#SoftwareDevelopment #CareerAdvice #ITIndustry
Hey fellow devs! 👋 Have you ever felt like you’re stuck in a rut at your job, just going through the motions without really learning or growing? I’m going through that right now and it’s frustrating!
I started my career at a big bank right out of college, but now I feel like I’m regressing instead of progressing. My team is mostly made up of older folks who are about to retire, and if they leave, the application we work on is in trouble. I’m constantly given random tasks that don’t really relate to each other, and it’s hard to grasp any skills or make progress.
I’ve tried talking to my manager about it, but my concerns seem to be overlooked. I’m tempted to leave the company, but with the job market being so tough right now, I feel stuck.
Have any of you been in a similar situation? How did you handle it? Any advice on how to navigate this kind of career roadblock? Let’s discuss and help each other out! 🤔💡
Possible solutions:
– Consider reaching out to other teams within the company to see if there are opportunities for more consistent work and skill development
– Look into online courses or workshops to continue learning and growing outside of your current job
– Start networking with other developers in the industry to explore potential job opportunities that align more with your career goals and interests
I can relate to this. I became sort of a jack of all trades master of none and I was recently laid off and I feel like I should have been becoming a master in something. I believe you should learn on the job. And feeling overlooked will lead to more bad feelings but at least you’re in good standing. Get out of there on your own terms
Tbh my skills are actually better but i’m a lot lazier at 7 ish yoe. I used to grind my ass off for 10 years to get where i am today. Some of it was a total waste of time, it was hard low paying work that wasn’t even in the tech space.
Most of the time, your job will be to fix a bug or add a new feature. It isn’t like being a student, where you job is to just learn whatever you can.
If you want to learn, you have to do that on your own or during spare time at work.
Saaaaame. It’s made me somewhat resentful since I’d like to be learning more and I’d like to be on the new thing we’re building out, instead of being stuck maintaining the older and even legacy stuff because the rest of the team is too busy with the new thing. And this is also after the first team I was on was disbanded because we lacked a manager or a consistent direction for a while. None of the things I worked on or built there have followed me to the team I was shuffled onto.
So, yeah, I feel like i have 3 years of 1 year of experience.
Welcome to the rest of your life. Most software is held together by chewing gum. I’m sure you’ll get a good rep in the company if you do things to a higher standard than the rest of em. Be a beacon of high quality, without being preachy – you’ll soon be recognised
I moved into management a long time ago but I had a similar experience during my time as a developer. I learned some lessons from some truly brilliant developers that I worked with that I will share with you:
1. No one is going to take ownership of your professional development other than you. So own it. Determine where you want to take your career, identify the skills you need to get there, and use down time at the office and your personal time to build skills.
2. The best developers I’ve seen pushed themselves to learn new skills all the time and they pushed those around them so that they could apply those skills. These developers were constantly advocating for solving a problem with a new design pattern they had learned, using a framework they were learning on a new project, or starting a special project to try out a new language. They annoyed the shit out of all of us, but they took ownership of their professional development and every single one of those guys is in a Principal Dev role right now.
3. You have two choices in life and your career. You can relax, and float downstream – taking assignments from your management as they come. This is a perfectly fine approach to life and probably one of the best ways to be happy. Alternatively, you can start to identify problems for your business and push to solve them. If you want to be really bold, you can skip the pushing and just go ahead and solve them. In my experience if you can accurately identify the problems for the business and correctly solve them without taking away from management’s priorities you are never going to be penalized and will likely be rewarded. You do not seem like you are going to be happy going with the flow. This can be tricky as a lot of young technical staff don’t have a good grasp on what actually needs to be done, but considering you said you were ready to leave anyway, YOLO.
>Have you ever been given so many random tasks back to back that don’t correlate with each other so often that you can’t grasp the/any skill?
Yeah, towards the end of my first job. I was given lots of 1-off tasks where I was learning something completely new then literally never seeing the subject matter again. It was cool to figure stuff out but I felt like I wasn’t really developing any actual knowledge. It was a big reason for why I left.
>I feel this happening and I want to leave the company but as we all know jobs are hard to come by rn
You can always interview elsewhere without quitting your job
Was it really that easy to get a job in 2020 ?