How do you manage anxieties surrounding a first dev job?

There are so many feelings that come with landing a first dev job, what advice do you have for first timers?

Comments

[Lewis Lloyd]

my honest advice? be good in devops.

when a team sees that the new hire is branching correctly, pushing good commits, utilising the agile board and generally impacting the dev experience positively, they'll breathe a sigh of relief and liken up to them.

i'm sure people are looking for some "don't worry about it" and "you'll be fine" responses, but i have to throw this in here because it's so important.

[Galuh Utama]

I manage a team of devs and we have been adding new team members be it for replacements or to assist the team during critical points in the projects.

My suggestion would be: no need to be anxious. A good manager will plan to integrate new devs into the team. In my case, the training of a new dev takes around 4-6 weeks. During this time, I always clarify what I expect from the new dev, which project I will assign him/her to, how the processes in the companies are, dev process in the team, and introduce her/him to key people in the company.

It really helps if the you actively raise questions to your direct manager and seek guidance from the other team members during the training. Let the team sees you that you can work with them. This is one of the soft skills that will bring you far. If your manager hires you then he/she is sure of your technical skill. Technical skills can be taught. Soft skills, on the other hand, are hard to build.

[Dave Parr]

This has been entirely my approach and experience as well. In some ways I would go further.

If your manager hires you then he/she is sure of your technical skill.

If I hire you, I know your technical skill (high or low), which IMO can be built easily, provided you have demonstrated the right soft skills around learning, communication and team-work, which are far harder to assess before hiring, but are also the foundation in which your technical skills will grow, and also more valuable to the company.

[Harsh Shandilya]

Communicate! I've worked on and off with some ragtag groups of developers, only getting a "proper" job a couple months ago. Since I never had to properly co-ordinate with others before the job, I was a very terrible co-worker despite my performance. My manager and product lead had to step in for an intervention and help me see the error of my ways, which has helped me both be a better coworker to my awesome colleagues as well as a more happy and productive person in general.

[Patrick Tumbucon]

As a junior dev almost 1 year into tenure, I felt most at-ease when I figured out how to navigate my team’s processes and commonly-used tools. At least to me, I have less anxiety when there are less nested unknowns I have to deal with regularly.

On a high level:

• Being aware of the infrastructure my team owns and knowing how to navigate a server
• Understanding how data flows through our services

On a lower level:

• Understand HOW and WHEN to add new dependencies to a codebase
• Learn how to read and discern a stack trace
• Be comfortable enough with debugging tools to use them regularly (I’m still working on this)

Less technical things:

• Learn the meta in your company for reaching out to someone
• Keep in mind how you write documentation. One of the most helpful classes I took in college was Technical Communication, where we learned how different writing docs were compared to writing academic papers. You will stand out if you can write a well-documented code/design review.
• Adding onto the last point, WRITE DOCUMENTATION. It reinforces your knowledge on the subject matter, your team notices that you uphold best practices, and future hires will be thankful.

Additionally, I took the time to get comfortable with my working environment (and communicated with my manager that I’m taking the time to do so) instead of trying to dive headfirst into the sprint tasks and learning sloppy shortcuts to speed up delivery time.

[Boris Petrov]

Even tho I fully support Lewis Lloyd's comment, there really is no place to worry.
You will grow the most when you fail, it will give you that motivation to be better next time.
I failed on my first two jobs, doing 4-5 months each. It broke me but it also built me.
I am doing 4th year on my current job and I am doing a lot more complex stuff then on my previous jobs where I got fired.

You will learn to fail, before you learn to succeed!

[Karan Gandhi]

Give yourself time to settle in.
If you are stuck with something or overwhelmed, ask for help from your superiors or colleagues or whoever you feel comfortable with inside the org.