Dear new developer,
I wrote previously about when to throw in the towel. Now I want to mention when you shouldn’t.
Anything worth doing is hard. That includes software development. There are times, sure, when it feels like you’re a superhero. When the code is flowing. When you can hold the entire system in your head.
Those times are great, and, in my experience, rare.
There are also times when it’s a grind. When you look up at the end of the day and wonder “what did I actually do all day?” When you are picking up a new technology or system and it feels like you are on the last move of a game of Jenga, with all the pieces about to fall over.
This is the time when you need to stop, take a deep breath, and then keep going. That doesn’t mean you can’t pop up and ask questions or take breaks, but sometimes the only way out is through.
There’s an art to knowing the difference between a grind that you have to get through and a wall that you can beat your head against without making progress. I don’t have a simple way to differentiate, other than to say that the grind often happens at the beginning of a project (when you don’t know what you don’t know) and at the end of a project, when that last 5% that you put off because it was hard balloons to 25% (or more).
I have told teams in the past that “if we aren’t learning and making mistakes and doing new things, we aren’t doing it right”. That’s because if a software engineer knows how to do something, they’ll likely automate it (and then they won’t have to do it again).
Sometimes that learning process is joyful. Sometimes it grinds. You have to push through.
Sincerely,
Dan
Letters To A New Developer 