Boy it's been quite a couple of months for me. I am back from months of inactivity due to just being completely overwhelmed.
My new team is great, wouldn't have asked for a better start. There is nothing to complain about, but just that the job has been above my previous scope by a significant margin and just took a lot of getting used to.
My current team work on marketing technology, so it's a bit of an odd ball since we aren't directly working on the main app functionality, and not exactly a typical backend role either.
Here are the challenges I've faced since getting out of my one-man show at my first job. Hope it helps putting somethings to perspective.
The scale of the project is incredibly larger. There are just so many freaking technologies that we have to use it's insane. The first months it's literally me trying to get used to the terminologies and wrapping my head around what's going on without failing too much. There are so many techs that revolve around getting user data and consuming those data. Even after 5 months I am just able to scratch below the first layers.
Talking to so many people, SO MANY PEOPLE. We work cross functionally since we are reliant on many floating pieces before we can do our work. So if we want something done, we might need to talk to 2 or 3 teams to get the pipeline going. Since we support marketing efforts, we are also actively in discussions with the marketing team and the data team. It's quite different from just talking to the manager/PM.
The process is 100000x slower. I used to be able to dish out 4 tickets, up to 10, per day and still be watching hours of youtube during my time. Now I am spending so much time on non-coding related tasks that maybe I get a PR out once a week. The tempo is so different that I was on the verge of mental breakdown thinking my productivity is absolutely shit.
Never thought I'd have to do presentations. We have to an Engineering Research Documentation (ERD) that explains a design for a feature. Then we will have to schedule a meeting where people on you team, and those under the larger org umbrella, participate and discuss the pros and cons. It was nerve-wracking to say the least and I was just glad questions could be answered.
As you can imagine, life has been hard. On most days all I do is wake up, work, and sleep at 10pm (10PM!!!!!!!), because I am just so exhausted that I can do anything else. The past few weeks I've been able to get more breathing room and get some exercise down. It's great to finally see pieces come in together not just at work but also in my life.
It's been a great journey, follow me on here and other sites so that I can show you what's it like to be an average coder trying to break it big in the developer world. Thank you!
If you’d like a 1-1 conversation with me going over your resume or your career trajectory in general, please reach out to me at https://www.fiverr.com/kevtseng
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