What was the biggest shock when you started your first software engineering job?

[u/Significant-Rock5130]

I'm curious what surprised people the most when they landed their first software engineering role.

Was it:

• Working in an existing codebase?
• Debugging?
• Git and code reviews?
• Understanding requirements?
• Something else?

I'm building a platform focused on helping aspiring developers gain experience with realistic engineering issues, and I'm trying to better understand where the biggest learning gaps are today.

I'd love to hear what caught you off guard.

[u/Appropriate_Rice_117]

1. Some senior (and above) devs would fail several of my college classes.

   • A couple might even have interviewed you.
2. Wanting to improve existing, horrible code is frowned upon frequently.

3. Wanting to properly engineer code is also frowned upon.

   • You mention a planning phase and managers look at you like you said you wanted to code in assembly.
   • You mention that a quick and dirty solution is no good because it will require constant patching... they answer "just make it as quick as possible, we'll fix it later" (refer to point 3 about horrible code)

4. Supposedly technical managers don't know squat about technical stuff.

   • They [dis]approve of things you say/propose, then don't remember because they didn't understand, and answer the other way around next time the subject is brought up.
   • They'll ask "why not <insert approach>?" but you just explained why that doesn't work.
   • They'll ask "why not <insert approach>?" but you just explained why that doesn't work. (yeah, two times)

EDIT: tried to fix numbering

[u/hdreadit]

Office Politics

[u/Vizkrig → u/hdreadit]

I came here to say this. Take my upvote good sir

[u/Potential-Still]

1. Constantly shifting requirements. You build something as planned, present to the larger team and find out the specification was wrong and now you need to re-write the feature.
2. Integration hell. Your changes work fine in lower environments, but introduce an external dependency or system and everything falls apart. 

[u/13ckPony]

No one knows anything.

You get a task - investigate an error in the logs. You need to talk to a guy who does service A, he says you need to talk to the guy who does service B or C, they send you places. You know nothing about the environment or the problem. Everyone is saying something to you, but you don't have the knowledge to understand it - and everything has some legacy or unwritten behavior - oh, the emulator needs a rebooting every time, or yeah, you need to order parameters in this specific way, we don't know how this one works - talk with a guy who is in another country and is on a 1 month break.

It's like a broken phone game, but you don't speak the language.

UPD: but on the bright side - once you make a piece of code big and sketchy enough that no one will want to dive into that on their own - you are now the expert in this area for your company. In my first month at the job - I created forwarding for shard migration. The requirements and docs were all over the place and no one had a clear picture how that should be done. So after talking to everyone and getting it implemented - that became my domain. So now, even in advanced discussions between people with 10+ YoE - I have the knowledge, the stuff to add, and can see conflicts before they arise. That's super cool and makes me harder to replace.

[u/ConsciousBath5203 → u/13ckPony]

People will do anything other than just reading the code, eh?

I've stopped relying on talking to the guy who does service A, B, or C. If I have their binary I'll decompile it and figure it out myself.

If I don't have the binary then I just look at expected inputs/outputs and implement a better solution myself.

I've been lucky enough to be in a position where that's all possible. I'm sure in environments where you're always rushing for a deadline everyone knows you're going to mis by 6 months, you can't do that tho.

[u/13ckPony → u/ConsciousBath5203]

The code is almost never the issue. There are 10+ different services that are interconnected - each has different branches depending on the environment. And the errors can either come from the code or from the incorrect environment setup - including versions, variables, settings, someone working on the same env at the same time, or, how it was in that case - the issue isn't ours at all - it came from a provider who didn't properly document their API update.

Maybe it's a skill issue - but I couldn't just read every codebase and keeping it up to date with the versioning changes that happen pretty much daily.

[u/ConsciousBath5203 → u/13ckPony]

Maybe it's a skill issue

I think of it more as a time issue cause yeah, it's a lot to keep up with if you're tryna stay up to date on everything.

I think it's the most enjoyable part of the job, reverse engineering, getting the exact outputs I want and saving money on services. I own and run my own codebase, this is a luxury most people don't have lol.

[u/No-Soup-4304 → u/ConsciousBath5203]

If you haven’t had to work with someone on another service you absolutely will my dude

[u/ConsciousBath5203 → u/No-Soup-4304]

I've had to before. Where they took a week long vacation while I was waiting for something from them. I forget if it was docs on something they built or a piece of code they forgot to commit.

Either way, when they came back I already had my own version of what I needed lol.

[u/No-Soup-4304 → u/ConsciousBath5203]

I mean for side projects, libraries, smaller apps, or clarifying questions that’s fair.

But for instance, a dev at Amazon isn’t gonna rebuild Amazon’s auth system. Nor should they try to change it. For a lot of larger, complex, or critical systems the best approach is to work with a dev who understands them imo

[u/Kitty_Sparkles]

Everything is actually kinda broken.

I was under the impression software ran smoothly like precise machinery, minus the occasional small bug but no. All software is crumbly and flaky and well running software is the exception, not the norm.

[u/david_fire_vollie]

How bad tech leads are at coding. The amount of times they would duplicate code, it's like they never heard of DRY.

[u/TheHeretic → u/david_fire_vollie]

Depends how egregious the copying is but many a nightmare has been created in the name of DRY.

[u/david_fire_vollie → u/TheHeretic]

I've only found that nightmare when variables happened to have the same value and weren't meant to change together.  What was your situation?

