Early Career Software Developers - Are You Sinking or Swimming?
Zhao Xin, Narissa Tsuboi · 2024
Background: Newbies in their early stage of software engineering careers suffer from unfitting task assignments, unclear job expectations, and insufficient communication with managers frequently, which leads to personal frustration, unsatisfactory team performance, and low employee retention. Goals: The goal of this research is to investigate new software developers' "sink or swim" early career experience from the following four dimensions: job assignment, newbie-manager pairing, job satisfaction, and thoughts and suggestions. Methodology: To achieve our research goal, we conducted an empirical study by distributing an online questionnaire that includes both qualitative and quantitative questions. Results: There are several factors contributing to a "sink or swim" early career experience, such as unclear about what to do, who to report to, lack of communication, and vague expectations, posing negative impacts on both individuals and the organization. In addition, we also propose a new community smell in our paper - Newbie Sink or Swim, based on our investigation. Conclusions: The early stage is critical to software developers' careers. A failing start phase has detrimental effects on software developers and development teams. Our study empirically examines software developers' early careers from various aspects, providing deeper insights into how to build a more supportive and productive working environment for entry-level developers in the software community.