New to dev, programming

I graduated a year ago and after working for peanuts for 5 months, I landed a sweet .net gig that pays pretty damn good. Everyone knows I am ‘new’ and I’m ‘learning’ and I get a lot of help from my mentor when he has a second (which is rare). Ive suffered from depression and just an overall pessimistic attitude since middle school. A positive outlook just seems to elude me though I wish I could change it. Im constantly in fear for my job and with a child on the way, it makes it worse. On top of that, we use pseudo-agile so there is a pretty strict schedule and a ton of accountability which adds to my stress. Most days I come home defeated and I know my wife has to be tired of hearing about it, but she can always tell. I guess it’s just nice to know I’m not the only one.

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I feel you man. I constantly feel like I’m just waiting to be fired. And strict deadlines don’t help. I never feel like I’m good enough so definitely fighting those feelings is a challenge.

Looks like the pattern in this community is that Agile is terrible. We can’t have immovable deadlines. Things happen, especially in development, that are out of our control so we have to be able to move deadlines or have more people added to the project to help out versus throw it all on the current people working on it.

I know with a child on a way, it’s not ideal, but if an environment like this is stressing you - maybe you can look into other opportunities on the side?

I also try to constantly communicate with the managers. Any blockers, anything that comes up that affects the deadline, I tell them right away. Don’t feel like you’re a super hero and somehow you can “figure it out” by fitting a 20 hour task in 5 hours or something. If you’re falling behind, it’s better to let them know early.

Also to admit you’re human. I had a job that treated everyone like factory workers too and at some point, I put my foot down. If they told me I had to complete and 30 hour task in 10 hours, I’d tell them that it wasn’t possible. I would do what I can with the time I have, but I wasn’t going to bend over backwards for them. After a while, it gets to a point where you can’t care for a company who doesn’t care about you. You can only do so much. And if you don’t take care of you, then who will? Certainly not a job like this. At some point I left that job and it’s one of the best things I’d ever done. If developers are nothing but “resources” without lives and health to tend to, then it’s not worth it. They will try to get as much out of you as they can unless you yourself sets the limits.

Anyway, I hope things improve for you. Try not to worry about things you have no control over, and start setting some limits that might help you take care of yourself and your family. I hope that in the future, you find a job that appreciates you more.

When I started as a web developer, it was 15 years ago. Back then, I was doing asp scripting with MS Access and a IIS web server.

Everything I knew, I learned by myself. I didn’t do any web development in college. I learned C, Pascal and Cobol… but no HTML/CSS/Javascript/dynamic scripting.

No Github or stack overflow either. I was checking out the “asp today” website regularly and believe it or not, I was subscribed to a paid PHP newsletter so I could get code samples.

My point is: there are so many tools out there to help you learn. In 2 years, you’ll accomplish more than I did in my first 5 :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

I had some tips for you from my own experience but I think this article says it all. It’s a great read about the challenges we face as software engineers:

https://www.nczonline.net/blog/2012/06/12/the-care-and-feeding-of-software-engineers-or-why-engineers-are-grumpy/