What are some things you'd like fresh college grads to know?
- by bradhe
So I proposed this to the Reddit community and I'd like to get SO's perspective on this. This is pretty much the copypasta of what I put there.
I was thinking about this last night and thought it would be neat to compile a list. I'm still a pretty fresh college grad -- been in industry for 2 years -- but I think that I might have a few interesting things to lend.
You don't know as much as you think you do. Somehow, college students think they know a lot more than they do (or maybe that was just me). Likewise, they think they can do more than they actually can. You should fairly assess your skills.
QA people are not out to get you. Humans introduce bugs to code. It's not (nescessarily) a personal reflection on you and your skills if your code has a bug and it's caught by the QA/testing team.
Listen to your senior (developers). They are not actually fuddy duddies who don't know about the new L337 hax in Ruby (okay, sometimes they are, but still...). They have a wealth of knowledge that you can learn from and it's in your best interest to do so.
You will most likely not be doing what you want to for a while. This is mostly true in the corporate world -- startups are a different matter. Also, this is due to more than just the economy, man! Junior devs need to earn their keep, so to speak. Everyone wants to be lead dev on the next project and there are a lot of people in line ahead of you!
For every elite developer there are 100 average developers. Joel Spolsky, I'm looking at you. Somehow this concept of ninja coders has really ingrained itself in our culture. While I encourage you to be the best you can be don't be disappointed if people aren't writing blog posts about you in the near future.
Anyone else have anything they would see added to this list?
