How To Excel In Your First Month as A Software Developer

Everyone has to start somewhere. This certainly do also applies for Software Developers and Programmers, whether you’re coming straight out of College with a degree in your hand or you have been self taught. The one thing that we all have in common is that we at some point has to face the life changing experience of getting our first paid job as a Developer.

When we get our first job it’s both exiting but also a huge eye opener, especially when it comes to believing in our own abilities. Wheras we comes from a safe and secure environment of education where we might rank at the top of our class or have no difficulties solving online exercies we now face a work environment with colleagues who have 5, 10 or even more years of real programming experience. In other words we now for the first time get to know how limited our skills actually are and how big of a journey we have ahead to master this exiting career path that we have choosen. The quickest way to master something is to practice it over and over agian for several years. But there is multiple ways of doing so, either as a solo player trying to wrap your head around everything on your own or by taking advantage of your coworkers many years of experience. The following reflections will not garantuee success but will definitely lead you in the right direction.

Ask Questions

One of the most important things you can do in your first month of a job is to ask as many questions as possible! As the new guy you will have a million questions that will range from how to restock the coffee machine to how you revert a deploy which broke the project test environment. However, many people hold a fear that asking questions will lead to appearing incompetent but you have to remember that everyone knows that you have little to no experience and most people actually enjoy helping people as this will boost their own self image as they appear knowledgeable. With that said you should of cause try to distribute the questions such that its not a single coworker who spend his entire day answering your questions as this will be annoying to most people.

The reason why questions is so powerful in your first weeks of employment is that you can benefit from the effort of others. Take for example debugging which can be a real time killer.. One of your coworkers has maybe spend 10 hours debugging a certain problem but it only takes 10 minutes for you to ask what caused the problem and for him to explain the solution he found. So instead of trying to solve every problem on your own which after a month will make you no wiser than what is humanly possible within a month you can actually come out of the first month with several months of experience due to your curiosity and determination to learn.

Take Notes

In relation to asking questions it’s a very good idea to take notes as you will be recieving a huge amount of information during your first period at a company. This will also help you avoid having to ask the same questions twice as you already have the answers written down in your notes. Even though you think that a simple piece of information is easy to remember you will be suprised of how fast you forget something!

Organize your Inbox

This might sounds like a no-brainer, but belive me I have seen many people trying this and failed. It’s such a simple task to do, but when the day starts getting busy and the mails is flooding towards your inbox the most of us lose track of meetings, deadlines and agreements. So remember to always archieve your mails once read either in a single folder or in a organized structure of folders with appropriate names. This will not only make you seem like a organized person but your surplus of time will also give a good impression on your colleagues.

A strategy that I use is to only leave mails in the Inbox that I’m currently in need of dealing with. This means that instead of having 1203 read mails in my inbox I will for instance only have 6 mails which is related to 6 different tasks or meetings that I need to deal with.

Be Open to Review

As a Software Developer it should be no suprise for you that the code you write will undergo some kind of review before being merged into the main project branch. Whereas some people are afraid of this process, letting other people see and tear apart their code it’s a necessary step that you should quickly get used to in order to benefit the most from it. The review is for the project team to make sure that no new code will either break current functionality or introduce future risks. But this is also your time to learn first hand how people with years of experience write code as they will see errors and improvement possibilities where you might see clean code. So it’s normal that your first PR will get bombarded with comments as you simply do not have prior experience to rely on and you might not yet be familiar with the coding standards that the other programmers have adopted (This does not only change from project to project but from programmer to programmer). So instead of just modifying your code based on a comment where the answer might be given, take your time to go read about that paticular syntax or function to fully understand why they want you to use such over something you have choosen to use. This approach will serve you for the rest of your career as you will be turning the review process into a learning experience and thereby hopefully avoiding getting the same comments in your next PR.

Ask for feedback

Some companies have it as a part of their company culture of giving feedback early on in an employment but if not you should not be afraid of asking for it. You dont need to ask your teamlead or project leader for feedback after each week but if you have a colleague who has been closer to you for the past week due to a given task you have been solving or due to his experience within the field then ask him for feedback once the task is completed. Again most people would love to take 10–20 minutes out of their calender to provide feedback on your performance. Even though it is not a deep evaluation of your entire work it can still give you some insight of how others are viewing your work and what you could improve in your next task.

Test your Ideas

When given a code assignment it is a good idea to write down how the solution that you are about to make looks like, this will not only give you a broader view of your solution but also stand as material for you to discuss with more experienced colleagues. Taking 10 minutes to explain your solution to them might highlight some common mistakes that is easy to change on paper but very expensive to change once it has been merged to the project.

I hope that the above advices will help you excel in your first month as a Software Developer. You might think that the advises you just received are common sense but you will soon discover how hard it actually is to utilize them when you first get your foot inside the door at a real company. But remember everyone started somewhere and it’s the choices we take that define where we will stand in 5 years.