On 6/26/2019 at 4:02 PM, Gnollrunner said:

Hopefully you won't be given thousands of lines of FORTRAN IV to port and debug like I was ?

That was me...

My first day, they sat me down in front of a terminal and pointed at 4 shelf-feet of orange binders saying "That's the system documentation, and this is the only connection to the PDP.  Log to the MCR prompt in as [1,7] and good luck."  OK, maybe I made up the part about wishing me luck.  Maybe I hadn't been fully clear about my experience on PDP-11s (I used Unix, not RSX-11M).  I could handle it.

My first job was maintaining a legacy system written on FORTRAN IV.  Customer support calls started coming in the second week. One other person in the company admitted they knew the system, and she was a manager two levels up.

Kids, that's how real [INSERT PREFERRED GENDER] hit the ground running as junior programmers fresh out of school.  I managed to build on that experience to become an open source warrior (documentation? the code is the documentation!) for a couple of decades.

My advice: sit back and enjoy the ride.  It's what you wanted, right?

Nothing more in the first morning. Meet with your boss and take the project which you work on. After then deep study your project and try to understand your work and its maintenance.  

My experience might be a bit strange, as I started at a very small studio (~10 people). Everyone is so busy to the point that they can't just babysit the newcomers and everyone has to learn on their own. No formal or informal training whatsoever lol.

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 What did you do on your first day/week/month?

In my case, I was thrown into the battlefield almost right away. The task might be minor, but battlefield nontheless :P.

At that time I started with writing tool for another studio. It was a C# tool used for manipulating (binary) game data. I don't really know if the client have any use of it though. May be they realized that text game data is much more easier to work with, who knows?

The second project is a port of a Series-60 (Symbian) game to Series-40 (Nokia's dump phone). The developer who write the original game sat besides me, so could ask him anything about the code.

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- What were your deadlines like? Stressful/relaxed?

I think those two projects took like 2 months to complete I think .... Stressed ... probably, but I was so young at that time any everything seems optimistic!
 

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- How were you trained/coached?

Mostly from my university years. I did quite a lot of toy projects using multiple API and stuffs.
 

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- How did you prepare/wish you had prepared for the job?

I didn't really prepared much to be honest. However I boutght as many books as my salary allows (in fact I was in red at that time). I read them cover to cover, and then move on to other. I had math, physics, Win32 and DirectX books on my desk, as references. Internet was already filled with information, but I still prefer book (even now).

One thing that just came to mind is, it's actually doesn't matter whether or not you have or have no experience. When you're new to the company, you're about to face new challenges. New people, new projects, new tools, etc.

It's not like you can apply the past experience to the new place right away.

In fact, I'm actually facing a difficulties at the time of writing comments above. I just moved into the company and still trying to get used to things around here as well.

One story I can share is, at the same company I was talking about before, at one point there's a new senior developer just joined the team. About that time there was a new project from one of the biggest client we had (the big U... ), which is to make a game port from PC to PSP. Unfortunately for him, he was assigned to this project. This project, with tight deadline, new tools, new platform, and every worst thing you can think of, kinda destroyed him. Right around his probation ended, he stopped coming to the office and just let my boss's secretary knows on the phone that he wouldn't come anymore. Basically he ran away from the battlefield.

Everybody in the team, who was not tasked with important project, had to stop their work immediately and jump into this project right away. We kinda rush it so we can end the project. That was too late, it did not meet the deadline, the quality was not good enough. We basically loses that client forever. Even with the boss's good relationship with them doesn't help.

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What I'm going to tell you is, no matter what happen to you, don't do desertion. It does harm than good. Nobody knows where this gentleman is anymore. I think he has lost his place in the industry forever (the industry here in my country are so small that everyone know each others). If you're know that things are going south, talk with you supervisor/coach/mentor immediately. Don't be afraid to ask for help. Don't wait until the point of no returns. Of course, if the team is not helping, then at least you can tell yourself that you've already done the best you can.

Nevertheless, things can ended up badly, and that's normal. However losing trusts means losing your footing forever.

And with that, good luck with your new journey :).