The transition from your own small projects to a workflow where collaboration, project management etc is needed, can be tough. That's why I got interested:
What were the biggest struggles/surprises to you after landing your first full-time developer job?
Top comments (7)
Not being able to google many of my problems. Legacy code makes a lot of problems so specific that you have to find the root problem and google that - much different from coding challenges and their answers on StackOverflow!
That's a good one - I experienced something similar. That said, it has paid off well in the future - the deeper knowledge you have, the better.
Mine was definitely the fact that all projects are chunked into smaller parts and so much collaboration happens between devs.
My first surprise was realizing that all my college professors were making it all up when they said all the companies will expect you to fully know everything about the language you are coding in and that you can't be googling things or using stack overflow at a job. Found out that was a lie real quick lol.
But once at the job finding out we didn't really have coding standards and seeing how the same things were done differently just depending on where you were looking was the biggest surprise for me. I thought the code in a big company would be much more tight and clean cut.
Biggest struggle for me though was going from working on a college/personal project that consisted of 5 database tables, and maybe 4 code files to working on something that had thousands and thousands of files and database tables.
My biggest struggle was (and is) learing in a few days how projects that were developed in years are structured. My biggest surprise was finding out what collaboration between devs means.
Constantly discovering things I had no idea how to do and the anxiety that there are 1000 more things I don't know I don't know.
Uuh, yes! I had the same! Sometimes experience it even now... but now the anxiety has replaced with excitement.