| So firstly, congratulations on deciding to improve yourself. I can tell you’re absolutely going to grow into a great engineer because you have the right mindset and attitude. Now onto some advice. I’ll give you 2 tips and ask a question. Tip 1: Learn to relax. It sounds like you lose confidence when you’re presenting an idea and things start going badly. It’s natural to get flustered and stressed in those situations. But getting stressed out is the worst possible reaction. Your ability to listen and problem solve drop exponentially. Getting stressed is like taking 50 IQ points off. Practice some basic mindfulness and relaxation techniques. Practice them in quiet moments throughout the day, then when you’ve got the hang of them, start to use them in mildly stressful situations. It might take a while to get good enough at relaxing to be able to actually do it in a high stress situation, but you will get there. And if you can keep your cool when a presentation isn’t going well, you’ll always be the best version of yourself. Tip 2: Practice. Presenting a technical argument to an audience is hard. Really hard. It’s going to take a while to get better. And the only way to improve is to practice. One great low stress way to practice is to record a screencast. Pick a topic, or present a feature you’ve built. Record yourself, listen to it, then try to improve. Even just repeating the same presentation a few times will help you find your rhythm. Now a question: I think you need to ask yourself why you are getting so much passive and active negative feedback? It strikes me as a little unusual. I would hope even the most junior member of my team wouldn’t feel like their ideas are responded to with people not listening, losing interest or being overly critical. It could be that your team has a toxic culture, and you’re being unfairly marginalised. In which case you should not bother trying to impress them and just leave. Or maybe people aren’t listening to you because you’re too new to the team? Or maybe you’re advocating for points of view that conflict with the leadership/power structure? I don’t know the answer, but I think it’s a question worth your time considering. Maybe find a friend/mentor at work who could give you a bit of honest feedback if it’s you or them. But stick with it. Careers are long. And if you’re improving just a little bit every day. You’ll be amazed where you will end up! |
I have worked with mid sized companies so far, where I have managed to work with it but I will start a FAANG job soon and just don't want to be in this situation when I start, specially when I am going to meet 10x more experienced and sharp engineers.