I got my first job as a developer, but felt terrible on day 1

Photo credit: maximkostenko / 123RF Stock Photo.

Shortly after college, I interviewed for my first position as a web developer. I had a bit of experience writing desktop applications but virtually no experience in web development.

At the time, I had a fascination with learning Ruby on Rails, so I started learning it for fun. This was around 2008 before the language was mainstream. My friend was trying to convince me to learn Python and PHP. He told me that what I was learning was completely unpractical and didn’t help in the real world.

I told him I didn’t really care.

I jumped in and built my first web application using the language. It was super cool to see my ideas become a reality.

Shortly after, I graduated from school and set out to find a real programming job. I found 100 job listings and applied to every single one of them. These jobs fell into a few different categories:

• Some used programming languages that I had gained experience with during school.
• Some used programming languages I didn’t know at all.
• Some used Ruby on Rails, which I was really excited about given my fascination with the language.

Over the next couple of weeks, I started hearing from companies and recruiters and lined up interviews through two recruiters and a couple of companies directly. One of them was a company that used Java, which I had used in school and still remembered pretty well. When I went in for my interview, the hiring manager led me into a big room with a large desk. Two men were giving the interview.

After we shook hands and introduced ourselves, we got into the meat of it.

To start, one of the men asked me, “How well do you know Java?” I thought about it for a moment, then responded, “Pretty well. I used it in college a bit, and I have some experience with C#, which is a pretty similar language.”

The man thought for a moment and asked, “So how will the JVM’s garbage collector deal with the following scenario?” He continued by describing a scenario that I was honestly very unfamiliar with.

“I’m not really sure, to be honest,” I responded. “I generally focus on writing code and solving problems with the language. I don’t know how the JVM works under the hood.”

The man nodded. He then asked me a few other nuanced questions. I didn’t know the answers to any of them! I remember walking away dumbfounded. I was wondering why he expected me to have the answers to all of these questions.

The company decided not to move forward with me for the position.

Other interviews

The next interviewers

On day 1 at my first job, a weird feeling hit me

The next months