There’s no way around it. You’re fresh out of college, you just landed your first job, you’re in your first stand up and you realize it…you suck. Everything you’ve been taught thus far is likely, not very applicable. Legacy code, stories about repos you’re vastly unfamiliar with, engineers that have been doing this for years, and a general nervousness of an unstable tech industry have got you in your feelings on your first few days of this new gig.
The best part about this is that being comfortable with not being very good at your job right now will be to your benefit later. You’re likely not expected to complete, relevant, work for at least six months and you’ve got several engineers with numerous years of experience at your disposal to learn from. Now is the time to soak in as much as you can, ask all the dumb questions, and slowly …oh so slowly suck maybe a little less. You’ll find that most of your peers at your new work will have similar stories, they’ve all been there learning something new and have also spent way too much time on a story that would have been completed by a more experience person in a few days tops.
Keep pushing, keep learning and remind yourself that you’re there for a reason. You made it past the interviews, jumped through all of the hoops and it was your skills that got you to this point. Soon you’ll find that , although, yes you may not be at the level that you wish you were at in the field just yet, were you to receive that pesky back-end story that you spent two months on again, it would not take you nearly as much time to complete. This gap will shorten, and soon you’ll receive something else that will require a large amount of discovery and research, and the process will start anew, only this time you’ll look forward to suckin’ again because you’ll know of the great things that come from it!
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