Your first tech job

Stage 6 · Lesson 1 of 7

Knowing what matters most this week

Productivity and learning on the job

A new engineer is rarely short of work. The risk is being busy with the wrong things. starts with knowing your team's current goals and which of your tasks serves them most.

Do that task first each day. When requests clash, ask your manager or lead which comes first, instead of guessing or trying to do everything. Write a short plan at the start of each week, and on Friday compare it with what you actually did.

This builds directly on and protects your focus time, the next topic.

Common trapanswering every small request and chat message instantly, and reaching Friday with the ticket you were actually given still unfinished.

A question to check yourself, an AI practice session and 1 cheat sheet entry come when you add the roadmap to your account. Add it

Resources for this stage

Start with· follow one of these

  • BookFree
    Software Engineering at Google

    Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck and Hyrum Wright · Intermediate

    Free online: the chapters on knowledge sharing and testing show how strong teams learn and work

  • BookPaid
    The Pragmatic Programmer

    Hunt and Thomas · Intermediate · About $45

    Habits for learning, debugging and owning your work that last a whole career

Practise

  • Toggl Track

    Track two ordinary weeks to see where your time really goes before changing anything

Keep handy

  • Claude Code Documentation

    How an AI coding tool handles your code and permissions, so you can check it against your company's rules

Also worth your time

Mark this stage as not done?