Ryan Murphy’s Post

As a Junior in your field, always opt for skills and environment over compensation. If you learn the right skills, off good people, the money will come later. In a much bigger way than if you chase it.

Dear Brooke Sweedar in 2034, As I sit here and write this in July of 2024, I am officially a fresh Bootcamp graduate.... I challenged Brooke Sweedar to write a letter to herself in 10 years time. The letter is vulnerable, it's honest, it's raw. It's more than I could have ever hoped for. It's a fascinating look into the open and honest mind and person of someone who is trying to break into the tech industry. A lot of us that are here take it for granted. She has captured her raw hope and passion brilliantly. On Tuesday, I will be publishing Brooke's letter to herself in 10 years on my newsletter. The link to subscribe is in the comments so you can get this straight to your inbox when it is released.

5 things I struggled to understand as a Junior Software Engineer: 1. Unit testing 2. Pair programming 3. Creating pipelines 4. Command line scripting 5. Grasping some OOP concepts It's easy to get frustrated with what you don't know. It's easy to compare yourself to others and wonder how it seems they know everything. It's easy to get lost in a sea of information and wonder if you will ever 'just get it'. It's hard to see that everyone is having the same conversation with themselves. Surround yourself with learners and move out of your comfort zone. The beauty of Software Engineering is the learning never stops, it just changes direction.

Psychological safety is much more than just not being afraid to lose your job. It's about being safe to bring your whole self. The freedom to be whoever you are. I guarantee that person is amazing. It's about being able to raise your voice, or share an opinion and not feel like you will get shut down. It's about feeling ok to say 'no' to Friday night beers with 'the boys'. I just want to go see my family and put my kids to bed. You will get much more out of me if you let me be my authentic self.

You need to be giving those around you praise. We hear the term 'feedback culture' a lot in today's working world. And it's really important. Giving feedback is the backbone of a high performing team. So many leaders, teams and companies get this wrong. It's not just about constructive feedback or failing publicly. Sure those are two vital ingredients to a high performing team. Another aspect is praise. Praise publicly, praise in private if they prefer. But start recognising each other and your accomplishments.

How to Simplify Progress Updates to Stakeholders:

Delivering business value for the company is much more than just the technology. When working on a project, stakeholders will always want to know the progress. People are unlikely to be asking (unless you are unlucky with a bad manager) because they just want to annoy you. It’s likely there is more invested. Marketing are probably wanting to keep updates on their targeted campaigns, sales might need to update their persona definitions and customer service folks might need to work out training timelines on any new features. You can reduce the friction of giving progress updates, reduce the need for update meetings, and stop the questions by adopting several pro-active non-verbal progress update techniques. 3 of those methods are: - Traffic light system - Internal newsletter - High level first nested wiki pages Today, in my latest newsletter, I sent 4000+ people an edition where I talk all about how to enhance your progress updates with non-verbal techniques and dived into these techniques in detail. Visit here to find out more and subscribe: https://lnkd.in/e5FpzVBy

The true measure of leadership isn't how you feel about others, it's how you make others feel about themselves.

The bare basics you need to offer your candidates in order to attract the top talent: - 25 days holiday - Hybrid working - Flexible working - Minimal number of interview stages - Short interview feedback loops - Clear salary range Sure, you don't have to offer all this to hire people. Your competition will be offering this and more and you'll be wondering why they are leaving you in the dust.

Once upon a time in a far away land there was a Software Developer who preferred Java to Typescript... No there wasn't, that's too farfetched for even a fairy tale.