I started my professional career 3 weeks ago as a full stack Javascript Developer. I graduated in 2019 it took almost one year to get a job due to some domestic issues. But during that time i learned many new things.
my company is a small software house where we are 4 Developers, 1 front end developer and 3 including me are full stack developer and 4 othere persons are working in digital marketing.
Now let's come to the point, i wanted to become a JavaScript Developer and now when i have found the job , my job is giving me depression.
Reason
First 2 weeks were fine. Because i knew many things related to development before working in any company. Now things have totally changed , first they didn't tell me how to do things the CEO told me to develop a demo blog project using Apollo GraphQL and mongodb and Apollo client with react. I only knew about Server side logic of GraphQL but but didn't know how to work on client side. CEO told me their folder structure orally which i couldn't understand at all. When i asked for and reference project CEO said if we provide that project to you then how you will learn new things. And i was shocked when i listened these words. Every company and person has it's own way of naming file and coding style how one can guess your coding style.
Previously i learnt working with react class based components to manage state , CEO told me to use functional components and use React Hooks. this is the first time i am using hooks in a project. But i learnet working with hooks. Okay so far things went well. But then he said use Redux in a graphql client based react project , i didn't know how to make a request to GraphQL API. and they didn't guide me how to do this. Only waited for results. And i was unable to achive my goal and he skipped that project for the time being.
Then they gave me a project of their client to go through the code. I went through it and got a vague idea of wht that project is doing.
Then CEO told me to upgrade the forms of that project to React side code, forms were built on top of Ant design version 3 to 4. And i was like 😂ðŸ˜ðŸ˜ðŸ˜‚. And didn't guide me how to handle the data as all forms were Nested and dynamic and dependent on other forms.
I spent 2 days but couldn't do anything.
Do you guys think i am wrong and i am not behaving like a professional or the CEO is not sincere to me and don't want me work properly.
Does it happen to everyone who starts his/her career ? Basically they are not guiding me properly how to work on their projects.
How to deal with this depression ? Should i leave my job and stay with them ?
Top comments (16)
Sounds like crappy project management to me. Acting like an asshole and talking in riddles to make you feel like you are doing things wrong and you should know things that you actually shuldn't know instinctively sounds like a terrible way to onboard new team members.
Try to do your best but don't blame yourself too much for things that are beyond your responsibilities or your possible knowledge in your current place in your career. You will come across something better eventually, all you have to lose is learn stuff that will help you get a better job.
Thanks
I didn't want to leave my job but unexpected things are happening. I moved to other city for this job, and i waited for 1 year to get my dream job although i had many other job options but i wanted to be a developer and i worked hard for this. I learned many new things on my own. But everything is unexpected now they are giving me depression i feel like a dumb person who can't understand what is happening to him.
I cannot tell you what to do really. You should learn to cope with pressure and work hard, but that does not mean tolerate any kind of bullshit or fall into depression and burnout before you even start your career.
If you think you can power through and you feel that there is something you can get out of that job/company, then try to keep up, it might get better overtime. Don't give up without even trying to put up a fight.
On the other hand, if you feel exhausted and abused, stop. Fuck that, fuck them.
The company has a 3 month probation period policy for new joiners. I am nervous should i keep working with them or resign from job before they ask me to leave their office ? Everyone is saying that i should not leave my job as i lack experience and I don't have reference for new job .
I am feeling lost 😞
Main problem is mindset your boss will feel it if you were enthusiastic and really try to commit he may even keep you even if you didn't do your job well but if he feels you are the kind of person who are undetermined at the first difficulties encountered he risks not so write a second post and commit yourself to cheer up ;)
I don't know what he is thinking about me . But they didn't pay attention on me from the very first they gave me a laptop and said work on graphql we use GraphQL, before that i had very little knowledge but i learnet many new things which I did not know earlier then he gave me a project to work on. He told me Orally and send me the link of documentation i was new to these things and today he said you didn't improve yourself in three weeks. Whereas one week ago he said i am improving and appreciated my work. Today he said i don't know anything at all.
I have decided i will leave this company i am not begging for job but i wanted to be a developer.
Don't worry you'll find another one but be careful not to publicly post your negative opinions except when you're already established because some potential employers will read you ;)
Thanks for telling me, i was about to share my experience at LinkedIn
Excellent point.
