Trying to figure out my career

Nathan Martinez — Thu, 01 Nov 2018 20:48:46 +0000

Hello, Dev.to!

I'm a little nervous to have my first post to be this earnest and vulnerable and not technical. But over the past year, I've watched from the shadows as Dev.to grew into an accepting and supportive community, so I hope that I can be honest and get some good feedback and advice.

So...I guess I should just dive right in, yeah?

TLDR:

The following will be an angry rant about my experience with a company for the last 4 years. It is more a public airing of grievances, both petty and substantial. It isn't especially important for you to see or read any of it.

If you can just skip down to the last section where I actually ask for some advice, I would be very appreciative.

I hate my job

Four years ago I was working as a wide-eyed junior dev at a small company when I was pulled off of my team and assigned as the only technical resource on another project that supposedly had potential as a new business opportunity. It was completely separate from what the company was doing.

Looking back, I probably could have said no. I definitely should have said no. But I was not asked if I would be comfortable moving onto this project. So I said nothing and told myself that it was a unique opportunity that not many junior devs get.

There is a reason for that. I wish I could go back and tell myself to run. Any 'opportunity' where a well-staffed company is only willing to assign their least-experienced team member is no opportunity. It is unserious bullshit, and the only person that stood to lose was me.

I was thrown into the deep end. We wouldn't bother to hire another dev for almost 7 months. Which means it was left to me to architect, implement, 'test', and maintain some sort of solution. None of this work was done before it was handed to me. I spent so much time trying to figure out what the hell I was doing. The project required coordination with a business partner to develop an interface with their CMS. My new manager had absolutely no technical experience or knowledge, so it was on me to stumble through call after call trying to get what we (I) needed. I had no idea what I was doing. During this time of anxiety and panic, I was also still doing the work I was originally hired to do.

I thought about leaving almost every day, but I was scared. During this time in the wilderness, I had gained some job experience, but had I improved? There was no culture of mentorship. Which is not to throw any of the team under the bus. They were very supportive. But it was not built into the culture to dedicate actual time or resources to help a junior dev grow. I did my work in a timely manner. I wrote code, of course. But I had no metrics, no experienced superior available to look over my shoulder and judge the quality of what I was making.

Fast forward...

I'm still working on this project. It was split off from our parent company a couple of years ago, which effectively cut me off from any access to help from their development team. They eventually hired another dedicated dev. He is competent and good at what he does, but he is also a lone wolf by nature. We've never really connected, and I haven't learned anything from him.

But together we have built a web platform that is the foundation for a profitable business.

Sounds like a happy ending as I'm writing it.

But now we still have only two devs who work fairly independently by nature and necessity: we are the only two with the knowledge and skills to develop new features and handle all customer support requests by our now 50+ customers. The sales team is made of all older men who promise every feature and customization to every potential customer and then leave it up to us to deliver.

(Aside: Based on their titles I assume they are all also own some part of the company. Which was never offered to the two people who actually built the product.)

And then...

One reason I've stuck it out was out of convenience. I fell in love with a wonderful person who teaches in a county about 2 hours away. As we got more serious, it was easier for me to adjust and move. So for the past year, I have been working remotely about half the time. It was lonely but fine.

But a month ago, a month before my wedding, they decided to revoke remote work privileges. Despite having no prior warning and completing customer requests and actual improvements on our system, my boss accused me of not doing my job for the month of September. I had to sign a 90-day remediation plan.

I was honestly in shock: is that really happening? Have I not been performing? But after digging through my email for any warning signs from management (I had literally received no messages from my boss, aside from WSJ articles that he sometimes spams us with before posting them to LinkedIn). I talked to our new customer specialist, who had been acting as our de facto scrum master for the past month or two. She was surprised: she couldn't think of anything that would have warrented the remediation. She was also not asked about my performance.

I'm done. I want out. I fantasize about the moment I can hand in my notice.

But I need some guidance

If you have skipped ahead, smart move! The long and short of this post is that I'm ready to get out of a bad work situation.

But I haven't gone for anything position in over 4 years. I find the interview process daunting: can I really sell myself and my bizarre experience to a company that I really want to work for?

Am I technically strong enough? I have built scripts, services, frontends to make my product work. But I've developed all of this in a vacuum. Is it all garbage? Is it passable?

I've been used to having to explain what I'm doing only in the most basic terms. Will I sound like an idiot when someone asks me about the web-scraper I built on Selenium, or the API I just deployed with Flask?

I'm starting small

I have a few things I have committed to make time for:

HackerRank: This one is a little self-indulgent, but going through HackerRank and proving to myself that I know how to solve problems is helpful. Plus I'm hoping that it will all pay off when interview coding challenges come around. If there are other resources/practices that help with interview prep, I would love to hear them.
Contributing to an open source project: I've always put this off because I never felt good enough to contribute anything useful. But I'm going to get over it and jump into it. I'm planning on checking out Dev.to's code, but if you have any suggestions let me know!
Side Projects: This one is completely on me. I let my day job demoralize me to the point where side projects were the source of more anxiety instead of fun, creative expressions. I've been wanting to build a substantial app using Vue for over a year now, and I'm going to do it.