided or informed them.

Here you have an opportunity to know about and avoid the same mistakes as you go on to start your career-

Not asking questions, not asking right questions

This is probably a mistake that people make most. They hold themselves back and refrain from asking questions from their managers, seniors or even peers. Some people do ask questions but do not ask the right ones. As a result they feel embarrassed and stop asking thereafter.

Unless you ask questions, others don't know what you are interested in or if you are at all interested in anything. The first project I got to work on individually was allocated to me because my questions showcased my interest in it. When the product was shipped couple of months later, that feature was one of the main highlights of the release.

Asking right questions is the key. For example, you may ask a deep technical question direct to a peer or senior in tech domain. However, when you need to talk about the same to Project Manager, you may not need to go much deeper in technical details. With senior management, you may want to keep the detailed technicalities out and elaborate it or relate to something in a manner that even non-technical people can understand it.

Therefore, it would be a sincere suggestion to not shy away from asking the questions and to keep in mind to ask right questions. Also, it should be mentioned that only asking questions but not paying enough attention to the response or not utilizing it at all would make people not take your questions seriously.

Keep watching for more. You may also check previous articles in this series. If you are keen on learning more about the better software development practices that you can start following right from the college days, do get a copy of my first book "Hello World - Student to Software Professional" published by Partridge (A Penguin Random House Company). Now available worldwide on all the MAJOR ONLINE Stores - Amazon, Google Play, Flipkart, Barnes & Noble and many others.