📌 TL;DR I'm still early in my own career, and lately I've been thinking about how much advice we hear when we're starting out.
Learn this.
Build that.
Get certified.
Network more.
Specialize.
Don't specialize too early.
Work harder.
Protect your work-life balance.
Sometimes it feels like everyone has an answer 😄 But careers are long, and I think some lessons only really make sense after you've lived through them.
That's what made me think about this community.
DEV has people at so many different stages of their careers, with completely different experiences.
Some are just starting.
Some have been working for a few years.
Others have decades of experience.
Some have changed careers entirely, managed teams, built companies, made mistakes, started over, burned out, found work they love, or discovered that what they thought they wanted wasn't actually right for them.
That's a lot of experience in one place.
So this post is a little different.
I'll share some of what I'm learning while being early in my own career, but mostly, I want to listen to you.
What would you tell someone early in their career?
And there's no limit here 😄 If one thing comes to mind, share one.
If you have five, ten, or a whole list of things experience has taught you, I'd genuinely love to hear them all.
They don't have to be about the same topic either.
Talk about whatever you feel is worth passing on.
It can be technical, personal, or somewhere in between: work, money, learning, managers, communication, confidence, health, work-life balance, mistakes, opportunities, relationships, or something completely different.
And if you're early in your career too, you're absolutely part of this conversation.
Share something you've already learned, something you wish you'd known when you started, or something you're still trying to figure out.
And if you have a question, ask it.
There might be someone here who's already been through exactly what you're wondering about and can share what they learned.
And if it's something I happen to know or have experienced too, I'll be happy to share what I can.
My hope is that we can turn the comments into a place where people at different stages of their careers can ask questions, share experiences, and learn from each other 💙 📚 Table of Contents This Post Is a Little Different I'm Learning That There Probably Isn't One Correct Way to Build a Career There's So Much About a Career That Doesn't Fit on a Resume Some of You Have Already Lived the Years the Rest of Us Are Just Beginning So...
What Would You Tell Someone Early in Their Career?
It Doesn't Have to Be Career Advice in the Traditional Sense Why I'm Asking the Community Instead of Writing an Advice Post I Have a Feeling the Best Part of This Post Might Be the Comments This Post Is a Little Different I had a slightly different idea for this post.
Usually when I sit down to write something, I have a topic I want to explore, an experience I want to share, or, apparently lately, a technical report that sends me down a rabbit hole for several hours 😄 But this time, I want to write a little less and listen a little more.
I'm still early in my own career.
There are things I understand much better today than I did a few years ago, but I'm also pretty sure there are things I'll look back on five or ten years from now and think, “I really wish I had understood that earlier.” Maybe someone has already told me some of those things and I haven't had enough experience yet to understand why they matter.
Or maybe they're lessons I'll only learn by going through something myself.
Either way, it made me think about something I really like about communities like DEV: we're all at completely different points in our careers.
Some people here are just figuring out what they want to do, while others have been working for years or even decades.
And even within that, no two paths look exactly the same.
People change fields, become managers, go back to being individual contributors, build companies, take career breaks, start over, or watch their carefully planned career go somewhere completely unexpected.
Every one of those paths comes with lessons.
And that's what made me wonder: What could those of us who are early in our careers learn from everyone else's experiences?
I'm Learning That There Probably Isn't One Correct Way to Build a Career When you're early in your career, it's surprisingly easy to feel like you're doing something wrong.
You look around and someone seems to be learning faster than you, someone else just got promoted, and another person landed an opportunity you'd love to have.
Some people already seem to know exactly what they want to specialize in, while others have incredible portfolios or somehow sound completely confident about where their careers are going.
And meanwhile, you might still be sitting there thinking, “I don't even know exactly what I want to be doing three years from now” 😄 I've definitely spent time worrying about things like that myself.
But I'm slowly realizing that careers probably aren't as linear as they sometimes look from the outside.
People change roles, discover that something they thought they'd love isn't actually for them, or become interested in something they never planned to pursue.
They take breaks, make mistakes, change their minds, and sometimes start again.
An opportunity that looks perfect might teach you what you don't want, while something that feels like a complete detour might end up being useful years later in a way you couldn't possibly have predicted at the time.
I think that's part of what makes comparing career paths so difficult.
We usually see where someone is now, but we don't necessarily see all the changes, uncertainty, mistakes, and unexpected turns that happened along the way.
I'm still figuring out my own path, so I'm definitely not going to tell anyone exactly how they should build theirs.
But one thing I'm trying to become more comfortable with is not having the entire map yet.
Maybe knowing where I want to go next is enough for now.
There's So Much About a Career That Doesn't Fit on a Resume When we're starting out, a lot of our attention naturally goes toward the things we can show: the skills we're learning, projects we're building, certifications we're earning, our education, experience, and eventually the achievements we can point to.
And of course those things matter.
But the longer I think about careers, the more I wonder whether some of the lessons that shape them the most are things we'll never put on a resume.
Things like knowing when to ask for help instead of spending another five hours trying to solve something alone.
Learning how to disagree with someone without turning that disagreement into a fight.
Being able to say “I don't know” without immediately worrying that everyone will suddenly think you don't belong there.
Then there are decisions that don't always have an obvious right answer.
How do you know whether an opportunity is genuinely good for you or just looks impressive from the outside?
When should you negotiate, and when should you walk away?
How do you deal with a bad manager, or eventually learn to become a good one yourself?
And some of the questions go beyond work itself.
How much of your identity should your career take up?
How do you stay ambitious without feeling like every free hour needs to become another opportunity to be productive?
How do you take care of your health while still trying to build the future you want?
I don't think there's one course we can take that neatly teaches all of that.
A lot of it seems to come from living through things, making choices, getting some of them wrong, watching other people go through their own experiences, and slowly figuring out what matters to us along the way.
And that's exactly why I wanted to write this post.
Some of You Have Already Lived the Years the Rest of Us Are Just Beginning That's something I think is pretty amazing when you really stop and think abo