Acquiring and Onboarding Your First Job
From academic success to professional impact
Introduction
My previous blog described the steps to obtaining an Internship. This post focuses on landing and onboarding for your first job.
The first job is different from an internship. Expectations are higher. The commitment is longer. The stakes feel real. This post is about what changes, what doesn’t, and how to navigate your first year successfully.
Your first job is not just about getting hired. It’s about shifting from academic success to professional impact. That shift shows up in three areas:
Lather, Rinse, Repeat
For the most part, just about everything I described about obtaining an Internship applies to your first job as well. You’ll still need a Résumé, Elevator Pitch, Company Research, and Interviews.
The main differences between obtaining an internship offer and a first job offer are:
- The recruiters and interviewers will be more discerning and challenging. This is no longer a 3-month commitment. This is a commitment that tends to last for years.
- Likeability may be even more important, since you’ll be working with a team rather than being sequestered with other interns working on your own projects.
- You may need to put more consideration into your own Decision, since this is no longer a 3-month commitment for you either. You will spend most of your week at work for months and probably years. Choose based on the attributes that matter most to you, such as location, company reputation, company culture, compensation, benefits, growth opportunity, etc. Each person will evaluate these attributes based upon their own preferences. Different people with the same offers will often reach different conclusions based upon their personal preferences.
Your first job is often the most difficult one to get, since most new software developers have limited practical experience. Once you have an employment track record with a year or two of practical experience, companies are more willing to consider you as a candidate.
When the Job Doesn’t Come Immediately
Ideally, most graduates will have a job lined up by graduation. But much like the Alternative Path situation, in which an internship was not obtained, not everyone lands a job before graduation.
My son did not have a job offer when he graduated with his Mechanical Engineering degrees several years ago. He moved home after graduation. He and I executed the plan I described in Finding Your Next Job, but I put a bit of an Agile spin on it via a simple Kanban Board made of Post-It Notes, Sharpies, Painter’s Tape, and a sheet of Costco cardboard.
Most days we reviewed his progress and set up a plan for the next day. I encouraged him to do three job-search tasks each day. We reviewed his résumé and ran through a few mock interviews. He landed his first job about two months after graduation.
Discipline beats panic. Structure beats anxiety. A job search is a project, so treat it like one.
When my son graduated in 2022, his Computer Science classmates were being scooped by companies with wild abandon. My wife wondered whether he had chosen the wrong major in Mechanical Engineering. Four years later, the momentum has shifted.
Generative and Agentic AI are reshaping software development and temporarily making entry-level hiring more competitive. The industry is cyclical. Entry-level hiring expands and contracts. Don’t interpret temporary market conditions as permanent signals about your major or your future.
Onboarding
Academia does a good job teaching you Computer Science, but it doesn’t do a great job of preparing you for your career as a Software Engineer. An internship introduces most students to the industry, but it’s often a sheltered introduction.
The first job can be a bit disorienting. If I had to reduce my advice to new Software Engineers to one phrase, it would be this: Show Up!
80% of success is showing up. — Woody Allen
Show up on time. Show up prepared. Show up curious. Show up consistently.
Your first few days to weeks will be spent Onboarding, which is Company Orientation. It is essentially a crash course about the company.
Onboarding varies among companies. Some onboarding may not be much more than a few compliance videos you need to watch on your computer. Other onboarding sessions may last several days and feel like drinking from a fire hose.
Here are a few topics that are common:
- The company’s history and culture
- The company’s business domain
- The company’s main products
- The company’s internal procedures and paperwork, especially with respect to HR:
- Payment schedule
- Medical
- Vacation/PTO policy
- Retirement plan
- Etc.
This phase of onboarding is usually generic and applies to most employees. Developer onboarding often continues with learning the tech stack, the product architecture, design, and some implementation.
It may include exercises that help you learn more about the codebase. You may have a mentor to guide you through the unfamiliar terrain.
These exercises may feel like quizzes. The goal is not to get the right answer as quickly as possible. The goal is to understand how to get the right answer.
I didn’t always appreciate this in my onboarding exercises. I tended to rush through these exercises to get the answer, when I should have been more deliberate about understanding them.
Some companies may send new developers to extensive training, much like a software bootcamp.
Listen to the first segment of the Soft Skills Podcast episode about Onboarding New College Grads. While the segment is framed from the point of view of how the company can better onboard new college grads, I think there are some insights for the new college grads as well.
NOTE: Also consider subscribing to the Soft Skills Podcast. It’s more about the soft skills one needs to be a great software developer rather than the technical skills. It’s a weekly 30-minute podcast and quite entertaining. It’s one of my favorites.
