5 things I wish I knew as a fresh graduate programmer

There are a lot of things I wish I knew as a fresh graduate programmer. To talk about all of them, I would probably need to write a book (or two). So I’m just going to pick five most important ones-in hopes that it would help an aspiring programmer manage his/her expectations for how the [real] world is like.

At this stage, there is not much that you know except from what you learnt in a couple of years. There are people that have a lot more experience than you and will generally come up with better solutions.

You will engineer things based on what you know and not what you’re yet to learn. So be patient, and leave your ego at the door.

There is no perfect programmer — including the person you might look up to and hope to be as good as in the future. That person might be right 99% of the time, but they could be wrong that 1% of the time and might lead you down to the wrong path. So yes, please do learn from your seniors but do not take their word blindly. Challenge them if you think something is wrong.

The best approach in case you hear something that doesn’t sound right to you is to go ask the opinion of many different people. You will learn a lot in the process and also avoid a potential disaster.

A programming job is nothing like school.

In school, its much easier to tell what is right or what is wrong. In the real world, however, there are a ton of best practices — but you may not always be able to follow them due to time constraints or factors such as politics, technological limitations and such. So no, you can’t just memorize the best formula and hope it works every time.

When I first got out of school, my first thought was to learn every new technology/framework just so that I knew how to use it on the surface. I didn’t want to be left out. I wanted to learn all the new front-end, big data and whatever else new frameworks that keep on popping up.

Instead of learning how to become a better programmer by really mastering a language, I was learning how to use technologies. Sometimes, more technologies might be what you want, but generally, its best to master a language.

Of course, please also do learn the technologies you are interested in, and a mix of both is important. I am just simply making the point that you shouldn’t disregard the depth a certain programming language has.

Once you have learnt the best practices, various ways to perform an operation or the positives/negatives of a language, you will always have that mental model which you can rely on when learning new languages or frameworks. You will definitely need this for your career, so get started!

There is a reason why the company you’re working at will have senior engineers. Now, contrary to what you might think, junior engineers and senior engineers are able to pump out code at similar speeds.

The code that senior engineers produce will account for everything that could go wrong. In the scope of testing and engineering, edge cases would have been addressed and there is a plan for failure or recovery.

When I first graduated and got into the industry, I knew many things that could go wrong, I just never engineered around them. There are just so many things but some that come to mind are:

However, the senior engineers will generally have thought of all of these scenarios. Some of these you can do something about and try to recover from. In other cases, you should not and you should try to crash your application as soon as possible.

I hope this advice helped any fresh graduate programmer. These are not the only things you should learn, so please, let me end with one last advice — keep learning everyday and constantly improving yourself. If you’re reading this, there is a good chance you already are on the right path — so kudos to you!

There are a lot more things I could have discussed and maybe I will consider writing another article to follow up on this one.

With that being said, I hope you enjoyed reading it. Even if you didn’t, please give me feedback. I generally don’t do non-technical articles, but depending on the feedback from this one — I might consider doing more of them. Thank you for reading and making it this far!

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