> I was sometimes assigned stories no one else on the team had done anything like before, so at times I couldn't even ask the senior devs for help.
And?
Stop putting yourself in a “junior engineer” bucket. There is no eureka moment on the horizon that will suddenly make you into the N+1 developer that’s capable of solving problems without help. This is it, this is who you are. There is no good reason that a junior engineer with zero experience can’t perform better than a senior engineer with 10 YoE on any given problem. The difference is what expectations there are. If you’re good, the expectations of others pale in comparison to the expectations that you’ll set for yourself.
Honestly, it sounds like you are having trouble transitioning from the school model of contrived problems with an ideal imagined solution to the real world where things are far more ambiguous and you need to use judgement. I hated school and did okay at it, but I do well at real work, and I have very little to say other than that you need to stop trying to game the system and you need to start thinking about solving actual problems. Homework is to jiras what a wrench is to a horse.
Are you working hard enough? How often are you checking out at 5pm? Are you productive while you’re on the clock?
Your manager deserves some blame for not keeping you on track but honestly to me it sounds like you’re
1.) yearning for clean tasks with prescribed solutions to be implemented, and it doesn’t work that way.
2.) not working hard enough
3.) not using general judgment about whether the changes you’re submitting are going to accomplish what they’re supposed to accomplish.
Hard disagree. The points about not working hard enough and checking out before 5pm sounds like you were just trolling or being cheeky. If you were then you can ignore my response.
The response sounds like it’s coming from someone who’s never thought deeply about problem solving and it’s relationship with mathematical complexity.
When one is given a task that they have no idea on how to proceed, to them, the number of solutions could be infinite. At that moment, even knowing what to Google could be overwhelming.
Imagine the junior developer being given a traveling salesman problem as their first task but neither the manager nor the junior developer recognize that the problem is a TSP problem. The Junior Developer can spend years and years rediscovering all the heuristics and algorithms related to TSP without knowing they’re actually doing that. You can’t google for it very well because the task doesn’t explicitly say TSP.
What you need is a Senior Developer to step in, hopefully they recognize it’s a TSP problem based on their experience, and then give context and an explanation on how to recognize such problems in the future and finally tell Junior Developer “Just Google traveling salesman problem”.
No working beyond 5pm needed. Junior dev is happy they solved the problem that was pushed to production, Senior dev is happy they don’t have deal with a pile of technical debt and Manager is happy that the task got delivered on time.
I’m sorry, but if you want to be good you need to work hard and long. Ignore at your own risk.
With respect to the rest of what you wrote, I’d just say that the possibilities are always infinite and my point is that being able to discern and limit the possibilities to something reasonable is a skill that has nothing to do with seniority and everything to do with general (read: fixed) aptitude.
> my point is that being able to discern and limit the possibilities to something reasonable is a skill that has nothing to do with seniority and everything to do with general (read: fixed) aptitude
I disagree with that.
You don't need to be a genius to be a good developer, you can be learn to be one or you can be mentored to be one. Some aptitude is required, but nothing extraordinary. Hard work obviously is a good thing, but not a pre-requisite.
P.S. Our success criterias might differ though. I'm not part of silicon valley or FAANG so my standards might be lower than yours.
And?
Stop putting yourself in a “junior engineer” bucket. There is no eureka moment on the horizon that will suddenly make you into the N+1 developer that’s capable of solving problems without help. This is it, this is who you are. There is no good reason that a junior engineer with zero experience can’t perform better than a senior engineer with 10 YoE on any given problem. The difference is what expectations there are. If you’re good, the expectations of others pale in comparison to the expectations that you’ll set for yourself.
Honestly, it sounds like you are having trouble transitioning from the school model of contrived problems with an ideal imagined solution to the real world where things are far more ambiguous and you need to use judgement. I hated school and did okay at it, but I do well at real work, and I have very little to say other than that you need to stop trying to game the system and you need to start thinking about solving actual problems. Homework is to jiras what a wrench is to a horse.
Are you working hard enough? How often are you checking out at 5pm? Are you productive while you’re on the clock?
Your manager deserves some blame for not keeping you on track but honestly to me it sounds like you’re
1.) yearning for clean tasks with prescribed solutions to be implemented, and it doesn’t work that way.
2.) not working hard enough
3.) not using general judgment about whether the changes you’re submitting are going to accomplish what they’re supposed to accomplish.