Career Readiness Panel

I was invited by the University of Texas at Arlington to participate in a Career Readiness Panel, in association with the Lockheed Martin Career Development Center, in March of 2019. This was my first ever time participating as a panelist for anything — but not my first time engaging with bright young minds as they seek to begin their careers.

On the panel with me were representatives from a broad array of fields, including legal, human resources, filmmaking, and industrial engineering. I was representing rewardStyle as a software development professional. We had a list of general questions provided to us by the host, to fill time in between audience questions.

Which of these career competencies is most important? And which did you find you were most lacking?

We did have a list of what the Career Development Center considers competencies for aspiring professionals — things like communication, critical thinking, collaboration, leadership, and so on. My answer to this question was as follows:

First and foremost, I could never select one competency from the list as most important. As written, I relied upon every single one, every single day.

However, I answered that for me, personally, I found professionalism to be the most challenging. Not in the sense that I act unprofessional, mind you. But the fact that I work in a highly dynamic environment, with a lot of sharp people, trying to achieve big goals with complex solutions means that I need to find ways to not only get my own work done, but to continue to make an impact for the company. Sometimes that means choosing my words carefully, adjusting my attitude or point of view, or even changing the way in which I approach certain tasks.

However, you will always have the power to change yourself.

The very tip of my career began as a software engineering intern for Cornered Rat Software, a game developer based out of Bedford, TX. It was an absolutely wild experience — there was constant drinking, partying, NERF wars, pranks, and other madness. I think to just about any outsider, it would appear unprofessional. But it was a very small, extremely close-knit group, and we got stuff done! We hit our marks! And when you can say that you have a massively multiplayer strategic shooter that’s been operating with thousands of players for over 10 years, that’s no accident. That’s professionals at work.

What that meant for me, however, was that when my internship there wrapped up and I started as just another schlub at NCR — a global megacorporation — it was a culture shock. I couldn’t use the kind of direct language we’d been using at Cornered Rat. I couldn’t celebrate squashing a bug by bouncing a NERF dart off a friend’s head. I couldn’t even ask questions like, “Does this matter?”

I thought maybe I had screwed up my chances for a fruitful software engineering career by starting at Cornered Rat. The pay and stability for entry level game developers was not good, compared to corporate gigs like NCR… but I was seriously struggling to make any headway or even be taken seriously. Luckily, I found a technical lead on another team whom I admired — not just because he was sharp, but because his team was vibrant and happy and successful and seemingly untainted by the stifling stuffiness of the rest of the cube farm.

“How can I make my team more like yours?” I asked him.
“You can’t,” he replied. “You can’t ever change other people. You don’t have that power, and you never will. However, you will always have the power to change yourself. So make the changes you know you need to make, and if it’s truly better, I think you’ll see other people start to make the same changes for themselves.”

It was tremendous advice. And I took it to heart immediately. I implemented some process changes for myself that led to better results. I self-imposed a “CYA Policy” that I’d insist on fulfilling before executing large tasks, because I had data showing that our large tasks failed 100% of the time. Soon, other people were doing the same, and it wasn’t long before management felt the pain of starting this fatally flawed initiatives over and over, and decided to take more iterative approaches with higher chances of success.

But it helped throughout my career, as well. Each new team I worked with, and especially at each company, brought about a different culture and a different way in which I could improve my professionalism. I’m currently in love with Kim Scott’s book, Radical Candor — the tagline of which is, “How to get what you want, by saying what you mean.” It’s guiding my growth as a leader and a professional, and I’d highly recommend it.

Have you ever experienced Impostor Syndrome? How do you deal with that?

It’s a real thing, yes, and I do experience it on occasion. Just this morning, in fact, I submitted some code for review which, as it turns out, contained a stupid, amateur mistake. It’s easy to give in to the embarrassment and sink into a dark well of self-pity where you feel like a fraud.

But, don’t.

Remember, you’re human. And you work with a bunch of humans! They may be smart, they may be talented, and they may be incredibly experienced. But they’re humans, too, and they make stupid mistakes every day, just like the rest of us, whether you see it or not. It’s true. And if you’re going to compare yourself to other people, make damn sure to start your comparison there — you have far more in common with them as fellow humans than you do with some starry-eyed fantasy version of them that never makes mistakes.

So rather than treating those moments like failures, treat them like opportunities. Turn it around to your advantage by connecting with the very people you feel you might not be living up to, and learning from them. Fill those knowledge gaps, learn new skills, or advance existing ones. Keep improving yourself, and keep moving forward. One day, probably much sooner than you’d expect, someone will come to you looking for wisdom or answers, and you’ll see they’re just as worried about being an imposter, too. And you’ll remember we’re all human, and you’ll pass along your experience. Never stop improving, never stop learning new things, and never fear failure.

