Thread: Your first job experience

I have to first times System and web developer:
System developer:
1. Very nice, People helped me a lot because I was entry level and 17 (yep still in highschool)
2. Did not, I was not ready at all, but the people at the company had faith in me, which gave me a lot of courage
3 Yes, I was asked to write in C, which I did not know, I was ask to GUI which I had never done - But hey you learn by your mistakes
The 4. I will answer in unsion

Web developer:
1. Awful, the people where kind, but not very good at helping each other nor structure there code
2. I felt ready, because I knew Java/JSP/JSF, HTML5, basic javascript and CSS3
3. YES, I was told my job would be in java, but from my job interview to the day I started they swicthed to C#, ASP.NET and Umbraco, things I had never touched in my life (look at me now, I have AP CS Degree with specialization in C#)

4. Learning by doing, I had to help a lot of people with small apps, scripts and so on. And it was often things I had no idea how to do, so I googled and instead of drinking my weekends away I coded.

A more complet essay:
When I started as a system developer, all I knew was from a course called Electronic Design taught in my highschool so in basis Assembly with AT&T syntax. My main problem was switching to the syntax of C and thinking in the terms of userfriendly design and the fact I now did not have a endless amount of time coding after school instead I had a couple of hours per day. I solved the syntax/C problem by learning C in my sparetime and as I said I didn't driking in the weekends, the part about time, well you have to adapted from a study world to a work world which takes time.
In my web developer days my main problem was the people no one wanted to help eachother and that was hugh problem for me because the application I worked with was a mess and I couldn't find half the files because they lay in a nother repo I didn't have acces to, such problems you solve by quitting.
My experince was at that point java SE/EE and RUBY and I had code for desktop for around 4 years but mostely backend.

as for a book or a good tutorial, hmm if I remember correctly Appress have a book on java interaction with MySQL which should be pretty good I just can't remember the titel.


Sorry for any spelling mistakes my spelling control won't change to english and I am not the best speller in any language

I doubt that you'll be hired as a freelancer at all without having actual project experience. The regular carrer path here is that you get a full time job in the industry and start as a newbie in a team of developers and slowly take up speed. After a few years in development, having been involved in a couple of projects, languages and frameworks, you might move on.

My 2c, FWIW