Tell me about a specific skill you developed by learning from a peer or manager

In my first year, one skill I really developed was debugging systematically, and I learned it from a more experienced teammate. I used to jump between possible fixes pretty randomly, which meant I could spend hours without really narrowing the problem down. That teammate showed me how they start by forming a hypothesis, changing one thing at a time, and writing down what each test proves or rules out. I started using that approach on every bug for a few weeks and even asked them to review my notes on a couple of tricky issues. After that, I got much faster at finding root causes, and on a later issue my lead trusted me to investigate it on my own because my process was much clearer.

At my first job after college, I learned how to write readable, single-purpose components from a senior engineer during a few pair-programming sessions. I used to pack a lot of logic into one file and rely on comments to explain it; they made me stop and ask what responsibility each piece had, then extract and name helpers so the intent was obvious. We refactored a tangled component together and reviewed the changes line by line, which taught me to think about the next person who will read the code. Since then my pull requests are smaller, reviewers ask fewer clarifying questions, and a new teammate was able to reuse one of my components on their first day without me walking them through it.