Sounds pretty rough. Sorry you're having to go through this. Absence of technical mentorship is a huge problem in this industry so even if you find a new place of employment, you're going to have to find yourself in a similar situation (speaking from experience, the grass is always greener on the other side). Keep telling yourself: there is no shame in asking questions, asking for clarification, or asking for help if you don't know how to do something. This is ok. If your CEO has such a clear picture of what he wants, why doesn't he just build the project, ya know? They hired you because they need you, so do your best. Try not to get caught up in how ridiculous their expectations are or aren't and just build what you can because at the end of the day, they're the ones managing the project and not you. They need to be able to pace their engineers with their projects, and if they can't, they'll eventually discover this behavior is not sustainable and have to change their ways. Just know that it's completely normal to have no idea how to do something, and yet be asked to do it by a certain date or time. Deadlines are actually more flexible than they might seem.
In a big multinational company they have time and budget to let you learn slowly. I've been project manager and for example on one of my Java project with 5 developers there was a Junior who did take 6 months to learn whereas the project was to be finished in 1 year, so it's 50% of the time which is a lot.
In a small company, you cannot have this luxury, so one thing that is important for a CEO is to recruit people who has the capability to learn how to learn quickly. My best guess is that he's testing you on that. So you'd better not being depressed for too long or change for a big company where you'll learn slow and less in same amount of time.
If you can take the positive side of things you'll make huge progress. To motivate you that's how Markus Frind learnt to code and later helped him become... a Millionaire ;)
inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-...
"Every six months, I got a new job," Frind says. "It'd start with 30 people, then five months later, there'd be five. It was brutal." When he did have work, it felt like torture. His fellow engineers seemed to be writing deliberately inscrutable code in order to protect their jobs. "It would literally take me four or five hours," he says -- an eternity in Frind time -- "just to make heads or tails of their code, when normally you're supposed to spend, like, two minutes doing that."
But cleaning up other people's messes taught Frind how to quickly simplify complex code."
Why do you need help from your co-workers? I know a thousand years ago when I started that was the only way but now we have the internet! Anything you get stuck on just Google or ask stackoverflow.com or even just post here - in the amount of time it took me to read your post I could have just solved whatever you are stuck on and then some.
Some issues are related to their own existing project , like they are using ant 3 Forms these forms have further nested forms and these nested forms are using functions from parent form component and passing data back and forth which is a very complex thing. and CEO told me to convert these forms to Ant 4 which is different from Ant design 3.
I don't understand from where data is coming and where it's going and they don't tell me how to achive desired results. At least he should help me on how to start converting forms as because these forms were develiped by someone else.
Yeah there are some issues which we should google to find the solution.
You should talk to your team leader, or project manager or whoever is responsible for coordinating your team and ask for clarification. If you don't understand what you are supposed to do, how are you supposed to do it. It doesn't mean you need them to tell you exactly HOW. They might give you freedom to choose how to do it, or not, but restraining vital information from you is just stupid.
Many people in places of power feel justified in expecting everyone to understand immediatly what they had years to learn or understand. They call that superiority complex. Don't get overwhelmed, play it cool and simply ask questions, and if they don't answer then tell them that you don't have enough information to do your job and that they don't want you wasting time and their money guessing what and how to do your job.
I've spent almost my entire career debugging other people's code. And even when it was my own code I frequently had to start from scratch understanding it. I don't know what an Ant 3 Form or an Ant 4 Form is (ant.design/components/form ?) but I do know how it feels cleaning up messes that you don't feel are your own.
Here's the thing though - no matter what job you get coding you will end up with other people's messes. If you do feature work you might get handed nonsense from a product manager. If you build an API there will be some previous version of the API that you have to be compliant with even though the previous versions had a very poor design.
Even now co-founding Uclusion where in theory its all ground up, blue sky I am left cleaning up the mess caused by Lean Startup zealots who push poorly built so called MVPs on everyone till no one trusts anyone enough to try their new product. But I digress.
Hang in there with your current job - there's nothing unusual about what you are facing - our industry unfortunately still has a long way to go before such experiences are less than common place.
First of all, just take a breath. A lot of information is coming at you at the same time, and you might not understand half of it. This is normal when you learn new things.
Your first step should to write it down (or type it out). This way you're already teaching yourself to understand what's going on. By doing this, you're also figuring out where you need to start: what do you look at first and what do you need to know. Being thrown in the deep end, where you need to figure out everything by yourself is a tough situation to be in. I understand why your manager does this, but this is not the right way. Try this: write down all the steps you need to go through to get to the result you want and show these steps to your manager. If it's wrong, he'll probably corrects your mistake and that will give you a good starting point. If you're right, then you can simply follow your own steps.
I'm happy to answer more questions if you have any!