The Journeys Begin

Anna
Anna
Nov 1 · 3 min read
Blank Slate

As a short introduction, I haven’t been a developer for long. I’m just short of a year in my developer career.

I graduated with a Computer Science degree about six years ago and, in the mean time, I’ve spent approximately five years as a SQL Developer / technical consultant for a local company and about a year as a developer in the same place. I’ve recently left the company to move to a completely different job. Not only is the development part of my job new, the industry in which my new company operates is also unknown to me.

That being said, I figured my experience as a completely inexperienced developer entering a world of React, Redux, Angular and dotNet Core might resonate with some others out there. So I’m trying to share what technical stuff I’m going through as well as the organizational part of starting a new job. I wanted to do this because the most frustrating thing I’ve encountered in my short career is that every time I try to research something, I find simple examples that work great and make perfect sense, but when I try to apply them on the product I’m working on, it feels like I’m tackling Quantum Physics when I’ve barely mastered “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction”.

As for the organizational part of starting a new job, it feels daunting to start fresh, regardless of your age. Especially when you’ve spent your entire life as an introverted gopher that has had the amazing luck of being consistently adopted by extroverts. Here are a few things that I have found helped me:

  1. Have someone on the business side show your new employee the product. What it does and how end users use it is just as important as how it works. And it’s a lot easier to tackle when you’re just starting in a new field.
  2. Have the newest teammate show them where the code is, how you organize your workload (e.g. sprints, tasks, etc), how you go about committing / pushing new work, what the build and deployment process looks like. I don’t care how experienced a developer is, they’ve never worked with your flow, so they need to be brought up to date.
  3. Be as clear as you can about what you expect from your new employee. Maybe you’ve covered it in your interviews, maybe you haven’t, either way, go over it especially after they’ve seen the product at the previous point. This may seem pointless, but I guarantee you that your new employee is confused and unbalanced and they are starving for a metric by which to measure if they’re doing a good job or not.
  4. Location, Location, Location. Coming into an existing team is not easy. Don’t make it additionally hard for a person by giving them a seat that is physically remote from their teammates.
  5. Go over the tools you use. And I don’t mean Visual Studio, and the like. I mean the HR platform for how you make a request for time off, the chat used for informal communications, any extra platforms your company might have. Maybe HR went over them, but just to make sure, ask again.
  6. Check in on them. If your new teammate is an introvert or just shy, they’re not going to have an easy time coming to you with stuff. Especially if your work environment is dynamic and everyone seems busy all the time. So just…ask them once a day or once every couple of days if they’re okay, if they’ve run into any roadblocks. It will make all the difference to them.

All the stuff I’ve mentioned here might seem obvious to some people, but trust me when I say I’ve experienced the lack of some of the things on my list and I’ve heard stories from my fellow developer friends about the lack of others.

Until the next journey, stay safe😄.

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