My First Month at Function

John-George Sample

01 January 2020
0 Comments

I joined Function as a Jr. Front-End Engineer a little over a month ago. During that time, I’ve contributed to new features, collaborated with numerous team members, and gotten comfortable in my day-to-day. In the spirit of transparency and teaching, I’m going to share what things I’ve encountered during this time.

Being the first junior on the team

Being the first junior on the team was admittedly scary at first. I didn’t want to gum up the works by asking too many questions. Thankfully, no one expected me to be productive on day 0 (don’t worry; there are more bad programming jokes scattered throughout this blog post). That was actually part of my criteria when looking for my (at the time) next job — a company whose culture valued training and mentorship. Growth and learning are always important, but even more at the beginning of a career. If my code isn’t being reviewed by senior engineers, it means I’m going to spend weeks learning lessons more experienced engineers could pass on in a simple ten-minute conversation.

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My questions have been encouraged.

 

I was welcomed on my first day to a document detailing how I’d be spending my first month as a functioning member of Function — rather than simply being thrown in the deep end. On top of that, my first task felt intentionally planned to show me the ropes and introduce me to the workflow. A few pair programming sessions later…boom! My first change was merged into production.

 

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Remote work && trust

(Please go back and appreciate my cunning sense of humor if that logical conjunction joke in the section title went unnoticed)

 

My title might say “Junior”, but that hasn’t stopped me from enjoying the same level of trust any other team member at Function enjoys. In the Pittsburgh office, that means working remotely three days a week (which still feels like I’ve won the lottery after coming from a stereotypical cube farm). Instead of a daily standup, I’m trusted to independently get work done and report back on a weekly basis with progress.

 

The lack of a standup doesn’t mean blockers go unanswered for a week. I had initial fears after hearing horror stories about not getting a response from co-workers on a remote team for days at a time. The reality has been the exact opposite; I get answers from co-workers across the country quicker than I would from co-workers in the next cubicle over at my last job. While I don’t run into these async co-workers at the water cooler*, tools like Slack make small talk and the ability to build a more personal relationship possible.

Conclusion

Is everything perfect? No. Being a distributed team comes with difficulties for unplanned communication given the eleven-hour time difference and we occasionally spend the first few minutes of a meeting asking, “can you hear me?”, but it’s easy to look past those when considering all the good things I’ve experienced so far.

 

With my first month in the books, I’m excited for what’s to come. Every day comes with new challenges and new knowledge, and I know I’m becoming a better developer because of them.

 

*We don’t have a water cooler in the office, so I actually don’t run into my co-workers in Pittsburgh at it either ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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