What kinds of tasks were typically assigned for your first role? How routine did your tasks become? How did you typically prepare for your first software dev role?
I don’t know how to answer this. The actual complexity of tasks? Usually lower, often much lower. The complexity of the app and its ecosystem? Much higher.
But I think the purpose of interview coding is to just get a feel for your style and to tell if you have a grasp of the fundamentals. Also, for a live coding challenge, they can listen to how you think and get a sense for how you deal with difficulties.
What kinds of tasks were typically assigned for your first role?
Just working tasks. I had a good team that tried to pick easy tasks to get used to things.
How routine did your tasks become?
I don’t think they have. First of all, if you are solving the same problem over and over again, then something isn’t designed correctly. But yeah, there’s some overlap - if the job were all fun, they wouldn’t have to pay us so much. But every now and then there is an interesting problem for which I get to craft an elegant solution.
How did you typically prepare for your first software dev role?
Learn and build things. What else can you do? Do some open source so you get used to dealing with a team and with git. Learn your tech stack. If you are getting ready for a specific job? Learn what techs they use. I try to read through a couple pages of documentation a night. For example, right after I started, they decided to dive into unit test coverage. People were freaking out because we needed 50% coverage and people didn’t really know how to write unit tests. So, I went home and read through the docs a little each night. Within a few weeks I was kind of the “go to” guy for questions. That made an impression.
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what documentation did you read?? documentation online? documentation at work?
My first job was hard. Working on a large, complex application vis just different from working on toy projects for school. My teams expectations were reasonable though. It’s all just… New
For most anything nowadays, there is extensive and excellent documentation online. Sometimes there are specific libraries with poor documentation, but then for those there won’t be books anyway. There are also a lot of excellent videos out there. There are lot of paid video courses, but there are also a lot of excellent videos on youtube.
I second this.
You first have to learn how the whole application works. So you won’t be able to start with hard stuff, you’ll probably have to fix a lot of bugs and add some very small stuff.
Yeah. You’ll spend the first couple months just figuring out where to find something in the application.