As the title say I am looking for some advice.
I’m almost 6 months into my first role and it really isn’t what I expected.
I’m late thirties and always had an interest in tech, but personal circumstances and a late start in life left me unsure if I was good enough.
I did too many boot camps and in all them they discussed how in your first role you would get lots of support to help develop your skills.
I work for a small company < 10. I don’t feel I get the support I expected.
A lot of time the spec is kept in the lead engineers (owners) head and when given a task I get no timeframe, the task is given verbally with 100 words when I need 1000 words. It’s confusing to understand their vision so I’ll do something and either be told great or no that’s completely wrong.
If wrong I’m not called out and they will spend a little more time going over what they want.
The boss is always so busy that sometimes you feel like a burden asking for pointers.
The tech stack is great but as a mature company they have refined the process over numerous projects and the newest will start as a copy of the last one, keeping all the shared hooks and stuff, so naturally it’s second nature to them and I feel stupid.
I guess my question is is this normal and how do I write an email expressing these concerns and to gauge how I am doing?
As an aside, there is no remote work and no headphones in the office, even though nobody really talks about work that often. So when is a good time to start looking for your second role.
I feel like I flip between I am a god and can code anything and omg I know nothing show me the nearest bridge.
Thanks.
Yeah, that sounds pretty normal, I guess. The time-frame part is probably based on how new you are as well as the nature of the task. I did quite a bit of that type of thing when I started, basically fixing tech debt, and small stuff.
If it's something you want to bring up, I think you expressed yourself pretty clearly. You could schedule some time with your boss to talk about it.
What would frustrate me would be the rework I was doing. If you could maybe even set up a short weekly meeting? Show your boss what you're doing and they could tell you if it's the right track or not.
Bruh, I've yet to find an employer that can accept me. Congratulations on getting your first role. I've been told that the barrier to getting in is the hardest.
You’ve got this bro.
Getting my first role was the hardest thing I’ve done and a little soul destroying. So much so that after the first bootcamp and many rejections I did another bootcamp and then loads more interviews.
I suck at interviewing as I have ADHD and I’ll either be too open and honest or I’ll just clam up and seem like an idiot. The more you do it the easier it gets.
If I can get a role, then anybody can.
Don't want to invalidate people with actual mental health issues and neurodivergence, but I also have some sort of undiagnosed issues. Suck at socializing, have some sort of behavioral OCD. I remember how I fucked up my interview by blurting out the name of the company incorrectly cuz I was nervous. The co-founder was so furious, he left the video call.
I've wasted an entire year trying to create a developer portfolio, and the entire cycle is hilarious. I wanted to create one of those advanced interactive OpenGL site with the most modern technology, so I went with Svelte, Tailwind, Threlte and DaisyUI. Worked on the project last December, gave up during January, because I didn't know shit about ThreeJS.
Tried again around March, was able to make a decent gradient mesh, but I didn't know anything about managing scroll in 3d, managing resize with canvas and stuff, so I preserved the 3d part, removed the entire stuff done with DaisyUI, and tried creating a fullpage site. Failed miserably, because now, it was very hard trying to make it responsive, now that both the horizontal and vertical screen were fixed.
Removed all of that, came across a Svelte video that was in favour of making components, so I did that, and tried making one of those generic rolling text SaaS page like portfolio. At last, I was so overwhelmed with ThreeJS and Threlte, and also the component thingy, and since the site was making my shitty phone lag hard, so I removed the entire 3d work. Now the website looked so generic, I removed everything and used the most simplest style.
Alongside that, I was also working on bunch of other projects, but completed them halfway and gave up.
So this entire year, I wasted on creating a single project. The design part of my home page is complete, and I'm satisfied with how it looks. Now for the blog and portfolio section...
I have never been in a company that had it all.
I was in one with all of the proper setup, fucking 10/10 CI pipelines, tests, the works. Someone just made stellar templates. 0 documentation tho and if you need to launch something in dev, get fucked. 0 task management, minimal meetings, barely a trello, and often you'd be like "okay what I do now?".
I’ve been in this industry for almost 5 years and having worked at 2 different massive ( > 10,000 employees) tech corporations, I feel comfortable saying this is how the industry is. I imagine that the main difference between a company the size of yours and the size of the ones I’ve worked at is how well the systems are documented. Regardless of where you’re working, they need to be willing to help new people onboard and onboarding people need to feel welcome and comfortable asking questions. I’m currently almost at 2 years at my current company and I still have to ask questions all the time. The people I ask sometimes seem annoyed with my questions, but they never seem to think it’s bad that I’m asking questions, and that’s good.
I think you ought to ask for better communication at the outset of your tasks, and if they’re upset by that or tell you it’s your job to figure out what you’re supposed to be doing then that indicates they’re not interested in building a team and it is never too early for you to start looking for a different job in that case. Any reasonable recruiter or interviewer you talk to should understand that’s a great reason to jump ship.
@build now gg You can send a focused email to your manager expressing your desire for clearer project specs, deadlines, and feedback methods. Frame it as wanting to improve your performance and contributions, not complaining.
