We placed 34 students from our last two cohorts into their first developer roles. Three months in, we did structured interviews with each of them and their managers.
What Helped Them Ramp Up Fast
Version control discipline. Students who had internalised Git workflows — branching, commit message conventions, pull request etiquette — hit the ground running.
Reading code before writing it. The habit of spending the first week just reading the codebase consistently correlated with faster ramp-up times.
Asking better questions. Students who practiced the format "Here's what I tried, here's what I found, here's where I'm stuck" integrated into teams faster.
What Still Catches Them Off Guard
The pace of production systems. Real systems have legacy code, unclear ownership, and competing priorities.
Business context. Understanding why a feature is being built is a skill that's hard to teach in a classroom but essential on the job.
Estimation. Almost universally, first estimates were wildly optimistic.
What We're Changing in the Curriculum
We've added: a week on reading unfamiliar codebases, a module on estimation, and regular exercises on communicating technical decisions to non-technical stakeholders.