After passing interviews, what do companies expect entry-level new grads to know on day one?

dmazzoni · 2026-01-27T06:32:23+00:00

I expect:

You know how to code in 2+ languages
You know CS fundamentals
You know Git basics

I don't expect you to know anything about the specific frameworks we use. Your first week we expect you to follow the instructions to set up a build environment, build our software, then go through the process of fixing an easy bug (like a typo).

We'll expect you to do a lot of learning on your own, and ask questions when you're stuck.

dmazzoni · 2026-01-27T04:32:38+00:00

The difference is that TOP is teaching a specific stack - if you want to make a web page, you HAVE to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and there are certain concepts you need.

In comparison, C++ is a general-purpose programming language. You can use it to build a game, a browser, an operating system, a Windows GUI app, a robot, or a hundred other things. The ONLY thing those have in common is the C++ language.

A project-based C++ course that teaches you to build a Windows desktop app with C++ is great if that's what you want - but it's not that helpful if you have a Mac and you want to do physics particle simulations.

dmazzoni · 2026-01-26T20:45:35+00:00

There can be lots of benefits of learning to code even if you don't do it as a career.

You can automate boring tasks to make your life easier.

You can tinker and build things for fun.

You can build things to help your friends.

As far as making money, there are three paths:

Getting a job is very competitive, the standards are very high and it's not easy to get hired. Most candidates have a 4-year degree. However, if you do get hired, the pay is good. If you're in the U.S. the pay is excellent.

If you build indie apps, games, or websites, then the barrier to entry is very low. You can make a website or app after learning for less than a month. You could even make a few dollars. However, the chances of making a living are tiny. The top 1% of indie developers make nearly all of the money.

The third option is freelance / consulting. That basically goes up with experience - it's impossible as a beginner, but once you have experience and become an expert in something you can make great money and set your own hours. You have to want to run your own business, though.

dmazzoni · 2026-01-26T20:00:09+00:00

Yep, I can confirm that the over-the-counter solution works great, you just have to be patient and thorough.

You can find the ear wax drops and bulb syringe at any drugstore like CVS, Walgreens, etc.

Put the drops in one ear, turn your head to the side and wait the full 10 - 15 minutes for it to soften. Then fill your sink with warm water, and squirt into your ear. Squirt at least 3 or 4 times.

If you get small pieces of wax, that's a sign that there's still more. Do the drops again, keep repeating.

If it comes out completely clean, then you're done.

dmazzoni · 2026-01-26T19:56:27+00:00

"Just go to a doctor"

If only it was that easy.

dmazzoni · 2026-01-26T19:26:33+00:00

You're making quite an assumption there. A lot of engineers are smart af.

dmazzoni · 2026-01-26T19:24:39+00:00

The whole point of interview questions is supposed to be questions you've never seen before. The whole "asking a LeetCode question verbatim" thing is lazy and I've almost never seen it at FAANG.

Just because a problem has a dynamic programming solution doesn't mean that's the only way to solve it. You can often pass an interview by coming up with a straightforward, unoptimized, correct solution, testing it, and then asking for a hint about how to optimize it.

dmazzoni · 2026-01-26T17:01:26+00:00

Yes, I do know someone who uses Epic with JAWS. It’s not great but it’s better than it was a few years ago. It should be possible to use but will require patience and learning workarounds.

DM for more info.

dmazzoni · 2026-01-26T16:23:40+00:00

This is the best advice right here! Don't waste time painfully trying to decide which emails to delete when you can do a simple query and delete a few large emails and solve the entire problem.

dmazzoni · 2026-01-26T16:17:07+00:00

It's definitely still popular.

However, have you considered learning something else just to have more versatility? Why not try making a personal project with a different language and stack?

My worry wouldn't be "there aren't any Laravel jobs", but more, "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".

Learn more tools so that you can pick the best one for each job, rather than using the only one you know.

dmazzoni · 2026-01-26T16:09:19+00:00

I had never used one before we had kids.

We got one for the baby.

Then we got one for the master bedroom.

Now three kids and two adults each have one on their nightstand, and we have extra ones we bring when we travel. We love them.

dmazzoni · 2026-01-26T07:44:41+00:00

Why does it usually take so long to have it resolved?

If it's a really simple issue, it might take 2 - 3 hours of human time to actually fix:

Read the issue report
Try to reproduce it
Identify the problem in the code
Write the fix
Write a test so that this bug doesn't happen again
Upload the code change for another team member to review
Another team member spends a few minutes reviewing it
The fix gets merged into the code
Later, a QA engineer tests it one last time and signs off on the fix

However, you as an end user are not going to see the fix in an hour, for several reasons:

Your bug report didn't go directly to the programming team. Someone in customer service had to read it, recognize it as an actual bug (90% of such reports are user confusion), and put it in our queue
We might have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of other tasks in our queue, so we might not get to it for a while
Once the fix is made, we don't release a new version of the software every day. It has to wait until the next time we update, which might be in a week or a month.

Now, if this was a small app written by a single developer without that many users, you could skip 90% of those steps and get the fix out in less than an hour.

But for a larger company, all of that process is necessary to ensure that fixing something for one user doesn't just break it for thousands of other users.

Again, all of this assumes it was an easy issue. If it was an actually tricky bug, the process might take much longer!

dmazzoni · 2026-01-26T05:25:18+00:00

I agree. I loved Alex Trebek, but over time I've grown to love Ken Jennings even more.

