When you start a job as a software engineer, remember this: they didn’t hire you just to write code. They hired you to create value for the business as it exists today. That means understanding the product, the customers, and the problems that actually matter—not just what’s in the ticket.
Most of the real work isn’t building shiny new things, it’s digging into existing systems, fixing them, expanding them, and making them survive real-world usage. And a lot of the time, you’re the only one who can do it. If something doesn’t make sense and you understand the business well enough, don’t just wait—take action. Sometimes the design is wrong, and experience is knowing when it’s okay to improve it.
If you don’t understand the business yet, that’s normal. Learn it. Look at competitors, read about the company’s history, ask people how they work, how money flows, and where things break. The best time to do this is when you first join—no one expects you to know anything, so take advantage of that moment.
I work in the flower industry now, and I took time to actually understand how the business runs. On Mondays, for example, flowers arrive in bulk, you unpack them, cut the stems, sort them, and prep everything for the week. Most programmers would never see or think about this, but that physical process directly affects inventory, timing, deliveries, and what the software should support. That’s the point: if you put in the effort to understand what people actually do in the business, not just what shows up in a database, you build better systems. You stop making assumptions, you catch edge cases early, and your software feels like it was built by someone who “gets it,” not just someone who codes.
Once you understand the fundamentals of the business, your impact compounds. You make better decisions, ship smarter software, and people start trusting you with real problems. You don’t just grow in the company—you age like wine.