I started my journey into web development back in October of 2021 and started my first job as a Front End engineer on May 31st, 2022. Many out there reading this may be seeing that time-to-job number and raising an eyebrow at it. Eight months is not a very long time to start learning web development and end with a full time job in the industry, but that's a whole other article by itself. Today I'm going to be talking about the lessons I've learned in the last six months of my first job as a web dev and hopefully pass on some knowledge that will help at least one person out there who's searching for or has just started their first job.
Being an engineer - and yes you are or will be one - takes thinking like an engineer. The whole basis around being an engineer is solving problems. Without us, society would collapse or not exist at all. Now, of course, society would go on without you or me. Especially at this point in our careers assuming I'm speaking to another junior. I felt completely disposable when I first joined my team for one simple reason: I did not know what everyone else knew. We were working with Redux, internationalization, feature flags, multiple portals, a component library and the list goes on and on.... At the time this gave me the fear that I could be fired at any moment simply for being incompetent, but I stuck my nose down and just took the time to learn.
I was lucky to have a senior who encouraged me to take this time when I didn't know something. He understood that I'll work more efficiently with an increase in code quality if I actually understand the tech I'm working with. The hard part about joining a team, even if you've been developing for years, is the exact stack they use could have parts that are completely foreign to you. This is when your skill in the ability to learn matters.
When you're presented with a new technology what is your first response? Do you ask a lot of questions? Go to YouTube? Freeze? These all have their place, even the last one, but if you want to excel and make the most out of your first six months you need to have an attack plan for learning a new technology. First off, you may want to slow down with the questions. I'll talk more about this soon, but attempting to figure out the answer on your own first will be incredibly vital to becoming a better developer and not annoying your seniors and co-workers. Part of learning how to learn will be taking the initiative to sit down and research. YouTube is a great resource for this, but should seldomly be your first line of offense.
For example, let's say you've never used Redux before and you have no idea what global state management even is. Heading to YouTube or asking your senior may sound tempting, but there is a better alternative. Going to the documentation of the tech that you're trying to understand is one of, if not usually, the best source of information. These are the people that wrote the code behind what you're attempting to learn. Where do you think the YouTubers found the information to make a video on? It's not just a long line of content creators regurgitating each others words. Most likely they went and read the documentation.
Most of the time this documentation will live on github and have a multiple examples and explanations of what their code does and how and when to use it. For larger packages like Redux you'll often even see a website with very consumable tutorials from the authors themselves. If you can master finding and reading documentation early on you'll seriously up the game of what you can accomplish as a junior.
If no suitable documentation can be found then google and stackoverflow are your best friends. If this is a bug or a question about something new that you're trying to tackle then most likely you're not the first. Google well and google often. Take the time to learn even if you feel anxious that you're not pushing code out. Taking the time now will speed up your productivity later and everyone will be happy. You're not expected to crank out insane code at your first job, so take advantage of that. Relax and learn what you can so that when expectations start being set, you can reach or even exceed them.