As A New Software Engineer – Should I Ask For Help?

I was excited, I finally landed my first software engineering internship. The first day on the job I was thinking I had to prove myself to management, developers with more experience, to other interns. Show me the code you want me refactor to increase it’s performance or show me what new feature I should build… Well being on a real development team is really different than school assignments. Depending on what development team you join, learning the code base could become a huge challenge. You could be there years and still not know what everything does, especially if you specialize in front-end or back-end development. If you are just starting out on your software engineering journey, just realize even experience engineers have a learning curve. I was struggling the first 3-4 months of my internship. I was asking a senior engineer for help more often than I would like to admit. So much so that he asked the project lead to talk to me so I wouldn’t be so much of a distraction. It was after that discussion that I realized I need to struggle and figure things out myself first. When I realized that, I learned more and got better at my job. I got my full-time offer because I was performing at the software engineer level and not at the intern level. Always try to perform at the level above where you are, that’s how you can get promotions. Sure, ask for help when you need it but also know that you can learn from failures, struggles, and experience. Try to find that right balance. Personally, I at least take a couple hours to research the problem I’m having and come up with a fix. A day if it’s a large issue. AND REALLY READ THE FULL THREAD TO UNDERSTAND WHAT IS BEING DISCUSSED. DON’T JUST SKIP TO SOMEONE’S SOLUTION.