Stupid Question 77 (Öredev conference special): What are the main struggles of junior developers in their first dev job?

[To celebrate my first year of programming I will ask a ‘stupid’ questions daily on my blog for a year, to make sure I learn at least 365 new things during my second year as a developer]

These questions are from my session at Öredev 2012: Stupid questions and generation n00b: top ten intriguing things you should do

All the posts related to my session can be found here: Öredev related

During the 100 interviews ++ I did with junior developers such as myself we talked a lot about experiences from the first job, or internship. We talked what was great, but also what many of the struggles were. A senior dev was kind enough to send me a link on twitter to a document describing a study by Microsoft researching what “Struggles of New College Graduates in their First Software Development Job " are. I was not surprised to see that the struggles found were the same as we had experienced.

struggles

The main areas of problem: (I should point out that this was a fairly small study!- but I can agree on these areas of problems based on my own experience and the experience of others that has been shared with me)
Communication

• The main problem, often being that the junior dev doesn’t know how and when to ask questions
  collaboration
• problems related to collaboration went both ways, misunderstandings were observed
  Technical
• Mainly problems related to using new tools, often the problems were also coupled with collaboration problems
  Orientation and cognition
• struggled to collect, organize, and document the wide range of information that they needed to absorb - as well as knowing in which order to do things

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Last modified on 2012-11-07