Professional programming and the kind of programming you learn in college/university/bootcamp/etc are actually very different things. Despite what you learned in school, development is really maintenance. In other words, I’m here to crush your dreams :)

So, you know how in school you started new projects from the ground up all the time? Yeah, you’ll hardly ever do that at work.

Now, sometimes you will need to research new technologies and/or frameworks and starting a new prototype project is usually a part of that, and sometimes even the largest and slowest moving organization needs to start something completely new, but that’s generally a very small part of the job.

What you’ll actually spend most of your time doing as a professional developer is adding features and fixing bugs in an existing product. That’s such a large part of the job that I wish we’d done more (or any) of it in school. For anyone reading this who is learning to code, I strongly recommend taking sample projects or open source projects or whatever you can get your hands on and adding new features or fixing bugs. Learning to read other people’s code is hugely important and you may only barely touch on it in your studies.

To be fair, just learning to code takes a lot of time and you can only cram so much into any one program without keeping students there for years and years, but I wish we put a little more emphasis on what software developers actually do at work most of the time. I also wish we’d spent more time on why design is such a big deal.

One of the consequences of hardly ever starting completely new projects at work is that the few projects that do get started are extremely long lived. Instead of a tiny throw-away project that you spend maybe a week building and then never touch again, you’ll work with applications that live for years or even decades. This can be really weird to adjust to since the lifespan of those projects means every tiny decision you made in five minutes can come back to haunt you for years to come :)

On the other hand, long lived projects have a much greater impact than tiny little throw-aways. If you do a good job, the code you write can make people’s lives a little bit easier for years and years. You can also build much larger things, whether they’re applications, games, frameworks, or something else entirely, when you have years to work on something. Corporate software development isn’t all bad, you get to work on things that you could never build on your own.

Another way professional development is different from school projects is that requirements always, always change. Even if every feature you add is perfect and bug free (ha!), your users are going to ask for new things and/or discover that the feature they asked for isn’t actually what they needed and the business might expand into new areas and the laws that your business has to follow might change. Sometimes technical requirements even drive changes: if a new version of your database or framework or a library you depend on comes out, eventually you’re going to want to switch to that.

The requirements changes can be infuriating, I’m not going to sugar-coat that. But at least you get to work on something that people care enough about to ask for changes, even if sometimes it seems like they have no idea what they actually want. If you never had to change a piece of software, all that would mean was that absolutely nobody was using it. I  don’t know about you but I think it’s pretty cool that people actually use the stuff I build.

Real world software development is very, very different from what you do in school, so don’t be surprised if it takes you a little while to find your feet. As much as it can be frustrating sometimes, there are some really cool upsides too.