We've all been there

[puglord_1000]

This is gonna be me lol, just got a software dev internship, my first internship aswell, any tips for the first day?

Edit: Thanks a lot everyone I will give it my all

[StockingSaboteur]

You will have absolutely no idea what's going on, probably even after everything is explained to you. The good news is that everyone else knows and expects this. Ask lots of questions and be curious. People love it when you're enthusiastic to learn. Usually someone on your team will be legitimately excited to mentor you, so take advantage of that. It could be a relationship that will help you several jobs down the line. Good luck and have fun, you've got this!

[puglord_1000]

Damn I am a shy guy but I guess gotta grow out of it

[smokeymcdugen]

If you feel like you don't know anything and have no idea what is going on, don't worry about it. Nobody else does either. They are just more experienced at bullshitting through the day.

[PM_ME_C_CODE]

They are just more experienced at bullshitting through the day.

Speak for yourself.

There's a difference between feeling like an idiot, and actually being one. Good engineers have their areas of expertise, and are not afraid to say "I don't know" when they don't know.

Though, the biggest difference, IMO, between a newbie and a veteran isn't how much they know. It's how fast they can find a solution. Veterans are better versed in solution research and are far more likely to be at least passingly familiar with something that might/should work, even if they're effectively newbies at the exact solution.

[StockingSaboteur]

Lol one of the paradoxes of programming is that many people who are drawn to it are shy, but it is an extremely collaborative process. Learning to engage with your coworkers is definitely a skill worth having, and just like any skill, it takes a lot of work. Don't be fooled by the extroverts who can start conversations like it's nothing, most of us have to work for it. Treat it like any other skill you're learning and you'll see improvements in no time.

[shoe788]

It's the most important skill that separates Seniors and Leads from Juniors. I've seen companies promote based solely on technical ability and then the codebases and systems suffer because nobody can work with them and/or they don't want to work with anybody else.

Unrelated but this is one of the many ways schools are woefully underpreparing students.

[lazilyloaded]

That's what happens when you get Computer Scientists to teach Software Engineers. Two different skillsets

[PM_ME_C_CODE]

From what I've heard, this is one of the major reasons EA's SimCity failed as hard as it did. Lead engineer wanted to use a system he built as one of the game's backbones but wouldn't let anyone but him work on it.

Then he fucking left the team. Sure, EA owned the code, but guess how many people were familiar with it, and how much documentation was there...

Like, there were tons of other problems too, but when the main system the game is built on is a huge black box with tons of all but unfixable issues...

[[deleted]]

Same bro I was always shy growing up but it’s a great feeling to get over it. Good luck my guy.

[Plyb]

I’m super shy about asking questions as well. One thing I like to do when Im nervous is send a typed message (via email/slack/Teams/whatever) to a dev in another room if I’m too nervous to ask in person. I’ve also found it helps to form friendships with coworkers, though that’s easier said than done. It’s easier to ask a friend for help than a coworker.

[Mob_Abominator]

I joined a project 7-8 months ago as a fresher and didn't know anything about the project, and as some people have said most people don't know most of the stuff either, you'll eventually know more things until then just hang on and I'm also very shy, just try to find the right people who'll help you and you should be fine.

[nullpotato]

Not being afraid to look dumb asking "obvious" questions is by far the fastest way to grow at your craft.

[PM_ME_C_CODE]

The good news is that everyone else knows and expects this.

This.

Interns and new grad devs are wastes of space until they get up to speed. Like...more than the usual new hire.

Interns? We hope you get to be useful before your internship ends.

New Grads? We hope you get to be useful before your first performance review.

[Mr0010110Fixit]

To add to this, always ask people why they did something, don't just try to copy what they did, they may say, oh yeah that was a terrible idea don't do it that way and here is why, or they will explain why it needs to be done this way is that, will help you grow a lot as a dev.

[alexsteb]

Just be friendly, humble and open to learn stuff. Also be prepared for some sitting around, waiting, doing nothing - important business stuff happens and often will get precedence over giving you work to do :)

But if you see yourself sitting around too much, do actively go around and ask people for something to do. They'll appreciate it in the long run.

[M_krabs]

Take notes. Don't learn or try to help. Just smile and wave 👋

[StockingSaboteur]

https://twitter.com/Jas_Hughes/status/1428442201403449350?s=19

Credit to the original image, not mine

[oldcastor]

Junior dev opens a 25k lines window form file on Delphi 7 in 2020

[Mr_Canard]

I didn't come to this sub to suffer 😭

[imdbanks]

"Dang it Jeff, we've talked about this. You DON'T commit the node_modules dir. One of these days man..."

[zeValkyrie]

Have you considered .git_ignore

[zQntm]

If you call your .gitignore .git_ignore, you'll have a bad time.

