The Junior Dev’s Onboarding Guide

You just received your offer letter! You’re now a professional iOS developer!

This is where your career begins. Start it off with the right foot.

Even though you’ve passed the interview and have accepted the job offer, your work has only begun. Going from an amateur developer to a professional developer is complicated at first because of all the added complexity of working as a team. You’re moving from a solo sport to a team sport and it’ll show as soon as day 1 that this is your first rodeo.

When I joined the team at KeyIngredient – my first ever job as a developer – I made many mistakes. The biggest issue was my lack of communication. The team used Skype to communicate and we didn’t necessarily have a schedule to follow so I wasn’t online most of the time. Requirements were basically handed to me via Skype calls, so nothing was written down and things changed from one day to another. We didn’t have code reviews, so the team wasn’t fully aware of my progress and I didn’t have the skills to communicate with them effectively.

Then I continuously clashed with both the CTO and the product person in charge. I disagreed with some of their decisions and I wanted to move the app in a different direction both technically and product-wise. They obviously disagreed and with good reason: I was an entry-level developer, with no previous experience. On the tech side, we were consuming protocol-buffers which were complicated and required a complex library from Google to consume. I also didn’t know a lot about Core Data so learning it on the job was difficult and time-consuming. 

My goal with this book is to make your first job a smoother experience than mine. The information in this book took me several years to collect. After I left KeyIngredient I kept working as an iOS developer for other companies and I found out that some of the issues I faced were not my fault but neither was it my employer’s fault. IT was the industry’s fault.  The industry has done nothing to address complex issues like onboarding, which is an extremely difficult task to successfully complete. Communication between developers and non-developers is very difficult. Tech stacks are difficult to learn, especially for junior developers. 

So I’ve set out to explain many of the hurdles you’ll face. Some of them will be very easy to explain like setting up your email and Slack. Others may be a bit more difficult to explain like understanding how to communicate with your manager in a 1-1 situation. All of them, however, are situations you’re likely to face in your journey towards success and all of them are much more complicated than it meets the eye…