Stuffs you should follow at your job

I have gone through this interesting article, which says a lot of things about how to behave/work/react at your job/company. I have cut/paste some notes out here, hoping that it will help others.

• If other people are going to be impacted by you failing, you need to tell them first.
• If you’re working in an environment/team where everyone is afraid to make the smallest mistake and tiptoes around - leave! The same holds if your manager brings up your smallest of transgressions in your performance review.
• When you do screw up, admit it up front. Send a mail out saying “I screwed up here”. Take the blame and move on, rather than trying to hide it.
• Whether you’re a developer or not, you need to be on all the checkin mailing lists, all the team mailing lists. You need to be trying out the latest daily builds. You need to be engaged.
• Code is king. You got to have some idea about its structure, no matter you're developer or not.
• If you know how to use a debugger, set a few breakpoints and learn how the different pieces fit together.
• Lone wolf Syndrome: Take a moment everyday to walk around your offices. Drop in and find out what people are up to. Talk about what you’re doing. you’ll gain enough trust that people know that they can depend on you to deliver on time.
• Our industry is one that fundamentally changes every few years or so. The worst thing you can do is to not keep up and let yourself stagnate. Download the latest hot programming language, web framework, browser plugin, whatever.
• ‘Not having time’ is not an excuse.
• The teams that die out at Microsoft are the ones who don’t keep up with changing tech world. One warning sign is if everyone in a team has worked on the same thing for over a decade. It is almost always a sign you need some fresh blood to shake up the thinking.
• New team? Pick people over products. Whenever I decide to move on to doing something different, I'll look for the people I want to work with first. Relationships you form with great team mates stick around with you for a long, long time.
• Get out of your comfort zone. I’m a big believer that the only way you ever get to grow is to do things outside of your comfort zone. Be it people, places, programming languages or your job - try and do something you haven’t done before.
• Ask the uncomfortable questions. Most times, you’ll have a much more productive conversation by stating the obvious question everyone’s skirting around.
• Go say 'Hi'. Any large organization has a number of interesting people. Go and meet every one of them. Find out what they’re working on. Get them to tell you stories of the ‘good ol’ days’. Get them to rant on things they hate now. Learn from them.
• Praise in public, pull down pants in private. praise is always something that should be done in public. In fact, people consistently underestimate the value of letting someone know that you appreciate what they’ve done.
• It is always OK to criticize someone’s idea in public. It is to be expected. However, something you should never ever do is to criticize the person themselves in public. Have an issue with someone’s attitude or performance? Have the conversation behind closed doors.
• Best things are taken, not given. Make sure the right people knew exactly what you did. If you don’t make the effort to make sure your seniors have the right input (and this might be as simple as knocking on their door and saying ‘Check out what I built), don’t be surprised if things don’t go in your favor.
• The most important lesson of all is this - don’t be an asshole. Lots of smart people tend to develop rude, antagonistic behavior patterns. Sometimes, they’re just jerks by nature. Be nice. The key is to critique someone’s work/ideas without critiquing the person themselves. That however is a hard trick to pick up.