6 months for me, though my experience probably is not representative of a fresh graduate as I had numerous internships, undergraduate research and startup experience upon leaving college.

I work for a government contractor that supplies software to the navy and airforce. I was initially hired on just as a contractor but after a few months they decided to terminate that contract and hire me on a salaried employee after they saw what I could bring to the table. I rapidly have moved into different positions of the course of my 6 months out of school. During this time our development team on the project started with 4 people (including myself as the newest member back when i started) to 20 people.

Here is my short story,

The company works on a agile based development environment. 1st month - I initially started fixing out bugs listed in our agile software, I was able to resolve most problems fairly quickly and was able to correctly identify if the issue would be javascript, java or a database issue with just looking at the problem. During this time (about 1 month) my average number of tasks completed a day was 15 hours worth of work a day ( agile tasks ranked with hour estimates).

2nd month - After seeing that I could easily do bug fixes they gave me a bit more of a challenge of implementing new features that needed to be added to the system I was working on, for example add a reporting feature to x system, implement a exception logger for x or allow record sorting on x.

• By the middle of the second month I asked my boss if I could interact in the design side of development to help with newer stuff. He responded saying he was willing to give it a shot even though I was extremely new by their standards. I got into some design meetings and was tasked with writing entire new sections of the application I was working on, It was up to me for the full scope of development, requirements to system architecture. This was strictly on a trail to see how I would do, that way if I messed up it was only on a new section I wrote.

3rd Month

• I continued working on full stack development for new sections of the application, I received tons of praise for my new sections of the application that was universally accepted by management as extremely solid and a great step forward in the application I was working on.

• By the middle of the 3rd month we hired on 2 new developers, management put these developers directly under me and I tasked them with helping me build new sections of the application with me.

4th month - at the beginning of the 4th month, management approached me with a detailed scope of the entire project development (total of 3 years for the cycle), I was told that they wanted me to work on refactoring alot of the older parts of the application to more closely represent the new parts I was creating as well as building new parts and functionality. I was also told our development team was going to grow pretty quickly in this month we hired another 5 developers. I spent this month dealing with the sudden influx of developers and holding meetings about the applications and trying to get the team organized.

5th month - at the start of this month we took on a total of 9 other developers, for our total of 20 (which thankfully remains the same today). So much like the last month I was tasked with getting the other developers up to speed, I was told by management I would be back tyo development as soon as things stabilized.

• At the end of the month I was pulled into a private meeting with my 2 managers, I originally was hired on as just a 6 month contract with renewal every 6 months, My managers told me they wanted to hire me on full time as a Senior Software Engineer as they mentioned that I went far above what the job originally entailed and wasn't afraid of the constant changes of position and scope over the few months I had been with them and showed mastery of the application, and demonstrated considerable programming talent.

Current Things have settled down a bit now that we have a full sized development team now, I am currently working on design analysis and planning of reworking parts of the application as well as doing day to day management of a set of 10 of the developers below me.