Hi! I hope all is well. I am loving this instance and all the communities so far! As I am a new grad software engineer who is gonna start working in the next month, I was wondering if there are some tips, advice and some nuggets of wisdom you want to pass to this clueless person making this post lmao.
Yes. Listen to this episode of SE Radio where they talk about salary negotiation. Salary is a weirdly taboo subject and doesn’t get talked about enough. Your salary is the single largest financial decision you will make in your life. Bigger than houses and retirement because you cannot do those without being paid.
https://www.se-radio.net/2016/11/se-radio-episode-275-josh-doody-on-salary-negotiation-for-software-engineers/
On a more light note, you will experience a lot of impostor syndrome when you begin working. If your college career was anything like mine you learned how to program but not how to use popular build tools and frameworks. There will be a learning curve. Your fellow workers understand this. Try to make friends at work. Just a little small talk here and there. Especially if it is remote work because it is so much more difficult to bond. This will help you feel like you’re not being annoying when asking for help. It is better to ask for help than sit there stuck. Not everything can be figured out on Google lol, like internal tools and processes.
Edit: ALSO keep a log of everything you do to set up your development environment. A lot of places have outdated docs for that or nothing at all. Documenting it as you go will help others onboard after you and also makes a good first impression of taking initiative.
When it comes to salary, I think people can sometimes underestimate looking into other benefits where you can maximize like your 401lk matching and even some other benefits one could negotiate for that doesn’t have to be financial. But yeah I agree that salary negotiation is if not the single biggest financial decision one could make when they’re starting their job.
I’m curious tho, how would you log something when you’re setting up dev environment? Like would you take notes on what worked for you and then look at the docs to see what needs to be updated? I am sorry if this sounded really obvious but I’m just trying to keep that in mind when I’m in that situation.
Edit: One other thing, I kinda want to hear how you make friends at work in a corporate environment? Just a little worried cause its different than what it was in my undergrad and have to be a little more careful I guess from what I heard.
For logging what you do, basically if there is some document they give you just update the incorrect parts. If there is not a document just write down things you do. Something as simple as,
Essentially there are many things people only need to do once per computer so they forget how they set it up.
As for making friends, just relax and it will happen over time. You do need to be somewhat careful, yes. Topics like politics and religion generally aren’t good ones to bring up. Things like what media you’re consuming (like shows and movies) is a good topic. Questions about children is another good one that seems to happen a lot. Basically if it’s a topic of conversation that is likely to divide people in an antagonistic way then you should avoid it. Questions about opinions in general are fine even though people disagree, it’s just with some things like politics and religion the conversation can get too heated. Food is another great topic to talk about.
Basically you’ll find topics that people like and then you can talk about them.
Be careful not to overshare about personal details in your life. It’s sort of hard to determine where the line is because I think opening up with coworkers you’ve know for a while is fine.