In today's episode, I answer a question from listener Charissa about her stressful work situation as a brand new developer. Today's episode is sponsored by Linode. Head over to Linode.com/developertea or use the code DeveloperTea20 at checkout for a $20 credit towards your cloud hosting account! Thanks again to Linode for your support of Developer Tea.
In today's episode, I answer a question from listener Charissa about her stressful work situation as a brand new developer.
Today's episode is sponsored by Linode! Head over to Linode.com/developertea or use the code DeveloperTea20 at checkout for a $20 credit towards your cloud hosting account! Thanks again to Linode for your support of Developer Tea.
Please take a moment and subscribe and review the show and share with another developer you think will enjoy this episode! Click here to review Developer Tea in iTunes.
Hey, everyone, and welcome to Developer Tea. My name is Jonathan Cottrell, and in today's episode, we're taking a short break from the Developer Career Roadmap to answer a fantastic question from listener Carissa. Before we jump into this question from listener Carissa, I want to take a moment to thank all of you once again for listening to the show and for becoming involved with Developer Tea. I would love to see that involvement just continue to increase, and there's a ton of ways to get involved. One of them is to join the Slack community. You can go to spec.fm slash slack. That's free, and it always will be for everyone who listens to these shows. Me and every other spec show host is hanging out in that Slack community, and we have over 6,000, in fact, 6,549 people as of the time of this recording are in that Slack community. Most of them, if not all of them, are designers and developers around the world, so go and join that Slack community. We have tons of great conversation in there. Of course, once again, all of the spec family is in that Slack community. Another way is just to send me an email. You can send me an email at developertea at gmail.com, the same email that we've had since the very beginning of this show, since episode one, basically. So go and check out the Slack community, and of course, send an email. That's exactly what Carissa did. And it was just a few weeks ago that I got this email from Carissa. Carissa wrote in and said, Hello, Jonathan. Before asking my question, I just want to say thank you so much for your podcasts. They have been very helpful in my learning process and have given me the encouragement I need when I was feeling down or frustrated. The question I have for you is about my first real job and project deadlines. Well, this is awesome, Carissa. I'm so glad that you're asking this question. This is going to pertain to all of you who have been listening to the Developer Career Roadmap. I'm going to ask you a question. What is your first real job? What is your first real job? 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There are many things I love about this job, such as finally getting the chance to really use my skills in JavaScript and PHP, and of course, getting to spend all day developing websites. While I love all of these things, I also have a few concerns. The two designers I work with don't seem to understand how the coding process works and often want me to jump right into coding without any real planning. I've just finished my first real project and I'm feeling very stressed out. My boss wanted me to create an entire website, hand-coded from the ground up, in one week. The site was for a client that had a strict deadline, which I understand, but they constantly changed the project scope in the course of this one week that I had. The site ended up being over 10 pages, requiring database functionality, and the clients had requested many unique features requiring JavaScript to write. This was incredibly difficult, for me to complete in one week. I'm not allowed to work overtime and I don't get paid for it, but in order to meet the deadline for this project, I went well over 40 work week hours. I tried talking to my boss and explaining to her that I needed more time, or at the very least, for the scope to stop changing, but she was unwilling to change the deadline or keep the original scope. On top of this, I never received important information from the client, such as contact information, photos, and content that they wanted on the site, or even database access and information for reports from their database that they wanted to include on the site. On top of all this, in the same week, my boss also added another project that she wanted me to begin work on. A project to create a mobile application with cloud server access, an entire database, and more that she wanted to complete in two weeks. I don't mean to bash my boss at all, but after this, I'm feeling overwhelmed with the overwhelmed. I'm feeling stressed and concerned that this may be the norm for what is expected of me. The real question is, is this normal? Does a single web developer knock out an entire site like this in one week in a normal job setting? Would you be willing to give any advice as to how to handle this situation or how to better approach my boss? I understand that this is my first job as a developer and thus I have much to learn and many skills yet to hone. I also love coding and I'm content to sit at my computer and code all day long. For this reason, I do not want to just give up if this is a normal work environment, but I could certainly use some advice as to how to cope and thrive. I certainly hope this isn't an overwhelming message and would so greatly appreciate any advice you have to offer. Thank you so much for your time. Sincerely, Carissa, a person who is bestowed with the best advice. Most definitely not curled up in a ball and crying under their desk. Carissa, first of all, let me say you are not alone in these problems. There are many other people. In fact, I would say most developers have experienced at least a slight version of what you are experiencing and perhaps just as extreme or more extreme than you are experiencing. So that's kind of the starting point in the sense that other people