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.

  • alphapro98@programming.devOP
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      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,

      1. Install Java 17 via blah
      2. Set up such and such tool
      3. Add the alias xxx since everyone on the team uses it
      4. When you get xxx error do yyy to resolve it

      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.