The Struggles of New Graduates

Posted 2008-03-17

I had a lot of interesting conversations while at SIGCSE last week, but the best talk I attended was given by Microsoft’s Andrew Begel, who spent a year studying the problems new college graduates face in their first software development job. The takeaway:

New developers' problems are mainly due to poor communication, not technical skills.

What do new developers do?

Programming (reading >> writing, commenting, proofreading)
Working on bugs ((repro, reporting, triage) >> debugging)
Testing (writing, running)
Revision Control (check in, check out, revert)
Documentation (reading >> writing, search)
Specifications (reading >> writing)
Tools (discovering, finding, installing, using, building)
Communication (asking questions, persuasion, coordination, email, meetings, meeting prep, finding people, managers, teaching, learning, mentoring)

New developers are good at:

Programming
Design
Peer mentoring
Using many strategies when debugging

They are bad at:

Engaging a large, legacy codebase without using written docs
Reproducing bugs
Using new tools
Reflecting on their own progress (knowing when they are stuck)

They interact naively with other team members when:

Asking questions
Triaging and resolving bugs
Attending meetings

Beliefs of new developers:

Perfectionism	I must prove I am smart, productive and write quality code from day 1. I must do everything by myself. I must fix all bugs I personally find in the code. Don't ask questions.
Delusion	It compiles, therefore it works. If it has bugs…well, that's what testers are for. I know when I get stuck.
Self Esteem	It can't be the bug repro instructions, it must be me. My self-worth is directly related to how much I coded today.

I think this is really valuable work; it’d be great to see it repeated with new grad students…