As the title states. I’ve been a software developer for a year now and work for a tiny company, where the salary isn’t amazing. I got paid more at Apple Genius Bar, but it wasn’t as challenging.
I still feel like I’m stupid, I’ll rely on the owner lead engineer for help on the more complex problems and because we have a great set of conventions I’ll frequently be going back to old projects to extract the logic from their. Whether that be reading from Excel spreadsheets or the controller flow, as we use GraphQL api for most calls.
Does it just click at some point?
Some advice that has taken me over a decade to learn myself:
There are no rules, the titles are made up, the responsibilities and requirements do no matter.
Get what you can from your job, and once you get something do your Best even if that best sucks, and stay until you have gotten what you want out of the job, or realize you can’t or don’t want to do it anymore, and then start again doing something else.
Don’t ever limit yourself thinking you need to “level up” or something needs to get unlocked.
Learn by doing, try your best, you will make things that suck sometimes, but as you do more and more you should be making things better.
In this industry, change is the only constant and your ability to learn, grow, and adapt is going to be more important than any singular technology you can learn.
I can promise you’re not as stupid as you may feel you are. You’ve made it a year, and that means something.
I’ve been pushing myself hard to get some certifications to really deepen my skill set. You may find that’s valuable to you, or you may not. I’ve found that it’s improved my ability to take a step back and understand the systems I’m building from an architectural perspective. It’s been helpful for me.
I’ve helped coach interns and new hires at my company before. I actually like when they ask me questions even if it’s something I’ve answered before, because it shows me that they want to learn. And even better is when they ask “why do it that way?”, because it forces me to check my own understanding of the problem set. It also means that I can really dig into the explanation and hopefully they walk away with at least one more tool in their toolbox.
Thanks.
I guess it being about change is great for me, as someone with ADHD I thrive off change as it’s novel.
I have been playing with the idea of getting some certifications, but more in terms of cyber security as an extra thing I could do for our company in terms of penetration testing our applications so I may dive deeper into this area.
The same for understanding the architecture as although there are only 5 of us under the bosses, I appear to be the only one interested in the inner workings of the company and products we build. Like the boss has made a seriously cool project that will help us code the boring parts faster using LLMs and he’ll frequently call me over to show me what he’s done. Even if I don’t understand how he has devised the architecture, I’ll still be able to suggest features and give it a go at implementing them, and he is on hand to praise me and get it over the line. Like seriously this things is so cool. A lot of what we do is to our coding standards and a lot of repetition is done away with. For instance if I create a new Model in C# and save, it will watch for changes and add the new table in the code first DB file, it will suggest the validation, add the CRUD schemas, generate the typescript / GraphQL layer and even scaffold the basic views we might want. I helped build the watch command and I’ve never seen a colleague pay any interest at all.
I can sort of relate to the last paragraph as recently I’ve been on a project with a more tenured coworker who works remote, and he isn’t familiar with react as he handled more legacy projects so I got to explain all the conventions to him and it does make me realise I kinda know what I’m doing.
One year is nothing.
Learn as much as you can from the people around you at your current position.
Find a new technology or existing one you want to improve/learn and create a project out of it that you can do at home.
Look for ways to improve your productivity.
Become a SME.
One day you will own a project, helping the new guy and be the person people come to if they have questions.
Put in the time. You’ll find your way.
