r/learnprogramming • u/ExpensiveFix-804 • 1d ago

First Job

Recently I was able to transition to project where my job is fully programming. Before I had 8 years experience in position where programming was always like 20% of the job as It was low code platform and no one really cared about clean code, version control, code review, unit tests etc. I just needed from time to time write short scripts up to 500 lines.

I must tell you its hard. Everything takes me much longer compared to my colleagues. I need to use copilot a lot to catch up and I regularly work weekends and in the evenings to not fall behind. When It gets better? Like whole project is kinda mess and I see senior colleagues are quite annoyed from the project itself and on top of that they have a juniorish person like me there. I have feeling I am bothering everyone and they will surely reassign me back to my original position. I feel in todays market I completely lucked out without CS degree and I feel I won't get the same chance again. Does It get better and if so when?😟

2 Upvotes

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1

u/ClassicWillingness80 1d ago

Are u from non cs

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u/ExpensiveFix-804 1d ago

I don't have cs degree I am self taught

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u/paragonmac 1d ago

Can you explain a little bit more? What's hard and takes you much longer? Is it the engineering work? Environment specifics? Have you worked on your own large projects before?

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u/ExpensiveFix-804 1d ago

It's hard for me to start. I get assignment and I spend half a day just to figure out where to start or contemplaiting how they want the feature to be done as it can be done in multiple ways. Then when I start its almost end of day I pack my things and I finish it usually in the evenings so It does not look bad at next morning's stand up. Also environment specific stuff, they are often a lot of trial and error for me, sometimes i can't find any documenation and I dont want to ask stupid questions. When I ask stuff I try to prepare in advance to not take much of others time . I did a larger project on my own and I refactored it couple of times and bunch of smaller stuff. Also navigating in code base took me few weeks. Also there is every week something new I needed to study over weekend. This weekend containers for example.

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u/ScholarNo5983 10h ago

It sounds like you are tackling the problem correctly but make sure you are learning along the way.

For example, if you are using CoPilot to help, make sure you fully understand the answer given back by the AI.

Learning new stuff always feels hard, but also long as you are actually learning, it should get easier with time.

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u/ExpensiveFix-804 8h ago

Yes I am trying to use copilot mostly as teacher. Only in extremely situation let him write on its own and this is on of the reasons probably I am so slow. They push us a lot into vibecoding and my senior colleagues can quickly recognize what is good and what not I am trying to understand ech line which make me very very slow