breaks at work and what if you cant do something?

[silverglade]

hi, after school i will be getting a job as a web developer in an office i hope, my questions are ,

 

1- how often and for how long do you get breaks to rest your hands. 8 hours of typing is a lot.

 

2- what if you dont know how to do something? do they fire you? or can you ask another senior developer or do you look up a tutorial real quick?

[salathe]

1. For me, officially, one hour for lunch (thought that's usually more like 10 minutes). Unofficially, taking a break occurs much more frequently: be it in the form of simply changing tasks, making tea, a chat about the latest sports/news events, and so on. Also, if you're typing at full speed for 8 hours a day, you're either a genius or not programming. As for resting your hands, you'll probably get the urge to get up and have a walk around more often than resting those poor hard-working hands.

 

2. It would be a really awful employer to fire a junior developer for not knowing something! If you're part of a team then ask questions of your work mates, they'll expect it (and probably relish the opportunity to be nice and talk things through, it'll give them a break from whatever they're doing). There's also, as you probably know, answers to pretty much every question ever conceived available on the interwebs already and plenty of avenues for getting those few answered that haven't been asked (or you can't be bothered to go find). Don't sweat about not knowing stuff, that's part of the job: to learn new things and improve yourself.

 

P.S. Good luck with everything.

[silverglade]

thank you so much salathe. that really helped me out and put my mind at ease.  ill remember that. i wrote it down. lol. thanks again for that great feedback. derek