The Core of a Developer's Collaboration Skill: Work Visibility

This article is a summary of a lecture on the importance of securing work visibility for someone who successfully completed a three-month probation period at Banksalad and is starting their first career as a software engineer. Coding and design are not the whole of development. It discusses how to begin strengthening the collaboration and communication skills that software engineers need.

Now, you are a professional software engineer, and organizing and sharing your work and concerns transparently becomes both a duty and a skill. ✨
When you start your career as a developer, you can minimize many mistakes through Jira, for example estimating schedules. ⏱️
When a schedule estimate is requested, you can only talk about the schedule after you write a tech spec, break the tasks into tickets in a Jira epic, and then estimate the time for each ticket and sort priorities and blockers. 🧮
Schedule estimates and sharing based on gut feeling, without the process above, are pure evil, and many problems in tech companies start right there. 👿
Schedule estimates are often wrong, but once a developer has said a date out loud, they want to meet it, so they will even stay up all night to make it happen. But after three sleepless nights, you are usually too exhausted to keep working. 😫
You end up struggling in silence, unable to even tell the team it is hard, then feeling guilty like a criminal because you missed the deadline, and wondering if you are incompetent. That is when burnout hits. 💣
Other teammates will make plans and draw Gantt charts based on that estimate, and then all the assumptions they trusted collapse, and trust between teammates drops. It should never happen like this. 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦
Because humans are visual creatures, visual slaves, you must always intentionally manage the work you are doing in a visible way. 📈
If you work without your work status being visible on the Jira board, it becomes hard to protect yourself. For example, unexpected tasks come in, you keep accepting them, and then you fail to finish your main work. Then you hit a what am I even doing with my life moment. 😑
If your work, priorities, and estimated time are visible on the board, you can turn down unexpected work or discuss schedule changes with the team. 🙅‍♀️
Make it so that what work and what concerns you are dealing with are visible through Jira tickets. That way PMs and other teammates can see them and help, and even teammates who do not understand development can still help the developer. They can bring in resources, go find a TPM, or adjust the schedule. There are actually more ways to solve the problem than you think. 🙌
Tech specs reduce communication cost and protect the developer's time and focus. The Jira way of working protects you from schedule-estimation stress. 📄
Let me repeat: being unable to estimate a schedule, or estimating it wrong, is pure evil in a tech company. 🦹🏻‍♂️
Work as if there is no work without a Jira ticket. It should become a habit to create a ticket and start when work appears. 🏷️
Congratulations. You are now not just someone who codes, but a software engineer who develops. Let us take on this adventure together. 🏄
Team XYZ, please keep reminding and supporting you so you can have fun making impact and grow into an outstanding engineer. Thank you. 🙇