Struggles of New College Graduates in Their First Software Development Job

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Struggles of New College Graduates in Their
First Software Development Job
Andrew Begel, Microsoft ResearchBeth Simon, U.C.
San Diego

• Motivation and Goals
• Understand how new college graduates learn their
  jobs
• Identify critical skills for learning and
  productivity
• Learn how new developers differ from experts
• Design hi-fidelity CS educational experiences

• Misconceptions of New Developers
• I must do everything myself so that I look good
  to my manager
• I must be the one to fix any bug I see
• If only there was more documentation
• I know when I am stuck trying to solve a problem

• Where New Developers Have Trouble
• Communication Knowing when and how to ask
  questions
• Social Working on large teams with large,
  pre-existing codebases
• Technical Writing high quality code
• Wisdom Bug triage, reproduction, workarounds
• Cognition Taking notes / documenting personal
  learning
• Orientation Adapting to a low-information
  environment

• Study Methodology
• 8 new developers, hired between Oct. 06 Mar.
  07
• 4 BS, 1 MS, 3 PhD
• 2 USA education, 2 China, 1 Mexico, 1 Pakistan, 1
  Kuwait, 1 Australia. All PhDs in USA.
• Each observed for 15 hours over 8 week period
• Participants recorded 26 video diary entries
• Pre, post interviews self-report activity survey

• Recommendations for CS Educators
• Design more realistic software engineering
  courses
• Legitimate peripheral participation, Communities
  of practice
• Work with larger, legacy codebases, pre-existing
  teams, minimal docs
• Make bug fixes, implementation changes, or
  non-critical new features
• Specifically, scaffold and support social
  interactions in software teams

• New College Graduates Do Know A Lot
• How to program
• How to write design specs
• Trying lots of strategies when they get stuck
• Peer mentoring

Faculty Summit 2007