Top 10 things you want from your first job out of school

There’s a seminal time after you graduate where you are about to be molded into the way you will likely work for the rest of your career. This process is called: career imprinting. John Lilly talks about it here.

So for that first job you want to be:

1. scared that you can’t do the job
2. around the smartest people you can find. Potentially you can find this out during your interviews and recruiting trips
3. at a company that is the right size for the impact you want to have. Hint: smaller is usually better. Andy Rachleff (Wealthfront) has a great analysis of medium-size rocket ship companies.
4. mentored, or even better, an apprentice. Being the latter is much more hands on and something you can get for free while pair programming if you’re an engineer for example
5. given an opportunity (not given a *junior* project)
6. allowed to have the same rewards, recognition and advancement opportunities as someone with more experience or tenure (beware the corporate policy around how you have to be in role for 12–18months!)
7. in constant training, mostly by people, but also by books (hopefully your company has a liberal book purchase policy), online training, blogs, going through corporate training or on the job training. Companies that have a rotation program can also be a great sense of learning. Education subsidies can also be powerful if taken advantage of.
8. good at getting and receiving feedback
9. always experimenting
10. able to work hard (it’s surprising how many companies make it difficult to work hard)
11. at a company with a strong brand (I put this last because in the long game this matters the least, however due to signalling theory this can, on the surface, matter a lot). Mostly this matters because the strength of this brand may dictate where your next job ends up being. Sad but true