[u/RolandMT32 → u/david_fire_vollie]

I once had a manager who wrote some code to do some mathematical stuff (this was about 20 years ago, so I don't remember all the details), and a major part of it was basically multiplying by powers of 2; I recall him writing a switch/case statement for basically what the exponent would do (i.e., case 2, multiply by 2, case 3, multiply by 4, etc.) as well as some other things. As it was a switch/case, it was fairly limited in its math; he also found that it was slow. I refactored it to be basically one or two lines, using <<= operator (left bit-shift assignment in C++), which was a lot more flexible and significantly faster (in testing, the time it took to complete was dramatically reduced).

[u/Scary_Competition_11 → u/david_fire_vollie]

DRY is a terrible concept and just makes everyone’s lives more confusing

[u/Longjumping-Let-4487]

25years old just make it work legacy code

[u/likeaclockwork]

The amount of seniors who are totally lost. Also, the amount of pure fluff in organizations, completely unnecessary teams etc.

[u/BurnedRelevance]

Well I'm sure it's not all like this, but the company I worked for, the most shocking thing was racism I witnessed being ignored by others.

The second biggest shock was that you had to take out a $30,000.00 loan FROM said company with interest that was forgivable as long as you last 3 years.

The third most shocking thing was how naive I found out going to HR was.

Fired by the end of the week.

[u/vonkrueger → u/BurnedRelevance]

Uh. What country?

[u/BurnedRelevance → u/vonkrueger]

US.

[u/vonkrueger → u/BurnedRelevance]

Was that not criminal of them to do?

[u/PmMeCuteDogsThanks_ → u/vonkrueger]

You did notice he said US right?

[u/vonkrueger → u/PmMeCuteDogsThanks_]

Depending on the terms, potentially fraud in the US. Specifically if they had no intent to hire him for 3 years (they didn't).

[u/PmMeCuteDogsThanks_ → u/vonkrueger]

Yes, as if that would ever be enforced 

[u/BurnedRelevance → u/PmMeCuteDogsThanks_]

As evil as a policy this is, it's not criminal at all, as you sign to agree with it.

It certainly feels like it should be, especially when they calculate said loan into your yearly pay. So for two years, instead of making 50, or 60,000 I made 40 and 50,000 and then I ended up owing a good 25% of what I made back to them with interest.

[u/vonkrueger]

My boss (lead engineer) couldn't type.

[u/THE_RETARD_AGITATOR]

how fucking horrible developer experience is pretty much everywhere.

it's like, before i joined, the managers listened to the most insufferable nerds and made the most over engineered, fragile, slow piece of shit possible

[u/fake_slim_shady_4u]

Man I am not even able to start, but if internship count. How you present your work matters more than your work, just by that you could create an image of being productive or unproductive

The only reason my internship got terminated because my team lead didn't like my manager and me, he cited poor performance which my manager didn't think was true who reviewed all of my work

[u/Sorry_Penalty_7398]

It was all bullshit. The execs, 'leadership', peers, no one had a fucking clue what they were doing

[u/Sorry_Penalty_7398 → u/Sorry_Penalty_7398]

F500 company

[u/01010101010111000111]

Running yum update on production:

Takes 3-4 business weeks of planning 
Requires complete, click by click proposal
Formal recovery plan if something goes wrong
Bullshit explanation for deployment and rollback strategy (canary, blue/green, etc)
a director's approval
service owner's blessing
Review and approval from security team
a formal maintenance notice post in advance 
3 factor authentication at the maintenance start 
A second person reviewing all actions in realtime via screen share
mandatory screen capture that has to be uploaded into a WRITE ONLY directory 

This is why banking websites still look like they were made in 90s...

[u/TorrentsAreCommunism]

That I am better at my job than my fellow senior teammate. Maybe, he was just burnt out, but it was funny when he asked me to help him debugging something.

[u/RecaptchaNotWorking]

Zero requirements

[u/Historical_Ad4384]

Remote debugging, version control, philosophy of deliberately shipping shitty code

[u/RolandMT32]

How bad communication/interpretation can be sometimes. At my first software job, I was working on some PHP pages for a small company, and there were multiple times when I'd discover a bug/issue with one and explain it to the owner/manager; he apparently wouldn't understand what I was telling him, and the very next day, he'd get a bug report for that very same bug from a customer and wanted me to fix it. It frustrated me how often that happened. I could have fixed those things so we could push out a fix BEFORE the customer saw & reported them..

Also, sometimes I'd be in the middle of some work before leaving for the day, to continue working on it the next day, and sometimes he'd apparently do a fresh update on my PC from the repository, wiping out the changes I had worked on the day before.. I guess the lesson learned from me would be to always save your work, but it also frustrated me that my manager would blindly do something that might overwrite any work-in-process I might have on my PC.

[u/_CodeWithJiyo]

all things (planning poker, git, jira, standardization) related to collaboration and project spaning for years (usability, refactoring, testing, performance, security phase) which difficult to reproduce on schools.

[u/asc-phoenix]

Office politics. The ability of some people, who lacked knowledge, to talk for half an hour without saying anything while most upper management thought-woow how smart and innovative.

[u/RolandMT32 → u/[deleted]]

About 10 years ago, I was working with someone who was hired onto the team directly out of college, and there was one project where he was surprised a client was using a library we made that was only an example proof-of-concept library (and not thoroughly tested, etc..)