I am learning code since february 2017, I was 28 y-o at that time. I am self taught and I studied economics and international relaions at university.
I got my first job this year in 2019. I started and now I am working as a junior front end dev for 14 weeks. In my country there is this 3 months of testing period, where both sides of contract can freely decide to cancel the long term-job contracted. I passed this period successfuly. Does this make me a professional? I dont know???
I do like the coding job and I like the company as well as my colleagues.
The start with my duties was rather chill and my manager gave me a slow acceleration paste, when he was giving more and more difficult tasks and at this point I have the general knowledge of using all the tools, company uses (like BitBucket, JIRA, PHPStorm, FileZilla).
I try to finish most of my tasks solo, since all other colleagues are PHP programmers and my managers is always busy and he he wants me to become increasingly independent. It is OK, to ask questions, but sometimes I feel he is feeling overworked and this sometimes comes out as a decisive and bit angry tone in his explenation. I often run into issues and some issues discovers only my boss, so I think I should try harder to get better in quality of my code.
What about my feelings? Well I do love, when I come up with a sollution to problem I managed to solve, but the dopamine rushes are after 3 months getting smaller and smaller. It is probably due to fact, that I fix simillar issues in CSS and jQuery and recently I do not work with any new technology.
I would still feel other people are way better developers, since they wotk on the company app code, which is mostly done in PHP, a tech that is still very new to me, and they solve just much more difficult issues that I dont fully grasp.
I try to learn on weekends and evenings as much as possible, it is going slow sometimes, but I am slowly getting there.
Over all there seems to be a lot of work in the front end at this point and I aim at getting better with PHP in the future, so I would be much more independent as a team member. Still often it feels, there might be a limit of complexity of tasks I would be solving on this position. Correcting errors in CSS and creating new functions in jQuery is fun, but I am not sure, how much joy I would get ftom it after couple of years. Seems at this point the devs, who do the back-end play much harder game and get much better rewards.
Now I aim at getting better in front tech tech and get better in basics in back-end in the future.
Over all now it seems getting a first job was kind-a-easy. Getting better and getting promoted from junior is much harder and serious game. I spend even more time studying, than when I was just applying for my first job.
ASK ME ANYTHING, if you want. I would like to share my experience
before learning to coding and all do you have any prior education in coding .
if not then how you manage to learn the coding .
what resources you used while learning . @simonB87
Firstly, congratulations on getting through the probationary period
Do you feel that having a degree helped in the end and was it ever mentioned at the interview stage or were they only interested in your practical coding skills?
Well I learned a lot, but more things related to team management, organisation, coding style. When it comes to learning hard coding I lerned a lot CSS Flex, jQuery and OOP for JavaScript. That was quite a lot, but honestly I feel I entered a whole new game . It is like, when you are learning to drive a 4-passanger car and a month after that you learn to drive a 30-passanger BUS. You just can not compare these things easily
I only coded for fun website in late 1990s and then early 2010s. Just HTML+CSS.
When I started in 2017 again Javascript and jQuery was unknown for me totally
I studied economics at school, only IT classes I had were on using the MS-Office and on using statistical software. I had almost zero coding knowledge.
I was following the free code camp - I finished the basic Design certificate and I was somewhere in the middle of the JS-certificate. Honestly free code camp seemed to me endless row of small little tasks and I felt I am not building real website. I think I will finish the JS-part, but I give it the same value as if I was just reading coding blogs…
Build a Social Network from Scratch: JavaScript PHP + MySQL Created by Reece Kenney
Honestly I learned the most by doing my 4 freelancing gigs, when I was creating small portfolio website for freelancers and small apps.
I also was a bit proactive, when I had interview in my current job, I saw they were suggeestin the Less.js compiler of CSS. So I took a 120 minutes tutorial on Udemy.com and gloriously presented the result during my interview. That would seem almost childish, but the managers was pleased I know Less.js
well having a degree was just a proof I am not stupid and I am able to learn. I think having an economics degree among mostly team of IT-graduates doesnt do much. At leat the manager would feel, a person would be a good fit in the crowd of other uni-graduates. Still I could have goten the job without the degree. There Is a lot of work, manager still doesnt want to streess the team that much, so we are searching for devs a lot, but there are very few of them on the job market.
More valuable was showing cheers interest and wanting to learn the tech.
Still I do not do compicate things, It is mostly editing the CSS and writing few lines of jQuery. Writing a whole new jQuery feature is a “special day”
Even my manager at the interview said, this position is not for a high skilled web developer … but still there is a lot of work that needs to be done. I do enjoy it, but I honestly feel I should move after 9 - 15 months towards something more complicated, such as PHP, since there is a lot of more work for back-end-dev in our company.
Having a master degree and that finishing a PhD helped mostly myself to get some feeling of achivement and get my prioritis straight in my life. So far it was not a help in my coding carrer. But I think in my country it is something, which makes you stand out among other freelancers, if I would go to freelancing again.
All in all, I would probably use my degree at other departments of my current company, since we are working in the “market research” industry. But I do not plan to switch to business-adminsitration again.
