My first job out of graduate school could not have been more different. Instead of being shown a desk and left alone, I was set up with a mentor. He encouraged me to ask questions. We did some pair programming so that I could learn the code base, and the way that testing worked for this project (my first taste of unit testing!). I was productive within days, and learned more in the first few months of that job than I had learned in the entire time I worked at BigTechCo. I credit this almost entirely to the mentoring I got when I started. Mentoring new hires is critical. Your job as a new hire
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