How do you effectively learn on the job as a junior engineer when seniors do not provide ground-up training in a structured way? A lot of the Skype/Webex/MSTeams powerpoint presentations within teams or cross-team contain a lot of terms and concepts which I am not familiar with. These kinds of presentations are usually in the form of "experts explaining details to other experts" where I feel that only people who already have in depth knowledge of the subject matter actually benefit from these meetings. There is no actual teaching or ground-up junior friendly explanation of terms and concepts in these meetings. What's funny (actually kind of sad) is that the presenter will occasionally ask during the presentation if anyone has any questions, but usually I don't feel like I can just step in as a junior and be like "What's even going on? Explain everything like I don't know these things" which would be socially and professionally awkward at best, especially due to timing constraints and boring everyone else. Google is NOT really my friend here, because the area I work in doesn't have much public implementation or discussion or tutorials or blogs etc. So I feel like the information can only be acquired on-the-job, but due to my explanation above, even that is impossibly hard. To get into the job, all we need to do is be good at the language in question (ex. C++) and pass leetcode style algorithm questions, for which there are plenty of online resources for self learning. But after you join, in a field with nonexistent resources on the internet, how can we learn if there is no proper on-the-job training or internal learning documents? Does anyone else feel this way? How do you deal with this? #software #engineering #swe #junior #onthejob #training
Everyone goes through this phase in the beginning of the career. Ask more questions whenever possible. Put more effort for an year, and you would be comfortable
I would give you one suggestion.. make this like your life and death situation and keep bugging your seniors. They might hate you for that but you will learn a lot. You might get lucky and there might be that one senior who will take interest in you and might be your mentor. But just keep asking even if it's a stupid question ask..
I wouldn't necessarily recommend this. Or if you do, then spread out the questions. Seniors want to see that you've taken your research as far as possible before coming to them with questions
I did what birdleaf suggested then got pulled into a 1on1 with my manager who said others complained that I was asking too many questions
Unless you’ve already pissed off your manager, your manager wants you to do well, so just tell them if you feel like you need something to do better
Sounds like a good thing to bring to your manager in your next 1:1
I read on another post that this is not recommended because the manager will use it as ammunition to justify a lower performance rating or put you on pip. Basically the suggestion was to not "reveal your weaknesses" too directly. But thinking positively, if I have a good caring manager, what realistically can the manager do?
As a manager I would be happy to know that sooner than after a year or so, that you don’t know something. Asking questions shows your curiosity and appetite to learn more about the projects and business. As per using it as ammunition is highly subjective and depends on the person , cannot comment more on this than to just start knowing the person more over years