My career had a rough start, but I learned something that changed my trajectory forever, which helped me grow from a new grad (IC3) to a staff engineer (IC6) in 3 years. At my first job, I was responsible for maintaining a database script that my manager had written by himself without using source control. The script contained over 10,000 lines of complex queries that were interconnected. Since we didn’t use code review, the script had a lot of typos and bugs that could have been avoided. We made edits to the script directly in production, which caused frequent breakages. These breakages took a long time to recover from because we couldn’t revert without source control. I felt like I wasn’t growing as an engineer and had no idea how to grow since I was a new grad with no mentorship.