What was the biggest mistake you made early in your career that ended up teaching you a valuable lesson? One of mine was assuming everyone interpreted requirements the same way I did. Learning to ask clarifying questions saved me from a lot of rework. What’s yours?

I recently switched to salary, and my workload exploded. Suddenly, everything is "urgent," so I'm working 2–3 hours of unpaid overtime at home every night. The company is billing the client for my extra hours, but I'm not seeing any of it. How do I bring this up with management? I'd rather not keep working for free.

My manager takes my work (which takes hours), feeds it to AI, and tells me to match the AI's output. Except the AI version makes zero sense for the actual project. I'm so annoyed and checked out that I'm skipping crucial steps in my workflow, making things worse. I used to love this work, but now I’m losing all passion. Has anyone dealt with a boss like this, or is it time for me to quit?

Obviously, no one expects a newly graduated hire to know everything during their first week, but early impressions stick. Question for the managers and senior engineers on here: What can a new grad do in those first few days to make you incredibly glad you hired them? What sets them apart early on?

What’s the greenest flag you’ve seen in an engineering team’s culture? For me it’s when senior engineers ask questions in public channels instead of always having the answers. It normalizes not knowing everything and makes it way easier for junior folks to speak up without feeling like they’ll be judged.