hello everyone i'm michael bernie welcome to glide chat i'm a senior technical consultant and then also a service delivery manager at glide fest consulting what about you jordan jordan julian senior technical consultant for glide fast fare code as well how's it going uh joel yeah hey good afternoon good day i know it's a podcast so whenever you're listening to this uh how's it going uh my name is joel simon i'm a technical consultant for glide fast awesome thank you guys all right so for this conversation we're going to speak on the servicenow junior developer journey that we all had so just for timeline purposes and to kind of set the backstage here what release did you begin beginning guys because i know for me i began in helsinki what about you jordan oh man um the tail end of eureka i think or even yeah yeah eureka i remember it was kind of like in the in between you know how they transition so i remember just doing like some training stuff in fuji and then moving over to geneva so right around that time yeah yeah that sounds right right yeah so holy cow i guess i would be the newest baby out of the bunch man times have changed all right so that's where you guys begin that's where i begin as well so whenever you were a junior developer i just want to get into this like how did you exactly learn servicenow itself like were you immediately like competent in the service now did you think that you know you were the bee's knee since day one did you struggle like what was that like please joel i i know you've been through well no i mean obviously i was not a rock star i i definitely made some some mistakes nothing nothing to you know like into the world or anything like that obviously but uh definitely not a rock star it took some time for me like i had to overcome that fear when i first started working on projects like worrying about like making any kind of change like it was a weird like irrational fear of like well what if i screw something up and then once you did it's like that sucks but you know what there's a way we can undo it right so that was probably one of my bigger things i had to overcome as you know when i first started out but like as far as learning it it's kind of going back to that same thing where it's getting your hands into the instance and making you know working on it because class time is good and all and there's a lot to be gained from that but nothing's ever going to replace just you know doing the work exactly you got to get your hands on application over there yeah 100 yeah 100 even from my very first project believe it or not mr jordan louie in here was actually my lead joel was on that project as well uh i actually picked up a ton of info like directly from jordan like not even my hands on keyboard like straight up jordan's hands on my keyboard oh man i i remember that uh i just remember bernie asked me a question or something i'm like telling you how to do it you're just giving me this blank canvas look and i'm like you know what here just let me type it out real quick but for you jordan like since you started like how did you get your leg up to be able to be in that position to teach other people so when i started at a previous company did their boot camp and everything and honestly i wasn't even thinking about servicenow at all i was looking at doing just a full stack development and job and everything but they had a bunch of speakers come in and one of them actually happened to be my old colleague from university and he was like the the lead of the servicenow team and he's like yo here come do this with me i'm like okay you don't need to tell me anymore like i already had that report with him like just tell me what to do um so yeah yeah for sure um just to kind of show me the ropes there i mean he knew everything i knew we were classmates and everything so so yeah i pretty much just took it from there and he gave me training documents and went to town [Music] that's good then i know for me man it was it was definitely a grinding it was a struggle and i would say a lot of my time actually did go to some outside learning well i say outside learning but um for what it's worth i know there's two different uh kind of schedules that exist in the corporate world i'll call it or enterprise world there's the maker schedule and the manager schedule and you can think of the manager's schedule as more of you know that that nine to five oh i need to email something oh i need to fax something oh i need to talk to someone else that's very you know like admin duties right when it comes to the maker schedule where you know we kind of fall into as makers well i should say we literally fall into on that schedule you'll notice like a lot of your creative juices don't come until like you know one two three p.m and sometimes even midnight one am two a.m so like for us to fit in that little nine to five time box on a manager's schedule and do maker's activities it really didn't sit well with me but don't get it twisted i still got my job done like yeah uh like i i'm not gonna lie i spent a lot of time working after my actual job and whenever i was outside of the office i would go home and actually you know get more billables done and i would still hit my 40 you know so i definitely learned that way um but let's segue to something else quick question here since you did have people to lean on and since you did dig into docs and training and all that was there anything else that helped you learn because i know for me i spent so much time like in the s dev slack channel and this was like back in the day like back before you know it is what it is today um this was back when like you could like roll into the channel like seven or eight a.m say good morning and like the same four to six people will reply to you yeah hey good morning you know nowadays i'm not going to say good luck doing that but uh you're going to see some different faces in there every morning which is good it's a sign of growth so uh for me sn dev slack channel was definitely help i could always go in there you know just ask something and get an answer out and it's also a good place to you know give back to the community but what about for you guys did it kind of just end it you know grabbing a senior dev to lean on did it that it kind of needed a training documentation like how did you really get your leg up like