You’ve landed your first job (cue excited screams).
You realise you’re going to actually have to do the job (cue terrified screams).
Everyone feels the same but preparation can make you feel a little better. A good induction will cover all of this for you but just in case you are worried - here are some things you can do to make it easier to settle in.
Prepare a “tell us about yourself”
Managers love to spring this in meetings with little warning - beat the system by having something prepared. Nothing crazy - but having something prepared will make you seem more confident. Practice saying it out loud a few times if public speaking isn’t your thing and you’ll find it’ll flow easier.
Ask your manager who you should ask for help and introduce yourself early
Good developers are usually happy to help new developers. You will have lots of questions, especially in the beginning and building a relationship will make it easier. Always say thank you, and shout out to the team about their help to give them recognition.
Look through the repos
There should be a form of source control used in your new company. The most common is GitHub but there are plenty of others that could be used instead. There should be a README.md file to look through which should either offer some documentation- or link to some. Take some time to explore the code and see if you can work out what is happening. You get better at this with time and practice.
Look at closed Pull Requests or commits to see what other engineers have done to complete their tasks. You can see what changes they have made and it might help you when trying to work out how to do similar tasks.
Check out the tickets
Larger teams will have a system of keeping track of ongoing work. Tasks are often assigned as tickets and they give descriptions of the tasks and what is expected. Jira is a commonly used platform, but many are available. Looking through the list of tickets should give you an idea of the available tasks, and a good manager will make sure there are some easy win tickets for you to pickup. Take a look through the active tickets and ask the assigned engineers if they mind pairing so you can see how they do it.
Accept that you will be asking a lot of questions
You are going to regularly run into things you have never seen before - that is a certainty. Getting used to admitting you need help early on will make things easier and remove a lot of anxiety. Entry level developers are expected to attempt things, then ask for help when they are stuck and good developers should be happy to help.
Good luck in your new role!
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