Well, the internet is flooded with lots of success stories of young entrepreneurs, individuals and many other people across every medium. Everyone has their challenges, fallbacks, overcomings, mistakes and most important learnings as it helps us to grow in life.
Before joining my first company (control shift) I faced many rejections I learned a lot of things from that phase but that's a different story for a different day. For now, let's focus on the main thing.
While I was badly hoping for getting a job D-Day came and I got the job. The company has assigned me to work on a big ongoing project. It was a huge opportunity for me to learn new things and expand my current skills. While I was excited about the project when I first saw a few lines of code I was stunned because I was not able to understand the flow because the code was written by senior engineers and my manager assigned me certain tasks. I was not able to figure out how would I complete these tasks and even I had a thought in my mind whether I would be able to survive in this job or not. These types of doubts came to my mind because of fear. But today when I'm writing this blog we've completed the project successfully. I am the same person who feared a lot of things when I started working on this project 3 months ago. Today I've built some of the most important functionality/flow of the project and I was an integral part of the project. but how this transition happened? what are all those things which helped me to overcome my fear?
I am sharing all of my 5 major learnings here:-
Patience:- First thing I've learned is that you need to have patience if you want to survive in this industry (software) or life in general. You need to have a lot of patience. My patience level has increased immensely by working on this project it taught me how to be cool when things are not going your way. I've worked sometimes for more than 12 hours a day. I've started reading and understanding code slowly and it all started getting into my head. If I would've quit my job after seeing the code for the very first time but I kept patience and worked on understanding and going through it.
Taking Help From Others:- I used to hesitate a lot in asking for help. I used to think about what they will think about me. but when you work on a project you can ask doubts, and ask for help from your seniors and teammates because you all work in a team. but you should first try to solve any issues by yourself and then if you're not able to you can take help from a lot of online resources and communities like discord. In the software community, everybody is there to help you out which was a quite new and very interesting thing for me and in my company as well I got guidance from our seniors including the CEO and co-founders. They've supported me every time. I learned that everybody is there for you to help you out, you just need to ask for it.
Planning:- I learned that not having good planning will leave you somewhere you don't want to be when you're working on a project. I wrote code that was not as per the industry standard because I did not plan things I had just things in my head like what I want to achieve and I started coding which I would not recommend anyone should do. Having a clear plan or logic broken down into small parts on paper will help you achieve the large functionality which you're aiming for in your project very easily rather than directly jumping into writing code. I learned that coding is more about thinking. I learned from this mistake and now whenever I get assigned to a new task I break it down into small pieces and then I approach it.
Being Consistent:- I learned that if you're consistent and working on something that you want to achieve you can easily achieve it. When I didn't have this job I used to work on my projects but whenever I got stuck somewhere I used to leave all those things the way it is and always picked up something new instead of continuing with the existing one. I've developed one entire flow in the project which involved very heavy state management (react) just by being consistent and patient which I am very proud of.
Fun:- I learned how to not miss out on fun even when you're working under pressure and this fun part has a lot to do with your work. If you'll start enjoying your work then you'll never take your work as work it'll be like a challenging and funny thing for you. The more challenging it is the more fun it will bring to you.
Conclusion:-
Well, In the end, I just want to tell you that my first job and my first project have taught me a lot of things that cannot be described in words here.
"If your job isn't challenging and not helping you anymore to grow and learn new things then it is the time you should find new ones. "
Thanks a lot for reading if you like it please consider sharing, and liking and don't forget to share your first job or project experience.