Subj : Those first dev jobs blues
To : Zet
From : Nightfox
Date : Wed Jul 05 2017 09:51 am
Re: Those first dev jobs blues
By: Zet to All on Fri Jun 23 2017 05:44 pm
Ze> I don't really know what I was expecting, but I was completely overwhelmed
Ze> by the new job. Everyone knows so much more than I do, and I cannot help
Ze> but feel a little inferior. The guy in charge of training me intimidates
Ze> the hell out of me too. He's been working on the system since the
Ze> beginning, and when I ask questions, he always answers it with this "how
Ze> don't you know that" tone in his voice which really makes me feel stupid.
There seems to be a lot of that out there.. It depends on the company, too.
Large companies, particularly high-tech companies that hire many software
developers, seem to have a higher chance of that happening. Software
developers seem to be an opinionated bunch. Many of them like their own way of
doing things and often question other developers' ways of doing things if
different from their own. And some may not understand that not everyone has
had the same training, so some might have a "how don't you know that" tone as
you've mentioned.
Ze> Another unexpected problem is that there is not a single comment in the
Ze> thousands of lines of code. Other than that, it seems that there exists
Ze> not one document describing how the system works or fits together. The
Ze> smallest assignments has me hunting for hours instead of actually
Ze> developing, which is annoying the hell out of me, and also adds to my
Ze> insecurity. Add to this the fact that I am adept (at best) at speaking the
Ze> language, and you have a totally unsure and frustrated new employee.
I've also seen a lot of code that isn't well commented. It seems that many
software developers just aren't in the habit of commenting their code well..
It frustrates me too. And some will even encourage "self-documenting code". I
don't think that's always feasable.. Sometimes, the code doesn't make it
totally obvious what it's doing. Also, I think it's important to know not only
what the code is doing, but why. The *why* is a good thing to put in the
comments.
One thing that also surprised me is that some companies don't have much
documentation on the project in general. And when I was in college, we learned
about software design documents such as class diagrams, sequence diagrams,
etc. (UML), and it seems many software developers don't know about those, so of
course they aren't going to create such design documents..
Nightfox
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