neilm

The most important thing: don't worry about it.

You will probably feel overwhelmed on your first day, probably in your first week too. That's normal. It takes time to get used to how the company works, how the codebase is structured, who's responsible for what in the organisational structure.

If it's a good company, there should be someone who you will be able to ask anything you need, no matter how often you need it. I've run multiple projects with perhaps a dozen programmers, and I try to make it very clear to new recruits that they are never bothering me. They don't usually believe me at first, but I mean it! Any significant codebase has a huge amount of knowledge and structure known only to its developers, and new guys save so much time if they can just ask a quick question than dig around for themselves. So don't be afraid to ask questions incessantly. Definitely form your question sensibly, but don't sit around feeling stuck.

Honestly, I feel the most important thing you can learn in your first day/week is who is the best person to ask about each part of the code that you'll be using, and a bit about the general structure of the code. You shouldn't expected to produce anything straight away.

Also, have fun! I still really enjoy programming after doing it full time for 15 years and hopefully you will too!

I just wanted to agree with this. I turned down a job a number of years ago that offered me great thing eventually but you'll be 'just helping push an existing project over the line for a few weeks'. Complete red flag.

There will be other IT security jobs. If you really want one, you should just turn down both offers and wait for one you really want. Good programmers are rare and you can probably wait around for something you like better.

Edit: Also, don't believe promises regarding payrises after 6 months, shares in the company, healthcare, etc. If it's not on the table when you negotiate the contract, be sure you'll be happy when the promises fail to materialise.

The problem is: you are too cheap. A programmer in Europe can earn much more than 12 euros an hour, but you're not charging more. It makes me wonder why. The only reason I can think is that you're inexperienced, just starting out. That doesn't tally with the statement that you can do any kind of code. I've been programming for many many years and I would still be wary about saying I could do 'anything'. There are lots of hard problems in Computer Science. Mobile app development is not one of the hard problems, so I would wonder why you would exclude that and not, say, massively scalable cloud computing, 3D rendering, etc.

I would suggest you be a bit more specific about what tasks you want to do, and double or triple your prices. ;-)

I wish you very good luck with the company though!

I spoke to him only a few weeks ago. An amazing individual, unassuming and would chat with everyone. It's very sad to hear the bad news.