What is the most rewarding thing I have done in my first two years as a software engineer?
Doing a rotation in another team in my company.
Since my rotation ended a few months ago, I have encouraged everyone around me to do one if they can. Beyond the benefits, such as learning new skills and meeting new people, I want to elaborate on six more perks of doing a rotation. Maybe I can convince you to do a rotation or offer it to your employees/reports.
Develop sympathy for other teams
You have heard someone say, “This is not our team’s problem,” or “pass this ticket to them.” Although it is important to have boundaries at work to avoid burnout and focus on the right priorities, I still believe in making other people’s lives easier when possible. Being in the shoes of the “other team” allows you to understand what slows them down, increases their workload unnecessarily, and how things can be communicated better to them. I, for example, now know what extra information to provide in the ticket that I am passing down to the team I rotated in, which can minimize further conversations or prevent the ticket from being sent back and forth!
Become a bridge between teams
Now that you know the inner workings, challenges, focuses, strengths, and weaknesses of more than one team, you are in a unique position to build a bridge between them. You can facilitate communication, oversee tickets that concern both teams and lead design conversations that require knowledge in multiple areas. You can bring strategies, procedures, or cultural elements you find useful in one team to the other. All of these additional contributions increase your visibility and impact in your organization.
Discover new opportunities
Even under a single job title umbrella, there are so many different roles. Doing a rotation exposes you to a different side of the business, a different way of developing or shipping products. You may like improving continuous testing infrastructure more than you like writing graphic user interface elements. Or you may enjoy brainstorming about features more than you like coding speed improvements. The more you get to explore, the more you will know about possible paths you might want to take and the ones you don’t.
Find new mentors
No mentor can do it all. Some people are good at giving you direction, while some will tell you when you are wrong. Some can encourage and motivate you, while others can connect you to others. Certainly, having a diverse pool of mentors you can tap into is very helpful. Sometimes, however, we don’t know that we can benefit from a particular kind of mentor before meeting them. Or, sometimes, it is hard to build and maintain a genuine connection with people without an organic reason that brings you together regularly. Being on rotation addresses most of these concerns and creates a perfect breeding ground for meaningful and organic mentor-mentee relationships to form.
Question how you have always done things
Numerous elements of our day-to-day job become automatic. Your code style, the way you do code reviews, prioritize features, assign tickets, and even the way you think about software engineering, in general, tends to converge with what your team collectively thinks. This is not necessarily bad, but leaving that bubble occasionally and peeking at how others are approaching similar problems or situations is a great opportunity.
Appreciate how far you have come
I remember starting my first job out of college and feeling imposter syndrome for the first time. There was so much to be onboarded to, so much to learn, and so much to explore. Git was scary, the terminal was a mystery and even the programming languages I thought I was comfortable with looked on steroids.
During my rotation, I had to onboard to another team again. I was surprised when I recognized that nothing that gave me anxiety a year and a half ago scared me anymore. Working with a new language? No problem. I know I can play around with code, research, and ask questions if necessary. I recognized that not only did I get comfortable with several technologies, but most importantly, I got comfortable with not knowing everything. This change in attitude inspires me when I feel stuck today because now I know that there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Have you ever done a rotation? What was your experience like?
6 Overlooked Benefits of a Job Rotation was originally published in Better Programming on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.