As a Software Developer, I started my journey in the Software Industry at Novell from where I moved to Citrix and later to Amazon. Being in this industry for close to 6 years now, I have met and learnt from many wonderful intellectuals and have worked with them on various top class products that directly or indirectly impact billions of lives worldwide.

I have experienced diverse corporate cultures, working environments, software development practices and processes. During this journey where I accomplished some distinguished feats and also committed many silly mistakes, I have learnt lot of things of which I think some should be helpful and of interest to the aspiring Software Engineers. You may check out the points mentioned in the previous articles in this series. Here is another one-

Don't be a lone wolf

Teams are everywhere and I don't even know if there is a meager chance that you will not be working in a team. One main reason is because industry can just rely on just one guy for something. The old proverb "Don't put all your eggs in a single basket is not there for nothing. By all means, a team of 'good' would be definitely be preferred over a single 'great' for a project.

To some people getting along comes naturally, however I have seen that many studious geeks stay silent, aloof and tend to be lone rangers. Some may do so because they suffer from superiority complex, others might do because they might be too shy to open up or probably for some other reasons best known only to them. Whatever be the reason, it is not going to work in your favor in industry. Few such friends after working in industry have told me that they felt that it was hampering the number of opportunities coming in their way and then they started on inculcating the spirit of team work in them.

My sincere suggestion would be to understand that you will have to work in a team and therefore start working on yourself to establish yourself as a good team player. Ask anyone who is already in the industry and they shall tell you that it is important to have this trait.

This is one of the things that I seriously think an aspiring Software Engineer should know. If you think some point should be added to this topic or some topic deserves to be added to this series, do post a comment and let me know. Keep watching for more. If you are keen on learning more about the better software development practices 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.