This document provides tips for transitioning from college to an industry job as a software engineer. It outlines three steps: 1) Find your destination by researching companies and attending career events, 2) Optimize your route by learning tools like Vim and Git to improve skills, and getting a mentor, and 3) Execute your plan and transition to an industry job. The document emphasizes that junior developers need guidance to learn practical skills, and should focus on acquiring day-to-day techniques through habits like test-driven development and breaking code to fix it.

1. En Route to Industry
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Tips on Transitioning from College Into Industry
Doreen Hakimi
Software Engineer
Oct 11, 2015

2. 2

3. 3
Step 1
Find Your Destination
(Second)

4. Step 1: Find Your Destination
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● Make friends
● Learn learn learn
● Find what you like
● Career fairs & networking events
● Company research
○ Like a company? Become a contributor!

5. Step 1: Find Your Destination
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● Programming Interview Preparation

6. Step 1: Find Your Destination
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7. 7
Step 2
Optimize Your Route

8. Step 2: Optimize Your Route
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● Things to optimize:
Skill Tools For Optimization
• Text Editing • Vim (MacVim)
• Dvork (Optional)
• Source Control • Fish Shell
• Git Town

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“As programmers, we live in a world of complex systems and variables. It is incredibly
challenging to simply execute a well defined and focused task, especially if you are not
terribly experienced with the tools at your disposal, or the codebase you are working on.
This is the life of the junior developer. You are fresh out of school, and think you know
everything. Suddenly, you are faced with the fact that what you learned about in school was
actually quite poor preparation for the types of problems you are encountering. Things are
more messy. Less theoretically pure. You are existing in a realm of compromises, and can
never make assumptions about anything.
Dealing with this is really all you can focus on, and it is what you really should be trying
your best to learn. Junior developers need a lot of direction, supervision, and mentoring
because of this, or they can stay in this place for a very, very long time (I recently
encountered a fellow who had been building software for almost a decade who I would say
is still a junior). You can say that this period is really about acquisition of tactical, day to
day techniques.”
Source: http://mattbriggs.net/blog/2015/06/01/the-role-of-a-senior-developer/

10. Step 2: Optimize Your Route
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● Get into the habit of breaking your code and fixing it
● Powerful tool: Cucumber (cucumber.io)

11. Step 2: Optimize Your Route
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● Get into the habit of breaking your code and fixing it

12. Step 2: Optimize Your Route
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● Develop good coding practices
○ (TDD) Test Driven Development
○ Code linting
○ Circle CI to integrate these into Git

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● Find a mentor to aid in your growth
● Build day-to-day tactics
○ Problems? Talk it out!
■ Some personal examples:
● Stuck? Go for a walk!
● 10-minute rule
Step 2: Optimize Your Route

14. Step 2: Optimize Your Route
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● Assume the role of a good junior developer:
“A good junior developer
can be given a known
task, and be expected to
execute it quickly, and
well.”
Source: http://mattbriggs.net/blog/2015/06/01/the-role-of-a-senior-developer/

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Step 3
GOOOOOO!

16. Doreen Hakimi
Software Engineer
doreen.hakimi@originate.com
Questions?