I have started my career in software development over 15 years ago by the time this text is being written. Back then, things used to be very different culturally. Discussion around "safe places" were not common place and the organizational structures were really rigid, and that translated in the way managers, or whatever other middle role name some may have at the time, communicated with their teams.

I recall that I was really anxious in the first days that I have been assigned to a new team. I had spent the past month basically doing onboarding activities with 20 or 30 other folks, from which some are still my friends to this day, and we basically spent most of this time reading random documentation like "How a tandem switch works" and playing flash games. Some of us got really good at Kaizo Mario.

Anyway, I was at the beginning of my third semester at college and I had no previous programming experience before that and little professional experience at all. The first task that I had and never done before in my life was to map a network drive. I believe that nowadays some of you may not even know what I'm talking about. After mapping the team drive, I started reading the code and trying to understand how things worked but there was a lot stuff to still be configured in my environment for me to be up and running. It used to take like 5 days back then to set up the environment and it is really funny to me how so many years later we take basically the same time as well.

Got say that I was not understanding much of the code. At the point, I had just worked in some basic CRUDs for college, so it was the first time I had to deal with integration, SOAP, authentication, build process, etc. I didn't have back then as well the malice to understand when there was pressure in the air and if there would be space for me to learn and grow in a good pace. I would soon understand what was the actual scenario.

We had a daily meeting at 10:00, if my poor memory doesn't fail me. My team use to sit around the table at the meeting room and our group leader, which would be the same as a scrum master nowadays, would ask us how things were going. It came my turn to give my status: [Group Leader]: What is your status for today? [Younger me]: I'm still setting up my environment. 2 seconds of silence… [Group Leader]: Look at the status this guy gives me. I can't say that I froze at the time but the rasped way that he pronounced this sentence hit me like a brick. It was my first professional job experience and I had no other reaction rather than keep silent. After the meeting, one of my colleagues approached me and said that on these situations I should try to develop my answer a little bit more and explain if I had any impediment which I may need help with. Looking back, I really don't hold any hard feelings about the situation because I understand now how much pressure was going on in a project which was already overdue and over budget. And would feel that even more once I got assigned to be at the client site for UAT in the next few months. It is for sure a really normal situation for anyone that has the minimum work experience at this point but for me it hit really hard. It taught me a lesson that I never forgot and I always try to give the same guidance for the people that I work with or mentor: Always know the subject of any meeting you have been invited to I may seems obvious but whenever I receive a meeting invite I look at the subject, check if there is any attachment to it or additional information and try to think what questions could be raised, if I would be involved in any of them or if I should ask questions. This has helped me on several situations throughout the years since it has been a really usual thing for people to summon me to meetings 5 minutes prior with not much context sharing. The younger me took that hit to save the older one from what would come.