really up to mid level i would say yeah so on that one so this was also my first professional job out of out of school right so um a lot of the mindset early on there was you know you gotta you gotta do your own research you gotta like learn everything yourself and and everything like that and quickly found out you know google's your friend it's not cheating to look up answers like you can you can ask other people so i mean pretty much once that kind of came to the forefront of my mind i was like okay yeah you know what look let me ask you let me ask you go through these docs google like everything just anything that can give me an answer yeah exactly exactly all right what about you joe how did you really get your wagon uh kind of echoing the same point i think you know when you have access to what is literally the wealth of human knowledge at your fingertips to not use that's i don't know you even you're leaving money on the table with that but one of the big things that i've learned is just like through working sessions with other developers even if it even if you know what you're doing like i've learned just you know small tiny like shortcuts or like ways to enhance my productivity as a developer just by watching other people work and they'll do something like a little it could be something as simple as just like a a shortcut you know on a keyboard that you know works with insertion i was like oh wow that that saves me so much more time instead of like uh i think the most recent one was like being able to get the actual value of a field you can just like double click on the field and it'll like have a little pop-up display that shows the value back in the day i always did the old school you know doing the script executor and then running it to get the value to make sure that that's the right value and it's like well that's taking like a minute of time like doesn't sound like a lot but over time that definitely compounds and you're not wrong at all either just from like shoulder surfing and working sessions with other people i've even learned like uh you know how you can you know enter a table name in the navigation filter and do dot list at the end and it'll pop it up well like if you do the you know if you do dot list but you capitalize list it'll open it up in a new tab like even something as simple as that has saved me so much time over the course of years that nowadays whenever like i do like you know show my desktop and let's say i'm just trying to dig into something for a client they'll sit there and go wow you're going through this so fast i thought you had to you know click everything use the menu and didn't have to you know go on the whole rant or tirade or whatever right yeah yeah so yeah just those small little things over time you can just pick up uh little little tips and tricks along the way that's that helps out a lot very true very true and that's dude i could talk all day about tips and tricks let's move on just for top sake so we know how you got good we know how you kind of got your leg up to you know get better how about this do you have any tips for future junior developers and what i mean by tips is um should they take your same route even though like this entire landscape and environment has changed because nowadays they have things like now learning you know it's like glide fast university we even have our own uh kind of training boot camp sort of deal going on like what would you recommend to someone new that's starting out how would they go from that junior to mid level so let's kind of um yeah so there's like there's definitely a benefit to you know traditional classical like learning through yeah glide the fast university and you know one on even one-on-ones with like a teacher or somebody just having that mentor there like really seek that out that's good other things i would say is you know outside of the classroom you know have that drive to keep learning you know you need to do the work in class and you need to do the work out of class if you want to really know this stuff i mean i i don't know how many classes i can tell you that i took that i'm like okay next semester we're done like and kind of just like the benefit of piggybacking off of what you were saying just now joel is um you know learning from others everybody has their own different learning style right and you're you guys pick up on things that i don't so having that other perspective on how to do something not only gives you another option but yeah it could enhance the way you do it so you modify maybe incorporate both what you already do with what somebody has done and come up with this whole new thing so just you know keep keep getting different perspectives on things like that none of us are are the number one in the world you know developer you know everyone's always gonna be doing something better than you and it's beneficial to have that in your toolbox that's very true i like that the whole like not just shoulder surfing or not just you know doing what someone else is doing but look at what they're doing learn it and then create kind of like your own cookbook of how you get your stuff done and that can be anything as simple as kind of like how i describe using you know dot lists and all capital letters at all times but joel how about yourself i would say one of the things that's going to really help a junior developer continue to grow um is not to become uh myopic in their approach so that's to say where like you know so as we start to become you know competent proficient we kind of know oh if i want to do this you know it's a b c or d and like without trying to be a little more specific here sometimes you know a business rule isn't what you need for a story that you're given maybe you need to you know stop and consider uh instead of this role maybe we need to run a calculated field and have a script on that just just as a for instance you know there's more than one way to approach things and you want to make sure that you're not getting too much into a rut where all right i you know you're going through the steps to do this because that's not what you're getting paid to do right if we had if you could break it down to a simple recipe each and every time right you can you know almost anybody could pull it because it's just steps you have to follow you need to think a little bit