have experienced this, this feeling of being constantly behind, being overwhelmed. Feeling constantly stressed, feeling like this is never going to end and that you have no way out. There are tons of people who feel this way and there is a way out. We're going to talk about a lot of the things that you asked about here, Carissa, because and the reason I decided to read this, this is probably the longest listener question that we've had. The reason I decided to read this one is because this is the sentiment of so many developers and this problem that Carissa is experiencing ends up for a long time. A lot of people, it ends up being the way they view this industry, the lens they view the industry from. And a lot of the other problems that we talked about in the past on the, on this podcast, such as cynicism or estimation issues, a lot of those stem from this specific kind of situation, especially if it happens as early as it is happening to Carissa. So I feel like this is an incredibly important topic to discuss. It's actually a suite of topics, quite a few things going on here. And we're going to talk about all of them right after this quick sponsor break from our great friends at Linode. You've heard all the details about Linode before on this podcast. So we're going to do something a little bit different. Linode has been sponsoring Developer Tea for such a long time and they have made a lot of what we've done this year possible. So first of all, a huge thank you to Linode. Linode is showing that they support the developer community by supporting this show and that they want to get closer to people. Like you, the young developers who are starting out building their brand new projects and they need a place to put them, right? You have side projects that you're building. You have your own personal websites that you're building. Perhaps you have some experiments that you want to run, or maybe you are working for a large company. You're an experienced developer. Linode is wanting to get close to you because they have a product that they believe will make your life better. Now, how do I know that? Well, primarily because Linode offers, a seven day money back guarantee. On top of that, they're offering $20 worth of credit. So you can actually get a server running with Linode in just a few minutes. And that server can run for an entire year for $100. Their plans start at $10 a month and they have two gigabytes of RAM on that $10 a month plan. And you can do pretty much anything with these, with these servers. You have root access, so you can go and create pretty much anything you want to create, whether you're working on Node or, you know, you're working on a server. So you can do pretty much anything with these, with these servers. You're working on a Ruby or Python, or maybe you want to run your own private Git server, whatever it is that you want to do, you can do that with Linux. And therefore you can do it with Linode. Go and check it out. Once again, Linode is providing you with $20 of credit, seven day money back guarantee. Check it out. Spec.fm slash Linode. Thank you again to Linode for sponsoring developer T. Okay. So Carissa is facing a mountain of stress. It feels like she can't climb out of this hole that she was put in. Uh, with this project, this one week, 10 page project. And really, if you break down the numbers, we can start out by saying that, yes, this was absolutely too much to ask, especially of a brand new developer. So let's start there. I think that just based on what I know about this project, based on what you're telling me, uh, Carissa, that your boss was probably asking more of you than you were able to deliver, even in the best of circumstances. And that was the case. You worked, uh, all day long for multiple days. You worked past what your normal working hours are. Now on this show, we don't like to, you know, go against the boss, right? And what that means is at developer T, we don't believe that bosses are inherently bad. And Carissa, it sounds like you believe the same thing that you aren't trying to bash your boss. And in fact, you're trying to do as good of a job as you can in the scenario that you're given. So Carissa, there's a lot to consider. And I'm really just going to run through this list. I don't have bullet points as much as I have just some things that I want to give you to consider. And anyone else who is in a similar situation as Carissa, uh, you don't have to be in a small company for this to apply. This, this could apply in any size company at any job level. Really, it just kind of depends on your specific scenario. But, uh, Carissa, your boss is the owner of a new company, right? And she may not know how long it takes to develop a website. She may be learning this for the first time. And she's learning with someone who is relatively new at their job. So you're kind of learning this for the first time. Of course, it's going to be extremely difficult to determine how long something should take. It's hard for somebody who's been doing it for 25 years to understand how long something should take. We are notoriously bad at estimating things. Most likely, she's being driven primarily by the goals she has for the company. And she may be setting those goals based on an accidental misunderstanding, kind of blind spot about how long it takes to deliver something in development. Now, where this misunderstanding comes from or where this blind spot hasn't been filled in, I can't really tell you. It sounds like this person is very driven and that they want to accomplish as much as they can in the shortest amount of time. That is kind of the entrepreneurial way of thinking. So that's probably what's happening. And you just happen to be on their team. And they're pushing you to accomplish as much as you can and to adopt the same spirit they have. You did the right thing by trying to talk to your boss, right? But perhaps the timing was wrong. The hardest time to discuss a problem, and you know this probably from other conflicts that you've had, the hardest time to discuss a problem is while that problem is occurring. 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