So, yeah, today was my first day as a tools intern at Surreal. If there's one thing I learned, it's this: maintaining other people's code is hard. In all my school projects, I've been on the team from the start, so I've more or less had something to do with all the code written, and thus, had more or less a decent understanding of how it all worked (that's one hell of a run-on sentence).
Unfortunately, things just don't work that way in real life. I was given some bugs to fix. Things like "color selector doesn't change anything", and the first thing I thought was, "what the hell is the color selector?". The second thought was "where the hell is the code for the color selector?". As you may be able to guess, I didn't fix any bugs or implement any new features today. Maybe after a solid 8 hours of work tomorrow I'll have one fixed, but I'm not making any promises.
In all seriousness, it's a little overwhelming. I certainly hope my lead doesn't expect me to be very productive for a while, because I can't see myself getting a grasp on the inner workings of the Unreal Editor anytime soon (while learning wxWidgets to boot). But then again, I suppose stranger things have happened, and 8 hours a day 5 days a week is a hell of a lot more time than I've put into any of my other programming ventures.
Anyway, readers, what was your first day on the job like?
Although it's cool enough that you're working on production code; most new hires I know of get put on in-house tool development.