I am a software engineer, and the 6 month probation is due in mid-March, I believe. I have some concerns about this, and paranoid that I will be told to leave.
I am not a software engineer by training, I was a Physics and Electronics Engineering major. I had good grades initially, but towards the end, I started experiencing significant personal issues, and failed several elective subjects (which are designed to make the University money, everyone knows this), like Sociology and Astrophysics, bringing my GPA down to 2.8/4. Without these, my GPA would be around 3.3. I could have applied for a "withdrawal without penalty", and was told it most likely would have been accepted, however I failed to do so, due to the chaos at the time. Due to the bureaucracy, it is unlikely they will accept this now, due to the length of time that has passed. I was hired without them asking me for my transcript, only my degree testamur. This was one of the few jobs that did not require any prior experience, so I have great concerns about what will happen if I'm told to leave. I am 24 years of age, and I'm at a point in my career I should have been was I was 22.
I have had virtually no formal feedback during this period, positive or negative. I have made a few rookie mistakes, but have tried to learn from them, but I doubt they have seen this. The only thing I have been offered is "tips and tricks" in Visual Studio, and how to use yield
and IEnumerable
properly in C#, and to use arguments in console applications instead of menus, things like that.
I have been given programming tasks during this time, and tried to complete them as best I can. However, it always seems like it takes me longer to complete tasks than I think it should. I would go in the morning, aiming to finish a particular feature in a day or two, and it ends up taking me a week or more. I only started coding properly about 1-2 years ago, so maybe I don't have enough experience to make judgements on how long it should take.
So far, I have not really been involved in the design reports that the rest of my team have been working on, I have merely been writing several command-line tools to process documents, which speed up the submission process, and also assisted in adding features to the client side of an application which handles project assets. Apart from that, there was a small amount of SQL scripting to assist another team, which was on and off. It feels like I should have more to show for 6 months of work, but these were the tasks I was given.
At the end of last year and early this year, I was told I was picked to be responsible (along with a colleague of mine) for a particular design. There was a meeting with the client in December, which I attended for my knowledge. There was an agreement that a ConOps was needed, but it has not happened yet. It was due in early March, but it has been postponed to a month after whenever ConOps is held. At the weekly standup recently, I was told "you are going to be the main one responsible for this". Is this a sign they intend to keep me post-probation?
The biggest concern I have: we have a monthly team-wide progress meeting for the entire project, with dozens of people. At the most recent one, the project director mentioned performance reviews, but he said these were for people who have been with the company for >6 months. I have not yet reached this milestone (it is several weeks away), but I have still been asked to complete the self-evaluation form. Is this a bad sign? In this form, there are sections for time management, quality of work, knowledge, communication, etc, to be marked 0-10. I have concerns about my progress, but don't want to seem too negative. How should this be approached?
The question: With the above in mind, what should I realistically expect to be the outcome of probation?