This is a guest post from Jerome Hardaway. Enjoy.
Dear new developer,
So, you’re in the office, learning a million things a minute that you were never exposed to. Everyone around you seems super competent and you don’t want to take time away from them, but you have no idea what you’re doing. You feel like you should probably be a janitor instead of working on a million dollar web app. I’m here to tell you, you’re wrong.
Every person who seems competent has felt like you or still feels like you do, they are just better at hiding it. I know people who have been doing this work for years and feel silly at least once a week. Hitting your head against the tech wall is a rite of passage here and normal and whether they tell you or not, we have all been there. We have all either accidentally taken down prod, nuked the repo, felt lost, accidentally ran up the AWS bill, and just straight up sucked at this job. So long as you focus on having more good days than bad, you will be fine. More than that, you’ll do great, so relax cause we are all rooting for you.
— Jerome
Jerome Hardaway is a Developer Advocate at Quicken Loans and Executive Director at Vets Who Code, Where they help veterans get jobs in software by teaching them how to program for free.
Letters To A New Developer 