Inducting Fresh Computer Graduates as Programmers

Question

What are the key practical concepts that a fresh graduate should be educated with when he starts with his first programming job and how soon should you expect him/her to be productive and actually deliver the code you expect ?

Answer 1

source control and testing

Get them started with checking out code and writing unit tests first, learn what its about, and then go from there.

Answer 2

First: If you are a fresh graduate or a skilled developer - you always can gain new experience. So developers should be ready to always learn.

For the question: If your dev-team Practices Test-Driven-Development the first thing should be to show him how to write tests and how it can be useful.

Naturally the freshman should be able to use version-control, so if he relly has no skills at version-control a short introduction for this should be made.

Answer 3

Yeah, that's a subjective question. We have done several summer and during-school internships as well as hired recent grads in CS.

If we start with a student who knows:

• An OOP-ish language (Java, C#, VB.NET, C++)
• How to fire up a compiler/debugger
• How to work with our Source Code Control

Then given a defined problem domain with prerequisites (for example, for a recent intern, the problem domain was "adding autogenerated annotation metadata to TIFF files using self-describing barcodes"), the student needed to therefore know

• How to generate and parse XMP
• How to read/write metadata into TIFFs (we have tools for that)
• How to read from a barcode scanner
• Write unit tests

We saw progress in a week and saw demo code in a month. This was all within expectation. I mostly let him work on his own, but stepped in and course corrected some of his style and coding practice.

The important part of this is how goals were set and met. I made the important parts crystal clear (ie, requirements) and left the less important parts up to his design. After all, who wants to do paint by number all the time? For setting goals, I try in general to follow the SMART guidelines. A good goal is

• Specific
• Measurable
• Avhievable
• Realistic
• Timely

It's very important that the project has a good feedback loop for communication. We were somewhat wanting in this regard.

Answer 4

Just my thoughts and experiences:

Mentor. Assign a senior or lead programmer to mentor them. Not everyone is geared for this sort of assignment and a good mentor makes a difference. We have a mentor assigned to every new programmer - regardless of how long they have been coding - just to get the new employee familiar with our systems.

Start small. Depending on how your organization / team / etc is configured have the new grad start on some small maintenance projects, with a mentor reviewing their code and guiding them.

Get them training in the development environment your shop works in - expect that they will know a little about a few languages but that most of their development experience will be with school projects - not exactly solid production code. They will need a solid base to work from in the environment you use.

Code review and best practices - give them guidelines and make sure that they stick to them - if you are not using best practices internally, then start. Makes a huge difference when a large development group is involved. Review code frequently - this does not have to be a large group of developers in a meeting - one on one reviews, informal inspections, etc work wonders.

Develop an environment of cooperation - allow developers to mingle and talk and brainstorm - give them the opportunity to discuss ideas and thoughts that might not be related to the code at hand - they will rely on each other more then plants in the cube farm and production will higher quality. Allow them to read blogs and sites related to their craft - sights such as this one, coding horror, hacker news, etc. Support them going to local user groups and developer conferences.

Productive? That depends on the individual - some new graduates will never be productive coders but might be productive analysts or managers - some will be code machines out of the gate but will quickly churn out 1000 lines of maintenance nightmare code where 20 would suffice. I would say a fresh programmer out of school should be productive in 6 to 8 months - this is to say up to speed with you average programmers on staff, able to take a new project for your product, design and implement it, and able to handle any maintenance task required. It takes time to get the experience required to be productive - experience that can only come from actually developing in a production environment.

Answer 5

Don't assume anything.

I made it through college without source control. Testing was stepping through the code with the debugger. No paperwork was needed for any assignment.

These 3 things are vital for production-grade code.

Answer 6

Here are a few things I've found to be important for recent grads as well as new hires that have experience:

• be proactive about including them in the corporate culture, don't assume they will fit in on their own
• include them in meetings even if they are only there to listen
• encourage them to interact in meetings when appropriate
• be careful when dismissing their ideas as bad I've seen this discourage people from mentioning good ideas later down the road

Answer 7

Use of source control would be first on my list as very few schools need or rely on this. Really sit down and explain how to use the product you use and why it is necessary. Then for at least the first month, make sure to frequently check to make sure they are using it.

Next would be basic database skills. I've yet to see anyone come out of school really understanding how to query a database.

Third would be an introduction to your database and code base, explaining how things are done and organized and why.

Fourth, testing procedures and policies including how to do a code review, unit testing, QA etc. Tesing is not something that most students need to worry about either.

Fifth, assign a mentor if at all possible, someone the new person can go to for advice, to ask questions about company basics. You probably need someone to give them the basics of professional behavior as well. What is acceptable in terms of dress, attendance, etc.