Professional and Ethical Behavior

The expected behavior at UCSD and in the workplace does not really differ that much. There are deadlines that must be met that really put the pressure on, but it is also okay to relax at times and take a walk around the office, or get a snack, or even go on Reddit. I feel like the only expectation is to get the work done, and of course, be a decent person to yourself and your coworkers.

It takes time to learn what is expected, though. It took me a couple of weeks to get a hang of the culture here – such as what time my co-workers come in, what meetings are or are not important and even what needs to be done in a certain time period. Learning this comes with time while observing and listening to my surroundings. From there, I could see where to apply myself the most to make the most impact.

Some ethical concerns could be the way I dress up. Sometimes, I go to school wearing sweatpants and a jacket. At work, I feel like that would frowned upon because it comes off as kind of lazy, and people do depend on you to get work done. If you look lazy, then you might not get a good reputation.

Description

Since we had a day off last week, some of my co-workers and I decided to take some extra time off. With this in mind, I was able to focus on more of my own projects or even catch up on work that I fell behind on in the previous week. I had to work on a test that would not run on one of the test fixtures. The frustrating part about working on the test and submitting code is the code review. One thing I never realized about industry is how meticulous I have to be when writing code because some person down the road will probably look at my code and try to use it. Something as simple as adding a space after the “if” in an if-statement could get annoying in code review, especially after working on something after so long. But after passing the code review, I was finally able to start planning for my next steps in the internship.

Analysis

The main difference between UCSD and internship work is the meticulousness of code reviews within industry. Industry code has to fall under the standard that the company has instilled to ensure a consistent code base that is easily maintainable and extensible. What I’m used to is hacking away at a problem until a solution is found. I never really cared about using it again, just as long as it works. However, it is very important to have well-documented and precise code that is easily readable for future people to work on. It also teaches me to write better code in the end.