10 Lessons from My First Year as a Software Engineer at Amazon

July 18, 2023

Code reviews are never personal, they are present to get the best work into the production collectively as a team. Do not take any comments personally, learn from your mistakes don't repeat them twice.
Small incremental changes outweigh large code changes. It's better to ship small changes or divide the larger chunk of a problem into pieces and ship.
Showing up matters, this is an old-school piece of advice, but showing up matters for you to build relationships especially initially in your career.
Don't be afraid of the unknown, be ready to dive yourself deep and find the answers, change your narrative from "I don't know, how to do it?" to "I will figure it out along the way".
It's okay, if you are spending more time on the task given at hand, try to learn as much as you can in the initial phases of your onboarding.
Ask Ask Ask, don't stop asking questions, and don't be hesitant to ask questions because there is a lot of tribal knowledge which is not documented and if you don't reach out to people you will never know about that specific information.
Learn to prioritise the tasks given at hand, there will always be work to do, but you should learn how to prioritise the valuable and important tasks over the unimportant ones.
Don't be afraid to make mistakes, but don't repeat your mistakes too.
Participate in the team discussions, even though you don't have enough context. Your fresh pair of eyes might help the team see edge cases that they would've never thought about.
Last don't stress, try to create an environment for yourself to enjoy the process, and take one day at a time. Eventually, things will start making sense and dots will be connecting together.