
What school doesn't prepare you for in your first programming job - bobblywobbles
https://debugandrelease.blogspot.com/2018/12/what-school-doesnt-teach-you-for-your.html
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tdeck
> Don't expect it. IT jobs frequently work past the 40hr work week. People
> expect everything to be up 24/7, and that means you'll spend off-hours on
> support. If you aren't on support, you might find yourself spending your
> weekend coding that new feature that needs to be in by Monday morning.

I think this sets exactly the wrong expectation. I rarely work more than 40
hours. It's very possible to set boundaries and a good employer will let you
do that. If you find yourself working through the weekend it might be time to
change your planning or your employer.

Aside: Maybe I am in a bubble, but do developers still refer to their job as
"IT" in some places?

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MRD85
I'm currently studying for a career switch to software development and I'm
midway through my CS degree. I sort of expect that if companies will expect
work at crazy hours then I'll be compensated for such. Is this not the case?
Maybe I'm dreaming but I'm in a non-US market which has fairly strong workers
rights.

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mac01021
I've never worked crazy hours. Never more than 50, sometimes more like 35.

But if you work on a product that the business depends directly on for it's
income, you should expect on-call time. If your team has it's act together,
they might have a rotation where you're pageable at all hours for one or two
weeks per month.

Compensation is mostly dependent on your ability to negotiate your salary.

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pmiller2
Even one or two weeks a month might be an exaggeration. The most on-call time
I’ve had has been about one week out of every 6. As far as actually getting
paged, I think it’s happened about 8 times in 5 years. This is primarily at
smaller companies. YMMV at a large tech behemoth.

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devxpy
Its weird to me that this article only discusses the social aspects of
programming in a job environment, while completely ignoring the contrast
between university studies and real world technicalities of programming. I
feel like the latter is a much bigger issue.

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em-bee
could you elaborate on that please? i think it would make an interesting
contribution to this thread.

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normal_man
Not OP but I would guess it refers to the differences in material learned and
needed between school and work. School will teach you to implement sorts of
varying complexity, when your day-to-day duties at work will be things you
never covered in school like spin up an AWS instance, hook it up to a user
experience metrics platform, basically anything to do with version control.

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astura
What sort of CS degree doesn't cover version control?

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dsfyu404ed
Define "cover". Yeah, you'll have used it in one or two classes. It won't be a
part of your day to day workflow unless you voluntarily make it part.

