11
emcea
5y

Started new job almost two moths ago..

For almost 3 years I was developing custom themes, plugins, and widget for WordPress using PHP, jQuery/AJAX, and MySQL.

The new company that hired me brought me on as a backend developer to help rebuild their custom PHP Framework, and other web based software/products as their moving toward Google Cloud Platform.

When I started, MVC and OOP was new to me... took a couple weeks to get the hang of things, and understand their system.

Just when I was getting comfortable, I had a task assigned to me that was all NodeJS...

Had a 30 check-in the week I started the Node task, and was feeling pretty beat down because it was all new to me and I wasn’t making a lot of progress, and still not comfortable with Promises yet, and some other ES6 features but finding my way around slowly but surely.

Manager reassured me that I wasn’t going to be fired and it wasn’t unique to myself. Very encouraging to hear, but I’m my own worst critic so it’s frustrating not being able to make progress like I would with PHP projects.

Fast forward to this week, I started to review another task for a feed and found it’s all Ruby! Another language I have no familiarity with... and started to question if I’ll every get the hang of all these languages and be a solid team member...

Not only do I have to get a grasp on NodeJS and Ruby now, but then I’ll also have to get familiar with GCP and whatever else comes along with it...

Oh and I’m using Linux now instead of Windows/ OSX... so there’s that too.. plus the other command line tools the company built, and uses..

I was comfortable developing in PHP and know I needed to take a step and accept this job to move my career forward but it seems like I’m always behind the 8 ball...

Some days I wonder if it was worth staying a Wordpress developer and just focused on learning ReactJS and stay more Front-end than Backend..

I enjoy working with talented people but I don’t like being the low man on the totem pole knowing I don’t have the experience yet.

Does it feel like this for all devs?!?!

Comments
  • 2
    Yes, its a constant game of catchup man. Just keel going at it and look for the odin project and freecodecamp for node and js as well as rails in ruby
  • 0
    @AleCx04 Thanks, I appreciate the feedback. Both seem like good resources
  • 0
    It sounds like they are seeing some pontential in you for the future.

    My advice is to do what you like the most and be aware of work contracts that force you to do overtime.
  • 0
    I was and am in some what similar situation after working ~2 years for this one firm. The company tries to give all equal wage based on number of variables. But it seems that I'm the one with "the bonus" but overall lower pay for my effort. The times are so flexible and cotract good in other ways (follows laws and other legal work contracts) that I'm not changing it until I have finished the final exams in school.
  • 1
    Man, don't worry. NodeJs is one of the easiest backend technologies, ruby has the motto that goes more or less like "easy to read, funny to write" (never used, only looked at some code).
    The only difficulty you might find is to memorize standard libraries, but if you managed to develop for wordpress I think it'll just be a matter of time.

    It's a great opportunity to learn new stuff, and if they assigned you this kind of task they know you'll need some time to get used to them.
    Just keep learning, go on, it's just a matter of time.

    And again, no one is expecting you (neither the manager!!) to know everything immediately.
  • 0
    Appreciate the feedback!

    I’ll definitely keep that in mind moving forward.

    I haven’t posted, or even opened the app in a while, and forgot how solid of a community dev rant had.

    Always good to find people who can relate and understand the journey!
  • 2
    From personal experience, tech switching gets easier with time. At some point you'll see that the basic concepts are the same in pretty much every language and you will become productive in something completely new in a matter of hours.

    Just stop thinking in languages and start working out logic. Everything after having a solid algorithm on paper is just implementation details.
  • 0
    I always got the feeling that companies think you can code.. so you must know all languages... and they simply push you in other techniques. even if you don't want it
  • 2
    Don't stress, language jumping is hell of fun, plus when you get to a point of knowing a few it's all down hill as a lot of languages have enough in common to not be to bothered with how to do it.

    As long as you know what you want to do, a search engine will normally tell you how to do it.

    Ps: welcome to your first steps away from wordpress!
  • 0
    This is my forth week at this new company I've started working with. I was hired mostly because of my Laravel experience. On my first day of work, I was handed over 2 projects written in a different php frameworks and expected to push something out by the first day. I struggled to get around the projects by I am now 65% comfortable with them. I am currently learning 3 more languages and 4 other frameworks to be able to work on the other systems that they have.
  • 0
    That feeling never really goes away.
    I have been in the industry for 15 years. And coding since I was 8.
    And I every year I'm like "wtf is that?".
    Last year mas deep learning and visual computing. And I love it! I would hate to say " I'll be doing the same thing in 10 years"
  • 0
    @dmonkey i have never heard of this motto. @Root have you?
  • 1
    @dmonkey ... eh?
    @AleCx04 No.

    @dmonkey You really shouldn't talk about things, especially poorly, if you've never used them.
  • 1
    The more varied programming experience you acquire, the less difficulty you will have when switching languages. (Though frameworks will always require some reading)
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