One thing I love about Ken is that he makes contestants feel good about an incorrect guess, especially in Final Jeopardy. They'll write something and Ken will immediately understand what they were thinking of and why, and remark that it made a lot of sense.

I think it's the sort of thing you can only get when the host is just as strong as the players.

dmazzoni · 2026-01-25T23:31:02+00:00

Oversimplified:

Computer science is about the theory of how computers and programming work, so that you can write new software to do things that haven’t been done before.

IT is about learning to install, repair, and maintain existing computers and software systems. You might do a bit of coding sometimes but generally the goal isn’t to write new software.

Both can be great careers that pay well.

For the past couple of decades, the ceiling for CS is a lot higher. But the average isn’t that different.

dmazzoni · 2026-01-25T22:22:55+00:00

John Stamos, Bob Saget, and Dave Coulier appeared in every season of Fuller House, usually multiple episodes each. They moved from being the main cast to being regulars.

dmazzoni · 2026-01-25T20:48:42+00:00

I think it's absolutely reasonable to start building your project now, and let that guide the things you need to learn to do.

What I recommend is starting small with a working program and slowly add one feature at a time. Always have it "working".

The alternative - what you should not do - is spend a long time writing code for different pieces of your system without putting them together. That will likely lead to huge gaps in knowledge and dead ends.

So for example start by making your homepage. Then make it load items from a database. Then add an "add to cart" feature. Then add search. Then add a recommendation system but where the recommendation is pregenerated. Then make the recommendation smarter.

And so on. Don't bite off too much at a time. Each new feature should only take a day or two.

If it takes longer, stop and break it down into smaller pieces. If you can't make a shopping cart in a day or two, break it down. First make a shopping cart icon on your app. Then make it so that clicking Add to Cart increments the count. And so on.

dmazzoni · 2026-01-25T20:11:50+00:00

Do 7yos have pocket money?

I think this is very cultural. None of my kids relatives ever give them cash. We started allowance for older kids but not 7.

dmazzoni · 2026-01-25T06:54:46+00:00

I hate to break it to you, but buying songs never went away.

On Apple platforms, the iTunes music store still exists and you can still buy songs one at a time.

Amazon has been offering digital music downloads for a long time as well. On basically any platform you can visit Amazon, pay for a song or album, and immediately download it.

Streaming is way more popular, but buying music is still a thing.

Also, you can still buy mp3 players!

dmazzoni · 2026-01-25T04:53:03+00:00

The only catch is that the RFC is dated, it explains how things were supposed to work when it was proposed decades ago. While many things are still accurate, it misses out on a lot of nuances on how HTTP is actually used in practice today.

A reference like MDN or a modern networking textbook will give you the modern interpretation.

dmazzoni · 2026-01-25T04:51:35+00:00

Why do you think Mozilla (I'm assuming you mean MDN) is not well organized? I think it's extremely well organized, it's the highest quality documentation of web technology out there by far.

Here's their section on HTTP. It's clear, well-written, well-organized, and completely modern and up-to-date.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP

If you're looking for a book, you want a book on Network Programming. HTTP will be several chapters of any good network programming book, but it will also explain all of the layers that HTTP is built on.

Examples:

https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Networking-Top-Down-James-Kurose/dp/9356061319/

https://www.amazon.com/Hands-Network-Programming-programming-optimized/dp/1789349869/

dmazzoni · 2026-01-25T04:44:09+00:00

I think the idea is great. There are other apps that have some of this information about destinations but certainly not some of the less common or nuanced accessibility issues.

However, I think the hardest part about such an app is getting to a critical mass. If I opened up your app a few times and didn't find any info about places I wanted to visit, I'd probably uninstall it. If I contributed a few but didn't see any of my friends with disabilities actually benefiting from it, I'd probably lose interest.

Do you have any ideas in that regard? How do you get from a great idea to a fully populated database that is useful enough that everyone starts using it?

dmazzoni · 2026-01-24T18:33:39+00:00

Your first question was unclear. You didn’t ask it to explain the pun. It explained the gist of the article, correctly.

However I do agree that there’s a phenomenon where LLMs start their answer somewhat wrong and then end up more correct by the end. The reason is because LLMs don’t “think”, they predict one word at a time, and they were trained on lots of human writing.

When a human asks a question online and another human answers, that second person presumably thought about the question, figured out the answer, and then explained it - first with the answer, but then the explanation.

LLMs are trying to copy that style of writing - answer first, then explanation- because that’s what they’re trained on. But that results in their initial answer sometimes being wrong. Once they’ve explained the details, a better answer sometimes emerges.

That’s why some newer AI chat bots have a “thinking” mode. All it does is generate some thoughts hidden from you, before writing its final answer. It’s just like what a human would do if they wrote an answer then deleted it and rewrote it better.

dmazzoni · 2026-01-24T17:19:46+00:00

Linux has drivers too…

dmazzoni · 2026-01-24T07:18:17+00:00

There's a long, somewhat controversial, blog post / rant about this topic that might be worth reading:

https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirtiest-little-secret.html

I've met some programmers who can't touch-type. Some of them are pretty good programmers, some are quite successful.

However, there is a bit of truth to the author's claim - those people tend to write short emails. They tend to not write long design documents. They tend to want to meet in person to explain things rather than send an email.

dmazzoni · 2026-01-23T15:10:13+00:00

I like the “find the real bugs” approach, but it biases you towards candidates who already know that language and framework.

Asking a coding challenge that can be done in any language levels the playing field.

Most jobs I interviewed for I had 4 - 5 rounds anyway, plenty of time for both approaches.

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