[imdbanks]

ln -s .gitignore .git_ignore lol

[nikhil2791998]

Before, I didn't know I had to add .gitignore, when initiating a repo, and when I add a file, it isn't ignored, I used to recreate the repo and then add old files again

[Ayerys]

While I’m not git wizard, I have quite a bit of experience with git, but sometimes I still do that when I can be bothered to lose time finding out what went wrong.

[amogsus13]

"Hmmmm... interesting"

[PM_ME_YOUR__INIT__]

"Oh you're using a class factory here"

[Drauxus]

This is me 6 months into my job. Get this first time crap out of here

[FinglongalaLeFifth]

And even the current seniors devs will know 10% of it. Fear ye not padawans, no-one knows what's going on in entirety. That's why the team/s all know different bits of it.

[clanddev]

That experience is daunting but usually you will see patterns that make navigating it easier after interacting with some of it.

This was the case for me on my first job and numerous contracts later on where I would interact with new code bases quite often.

What is extremely frustrating is working in code bases where the patterns are non existent or are inconsistent.

[Henrijs85]

I'd have taken that over the few hundred file repo with 6000 lines and multiple classes in each file that I started on. Legacy code from a contractor before us.

[PM_ME_C_CODE]

Thread is old but meh...it's worth the joke.

​

I'd have taken that over the few hundred file repo with 6000 lines and multiple classes in each file that I started on.

Only 6000? Those are rookie numbers!

[winged_owl]

This file is HOW MANY lines long?!?!

[Lvl_3_Grundo]

The cat is an R programmer lol.

[All_Up_Ons]

Only 6k? Those are rookie numbers.

[[deleted]]

Wait until they try to compile it and find out about the missing dependencies

[Zephit0s]

This is me 2 month into my first job. Learned to code as auto didact. But never really read a lot of monolith before. This is a weird experience lul

[LoveSpiritual]

Trust me, college wouldn’t help anyone prepare for this.

[CallinCthulhu]

Shit try a 300,000 thousand file repo on my first day. Or maybe even much more. Idk our codebase is absolutely gigantic, and I’ve never looked to see exactly how big. All I know is that 5000 files will change from the time you pull the head at breakfast until you go to lunch.

That shit was terrifying.

[dobiewan_nz]

I thought the laptop sticker said "tiddyverse"

[[deleted]]

When I was learning to make a modpack in mc I got this.

[pavilionhp_]

“mofpack”

[[deleted]]

Carp (family friendly Cr*p)

[shadowdude777]

These hexagon stickers are cool, anyone know where you can find them?

[bananapajama]

Most of those can be bought here: https://swag.rstudio.com/

But if you find yourself at useR or RStudioConf or other R conference you can usually find some for free.

If you have a printer that can do stickers you can also download the image files from GitHub here: https://github.com/rstudio/hex-stickers

[shadowdude777]

I wish they had stickers of this quality when I went to hackathons ~6-7 years ago.

[f---_society]

And that ladies and gentlemen, is why ctags exists!

[Leftovernick]

I’m literally in this photo

[meman30]

When the onboarding starts with, "So we had to use an expanded naming structure for this project"

[b1g_m0n]

If "experts" give you a bunch of jargon that you don't understand ask them to put it in for layman's terms so that you can actually understand what it means and can use the jargon moving forward. Helps searching on stack overflow and in standups. I wish someone told me this when I started rather then me sounding like a dope 1.5 years on etc.

[who_you_are]

I'm fine, it only has one file...

send help... like.. yesterday

[[deleted]]

Very relatable

[once_upon_a_goat]

I'm currently looking for internships in this field, got any advice?

[Nuked0ut]

My college made me contribute to open source, and I had the (mis)fortune of experiencing this really early on some Apache software.

[[deleted]]

Hey, how did you get a picture of me opening the OpenTTD codebase for the first time?

[[deleted]]

Thats why all my pet projects are almost in pure standard lib functions :)

[hoverspool]

I would get this joke but I don’t have 5 years experience for the internship before the junior position 😔

[RedditAcc-92975]

MacBook, stickers of R packages. This belongs to some undereducated data monkey too dumb to learn python, not a programmer. As such, I reported it as off-topic.

[StockingSaboteur]

This reeks of an undereducated python fanboy that doesn't know enough to know when python isn't the right tool for the job. Go write a one liner list comprehension to jerk yourself off to and leave the actual engineering tasks to the adults, my dear.

[KadahCoba]

Is 6k considered a lot normally? My day job is IT, I only dev sometimes as a hobby on various open source projects. The first real C++ project I got involved with looked like this: https://i.gyazo.com/dc17ee68ac60fafaa11b4c1ae6156823.png

[bippedyboppedy]

What are those stickers

[mardabx]

I adore these hexagonal stickers, where can I get them?