What I Wish I Learned Before Getting a Job: Best Practices

Disclaimer:

Despite growing concerns and a staggering number of new unemployment claims in this scary time, I somehow got my very first job right in the middle of the COVID-19 outbreak. My heart goes out to everyone getting laid off, permanently or temporarily, people looking for new employment, and everyone struggling to pay the bills. I have been there, I have struggled through that, and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

I don’t want this blog post to come off as insensitive and my goal is that I hopefully empower and educate anyone coming into the software engineering space. It would be great if learning things from this blog series somehow gave you enough knowledge to impress a company and get a job!

Click here to go to the master post!

Working With Issue Tickets

If you’ve never worked with issue tickets before, it’s no big deal! We’re going to go over it together so you can get used to creating, managing, holding, and closing tickets. But first, why do we need to know how to work with issue tickets? Well, it’s simple. Issue tickets give everyone an easy way to track if and when things are resolved, but it’s not just for your company. It’s also a great way for the client to see overall progress!

No matter what software your company uses for ticket management, the first step to successfully working with issue tickets is getting familiar with the software. Check if there are multiple projects going on, if there’s a way to filter tickets by one or more assigned user, or if your tickets have a commenting system attached to them. You’re going to be using this software a lot and not knowing how it works does not count as an acceptable excuse for messing up or missing ticket comments. Seriously, don’t even make this excuse.

I’m sure other companies use a different name, but my company calls their development tickets… well, development, and has four rows titled To-Do, In Progress, Completed, and On Hold. They’re all pretty self explanatory!