Here are some things to consider doing during onboarding and beyond:
- Go into the office as long as it’s not a remote job. You’ll pick up much more in person than working remotely.
- Learn the tech stack and other related technologies.
- Learn the tools they use to build, track, and document their work.
- Learn the business domain.
- Read their documentation, which is hopefully online.
- Find a mentor if one has not been assigned to you. Hopefully one will be assigned. Otherwise, you may need to ask your manager for some assistance.
- If you’re overwhelmed with information, ask your mentor for triage help. That person can probably provide context indicating what’s important to know now versus what’s important to learn later.
- If your mentor is busy, schedule dedicated time on both of your calendars.
- Don’t be afraid to ask questions, especially about the business. You will be a unique asset for six months to a year. You will see the business and product with a fresh set of eyes. You may ask a good question that no one has thought to ask because they have been embedded in the business domain for too long. It’s like the story of two young fish passing an older fish who says, “How’s the water?” After swimming on, one turns to the other and asks, “What’s water?”
- When you run into a technical challenge, don’t be afraid to ask for help, but do your due diligence beforehand. Try to find the answer yourself. If you get stuck, explain what you’ve tried and ask where else to look before asking for the answer. Then if you’re still stuck, ask for the answer. You want to demonstrate that you put in the effort to find the solution yourself, but don’t spend too much time on it. That is, don’t spend five days being stuck on a problem that could have been answered in five minutes.
- If the question and answer is significant enough and useful to other new people, see if there’s a way for you to document it for others who might run into it. Many places will have an internal Wiki of some type where you might be able to post a question and answer. Ask your mentor where to put it first, since they may have a Q&A repository. Visibility matters. Contribution matters. Documentation is a low-risk, high-return way to build both reputation and trust.
- Don’t spend every lunch alone at your desk. Use this time to get to know your team and others.
- Have a list of short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals. If these aren’t provided for you as part of the onboarding process, work with your mentor or manager to come up with a set.
- Keep track of your accomplishments. I usually kept an MS Word document with bullet-listed items I had completed. Update it weekly, possibly even daily. It will be great value when it comes to your annual self-assessment. I almost always spotted accomplishments while reviewing my list that I had forgotten about or I had remembered as being in the previous year. If I can’t remember my accomplishments, then why should my manager remember them either?
- Schedule a weekly or bi-weekly one-on-one session with your manager if they don’t automatically do it. The one-on-one isn’t about reviewing what you’ve done. It’s more of a conversation with your manager to discuss how things are going, where you see your career going, etc. Your manager cannot read your mind.
Plan for Retirement on Day One
Your first job is when adult financial life begins.
This is tailored for workers in the United States, but some of the concepts may ring true for those working outside the U.S. Enroll in your company’s retirement savings plan, such as a 401(k) on day one of your job. Recent laws allow employers to automatically enroll new employees in their retirement plans, which is a good way to get started, but you may want to take more control too.
I will provide more details on retirement plans in a future blog (TBD).
Tasks
Work tasks will be different than the assignments you did in college. One of my college physics professors told us:
- In high school, you memorize the formulas.
- In college, you derive the formulas.
- In your career, you look up the formulas.
The last bullet has changed over the years from looking up information in a book to searching for answers on the internet and now it’s asking Generative/Agentic AI to do large portions of the work for you.
You don’t have to know the answers. You have to know how to find the answers and evaluate them.
Sometimes, it’s more than just finding the answers; it’s knowing how to ask the right questions.
Paradigm Shift
Data structures and algorithms are powerful tools, but without context they are abstract. Similarly, without context a calculator is a toy. You can push a few buttons and make some numbers appear on the display, but they have no meaningful significance.
The power is not in the calculator. The power of the calculator appears when it solves a real problem in context. A calculator can be used to balance a checkbook, calculate stable orbital trajectories, manage calorie intake for a diet, and many more.
You’ve been learning data structures and algorithms without a business domain context. Without context, they are like calculators.
A Computer Science degree has taught you the inner workings of the world’s biggest and most powerful calculators. You may know what a computer does and how it does it, but now you need to learn why.
It’s important to learn the context, the business domain, and understand how and why to apply data structures, algorithms, and other computer knowledge to solve real problems for your customers. This is a mental paradigm shift, and it takes some time.
Summary
Your first job is not about proving how much you know. It’s about learning context. It’s about becoming useful. It’s about building trust.
Show up. Stay curious. Ask good questions.
The rest will follow.