It seemed as if I never had enough creamers, or the right kind of creamers…

I’d like to share a brief story of an epiphany I had once. When I first started at NCR, I mentioned before it was a culture shock for me. I ran into an acquaintance who worked there, and asked if he had any advice for me. He gave me a weird laugh, a weird wink, and told me to keep some coffee creamers in my desk, in case the break room ran out, as it tends to do from time to time.

I shrugged, and tossed a few vanilla creamers in my desk. A few weeks down the road, sure enough, the break room ran out of creamers, but I was able to use one of my desk creamers. I stopped by my coworker, and thanked him for the advice, explaining that it came in handy. But again, he gave me a weird laugh, and a weird wink, and said, “Why did you only throw some vanilla in your desk? Why not get some mocha, and Irish Cream, and all kinds of stuff? Give yourself a variety, you know!”

I thought, sure, ok, why not? I ordered a variety of creamers on Amazon, and stuck them in my desk. And we continued in this pattern for several months. Every time the break room would run out of creamer, I’d grab a spare from my desk — which had become EXTREMELY ridiculous with the amount of creamer in it — stop by this acquaintance, and receive more weird chuckles and winks and recommendations. It seemed as if I never had enough creamers, or the right kind of creamers, to make him feel that I had fully followed his advice.

I was extraordinarily puzzled by this bizarre relationship we had developed. But one day, we had a huge problem on my team, which was responsible for developing software used in restaurant kitchens around the world. There was an extremely high demand for a feature which could show, visually, the amount of time remaining for a certain task. Our UI was already incredibly crowded with all sorts of clocks and timers and colors and information.

Drawing on my experience working on the UI for WWII Online at Cornered Rat, I proposed a minimal, but effective, progress bar element that could fit perfectly, convey the information, and only take up a fraction of a percentage of screen real estate. You see, game UIs are a special beast, because they need to convey useful information to the player without obstructing the view of the game while still fitting with the aesthetic of the game. It made perfect sense to me.

“You can do this?” my manager asked.
“Sure,” I replied. “I did this stuff all the time at Cornered Rat.”
“Wow, what other cool skills are you keeping tucked away?”

And then it dawned on me. Our product was coffee. The features are what happen when we mix our skills, our creamers, into the coffee. And my game UI experience was a mocha creamer kept in my metaphorical desk drawer that came in handy when the team had run out of all its usual creamers.

Maybe my acquaintance was just a weirdo. Maybe he was just addicted to coffee. But it was an important lesson: Always keep adding to your skillset, as much as you can, because you never know when these things will come in handy. You’ll never have to feel like an imposter, because you’ll be you, and you’ll develop a desk drawer full of things you are good at.

So to this day, I keep spare creamers and snacks in my desk drawer, literally and metaphorically.

I’ve been told that when I enter the workforce, I won’t have enough experience or skills to be considered worthwhile. How am I supposed to deal with that once I graduate?

Well of course you won’t have as much as experience, coming fresh out of college, as people who have been working in the industry. It’d be foolish of any company to expect otherwise.

But what’s more important for entry-level applicants, beyond skills — which can be taught — is your attitude. Think about programming. You might have only worked with a couple languages throughout college, and you might be decent enough at programming those languages, but there are many languages out there, each with their strengths and weaknesses and uses. If you stuck with Python throughout college, and you’re applying at a place that uses Java, don’t feel discouraged.

Instead what’s important is to explain that you understand programming in general, you understand the concepts, you understand algorithms and data structures and paradigms like object-oriented programming. And it’s important to demonstrate the attitude that you’re willing and able to learn, that you will take the initiative and learn the syntax and idiosyncrasies of whatever language or system the company uses.

I know it’s frustrating to be fresh out of college and interviewing at places that want entry-level employees that already have experience. But remember, you DO have experience, very important experience: Experience learning, and learning a lot. Experience collaborating with diverse teams and experience working solo. If you can leverage that experience, and connect it with your prospective employer, it won’t matter much at all whether or not you know such-and-such a language specifically.

Now, there is an addendum. You need to understand that you just might be competing with applicants who DO possess the exact skillset the company is looking for. Do you know how entry-level people get those skills? They work on things on their own, as a hobby. Get a GitHub account if you don’t have one already, and find some open source projects to work on. Find a language or a tool that gets you excited, and develop your skills there, on the side. You could probably become “familiar” with a new language every weekend, if you’re so inclined.

So to recap — demonstrate a positive, motivated attitude that shows you are able and willing to learn; leverage your very recent experience in learning to connect with the company and illustrate how you can hit the ground running and make an impact; and actually take the initiative to start learning new things and building up experience on your own time. Those things will separate you from every other random person graduating college and blasting out a bunch of half-empty, cookie-cutter resumes.