larger and a little bit bigger with how you're approaching you know delivering these functionalities for clients um so that's what i'd say is be cognizant of what you're learning and know it but realize that that's not the only way to go about doing it very true and i like that response so in conjunction with that like we've gone over like you know learning how we learned or i guess the whole idea of how to learn what are some other things that do contribute to that because it's not just tools it's not all technical it's not just you know straight up coding to get the job done but there's some other things that contribute to it like soft skills for instance like i can't tell you how many classes i've gone through in school or any boot camps or anything like that that don't even touch on soft skills or how important it is in a professional setting and not only that don't get it twisted actually i i don't know how to teach someone soft skills either it's kind of something you you yourself have to delve into and learn i know i've read a couple books on it that have you know helped me out but at the end of the day it really came down to me literally in the mirror looking at myself and trying to get better with my own soft skills saying anything i could as if i was on a zoom call right now to say like oh you know good morning everyone because keep in mind like i came into this role from a a minimum wage position i was just a valet so like for me to delve into i guess corporate america enterprise however you want to phrase it man i was rough around the edges and it took a lot of work for me to i guess get smoother with my approach when it came to things because check this out you know like whenever you're in scrum and you've got an issue well i was always that guy this is faux pas do not do this i was always that guy that would just you know hold on to my issue like oh hey you know hey bernie how's it going oh yesterday i uh today i well today i've kind of got this one thing it's not really an issue it's not really a defect it's nothing to consider it's not an impediment though i mean it is an impediment but it's not an impediment like you know like don't do that like actually tell your you know your senior dev your tech arc your management or whoever it is what your issue is what did you try to do to actually solve it and do it in like the most clear and efficient manager possible and i think soft skills are huge so like do you all agree like is like general i guess professionalism or even reliability reliability as a team member or working as a team or are these traits that actually help in our you know around do y'all agree of course yeah yeah definitely um i mean and the thing about soft skills is literally every day you're improving upon it somehow and that's and that's really good because i i mean when i first started you know i'm myself an introverted person i would not want to be client facing at all like i would freeze up i wouldn't know what to say i would stutter all that kind of stuff and you kind of need to evaluate that if that is something that you do and and that that's something i evaluated to myself i'm like okay i need to improve this you know because it helps communication is just huge across the board internally with clients um and everything and so the better your soft skills there then you know you're gonna have those less gaps in communication but yeah so kind of just improving that is just gonna help a project run smoothly a delivery go well and just you know everybody's on the same page with those things so soft skills definitely definitely important what about you joel is professionalism something that that should have a heavy weight on it these days yes i mean you know i i just think the idea of you know being able to have a conversation and and make sure that people understand what you're saying because like sometimes and i know i definitely i do this like you find yourself hemming and hawing about what you're trying to say kinda like what you referred to earlier bernie like oh i have this thing but it's not really a thing i don't want you guys freaking out but it's kind of like hey look i ran into this thing right i tried x y and z i need some help can somebody can i get a second set of eyes on this right and people usually are more than happy to help you with that kind of stuff um and then yeah like if you do have a problem you know i think this gets repeated a lot but it bears continue to be repeated don't be afraid to say that you don't know something right because you're not going to be able to fix it you know just by sitting there kind of spinning your wheels um so yeah you know i think professionalism and also swallowing your pride a little bit i think is part of that as well of just saying hey look i don't know help me i think that goes a long way in as far as communicating within you know internal teams uh and then hourly with clients you know like i feel that you want to try to avoid wishy-washy statements with them right you they want you know straightforward answers so like with with clients it goes a long way to not be somebody who's beating around the bush totally understood i know we're going to wrap it up here but i do want to like add on to something there it's like you said don't be afraid to ask a question seriously like and what helped me with that confidence like here at gladfest we have an internal like deaf health channel so like if some of us are having an issue and of course we're all remote for the most part we can just put the question in the dev health channel and someone will chime in and help us out with it and for me seeing some of the people in the company that are extremely good very talented individuals definitely top tier ask questions in there and mean like seeing that that they have like you know swallowed their prides while their ego anything like that and they're okay with asking a question to the general public of the company and they're not seen as any lesser for that so that definitely helped me but i do want to say thank you everyone for tuning in to this glidechat episode uh it's been fun we've talked to you about what we want to see in a junior developer uh we've talked to you about you know like just how to get your leg up and it's been fun guys have a good one thanks all right thanks everybody take it easy [Music] you