This is not the developer you are looking for?

Jason Towle — Wed, 26 Jun 2019 10:39:20 +0000

I hope you don't mind me getting this one off my chest. Apologies for what may seem a minor rant.

I've seen quite a few job adverts grace my inbox over the years and another one came through yesterday which included a should have which I find irks me somewhat?

It's the kind of should that appears to suggest you can only class yourself as a competent and worthy developer (coder, programmer, software engineer, insert your favourite job description here) for this role if you're attending meetups, have a blog or contribute to stackoverflow, github et al. Basically I feel it suggests you need to live, breathe and intend to die for coding. Life therefore has nothing else to offer.

Now that's a fairly dramatic over exaggeration, admittedly, and let me be clear the activities listed above I am 100% behind. It's more the job advert suggestion that you can only do this job if you are also regularly doing these kind of activities. I only have a few repositories on Github, I don't have any activity on Stackoverflow and to be fair my very limited contribution into the "community" is here on Dev.to (2 posts including this one and the odd comment on others).

I also had a job interview once where it felt like the interviewer was almost trying to impress me with how much all of the "guys" code outside of work. Again, to re-iterate, I am all for this. I certainly try to find some spare time for keeping my skills up to date and learning new things that I can take into work with me. I just found it a bit of a turnoff and I suppose it's because if I interview someone for a developer role, I'm also interested in who they are when not in front of a computer developing the next groundbreaking framework/library. I need to know they can unplug.

I'm not sure if it's worthy of another post but is this then a kind of elitism issue in the industry? You're not cool if you're not jacked in 24/7?

I just want to close with a little disclaimer to make sure I've been clear throughout that I am not questioning what anyone chooses to do with their spare time. We all do what works for us individually and what makes us happiest and I hope you all aspire to that. I just question whether our suitability for a role should be marked against what we are doing outside of the work environment.

RANT OVER

Looking back: The first job

Jason Towle — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 09:39:32 +0000

I tend to think, I tend to overthink. My mind plays a merry go around of where I've been and where I may or may not be going, until it slows down and picks a particular vision to focus on and replay (over and over). In this particular episode I somehow got focused on my first job out of university and those first few weeks, the first few months even.

I was the proverbial rabbit caught in the headlights!

I'd spent 4 years completing a Computer Science degree and having successfully navigated the interview, I'm sat at my new desk, in the wild, surrounded by developers all talking to each other in what can't have been the English language, surely, yet they all seemed to know what each other was saying. I even fumbled around trying to get my new laptop connected to the laptop dock that was provided.

Everyone is staring, they know I'm a fraud, they know I've never been near a PC in my entire life and they surely know I couldn't even write a "Hello, World" program.

Through my 4 year degree course I'd mainly coded in a mix of Java, C++ and VB6. I was somewhat familiar with C#, yet here I was, a newly inaugurated C# ASP.NET developer. First task.... "We're looking into this new CMS system, can you investigate it, look into it's functionality, play around and get familiar with it? ..... Oh and can you put a presentation together and present your findings in a couple of weeks?" More panic, the sweaty palms and a heartbeat to end all heartbeats.

Roll on a couple of months and I'm on a new project team, I'm working with a couple of guys who really know how to code and I'm feeling a little bit more comfortable but still somewhat out of my depth. Particularly when I hear (for the first time in my life) the terms Dependency Injection and Unit Testing. Wait! What?! You did a CS degree and these hadn't come up?

Correct. I'm sure CS Degree curriculum's have come a long way since I was in Uni but these things just hadn't come up as part of our directed learning and I guess how I'd approached my self-directed learning meant I'd missed them too. I digress, the point I was getting to was that initially this "dependency injection" thing, in particular, just didn't make sense. I couldn't quite grasp the benefits but the rather knowledgeable chap imparting this knowledge upon me believed in it's benefits wholeheartedly. I still didn't get it. I've been here a few months now and I'm still a fraud.

Again, some time went by, I moved to another project and slowly but surely everything just became normal. I picked up that foreign language those developers were talking back when I first started, my confidence in my technical abilities grew and I forgot about that guy who fumbled and panicked in his first few weeks.

That said, 12 years on... guess what?

I still feel like a fraud

To all you new developers out there, starting your first job, maybe feeling the same way I did. I just wanted to say it's OK. It's going to be OK. You'll never know everything and there will always be someone with more knowledge about something than you, and ultimately you will know more about something than someone else. Time will be your friend.

DEV Community: Jason Towle

This is not the developer you are looking for?

RANT OVER

Looking back: The first job