Introduction
Get introduced to the course content and its intended audience.
We'll cover the following
About this course
It is the first day at your new job. You passed your interview and are sitting at your workstation. Now what? Before you, a new jungle awaits with its own new challenges:
- Programming at industry scale, with code bases measured in thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of lines of code. How do you get your bearings and start contributing quickly?
- Navigating an organization with programmers but also people in many other roles. When you need guidance on a product feature, who do you ask?
- Building your portfolio of achievements each year. When performance reviews lurk on the horizon, do you know what your boss is looking for and how you’ll be judged?
And so much more. Your programming skills are only one part of the skill set you’ll need in these first years of the job.
Luckily, this virtual guide can help you get started. We’ll get oriented in our new job, point out the challenges ahead, and also save you from some nasty pitfalls.
Intended audience
The audience for this course will fall into a few broad categories:
-
College students and recent graduates taking computer science classes. and might wonder, “Is this what programming is like in the real world?” (Short answer: no.)
-
Professionals from other backgrounds who got into programming as a hobby or side job now want to take it full-time.
-
Others who are considering a job in programming but want to know what the books and classes are not telling them.
Regardless of the path, here you are: it is time to pay the bills with code. There are plenty of courses and books out there on the code part. There’s not so much on everything else that goes with the job—and that’s where this course comes in.
Some sections won’t apply as much if you’re a professional from other fields to them. However, you will still benefit from details about how things run within the engineering department and how code evolves from concept to release.