Employed or self-employed life of a new developer
I recently got my first developer job. I am newbie to coding but I love learning and building things. However, a part of me doesn't enjoy the idea of working for someone else to build a product for them and to make them rich, but I know working in a company provides great experience.
I would love to build a product for my self that I can truly be proud off. This feeling has become intensified as I have been working on a project for work which they thought would be great for a newbie such as myself. Everything was going great but now it is getting super complex and things that I believed to be working are breaking. I do know it is part of the job of being a developer, considering I love solving problems, but this is so demotivating as people high up in the company have been wanting this project for time and now it doesn't work like they expected. When I work on my own projects and come across difficult problems I always push through without this feeling of no motivation and hopelessness. A part of me wants to leave and take the risk of getting a part time job in web dev, preferably a company with a product I find interesting. And use the rest of my time to build my own company or product. It may require me to work more hours and there may be no stability but being my own boss sounds right to me even if it is hard.
Do you guys have tips or personal experience of not enjoying the feeling of working for another person or just this feeling in general?
You will likely never be happy working for someone else. That being said, the hardest work that you will ever do will be for yourself.
Hi Cellzing
Some thoughts on reading your post
It is great experience to work for someone else as a junior, professional development is tough for a variety of reasons, so you will learn loads by staying.
Are there more senior devs at the company who would mentor you? If not, maybe someone on here.
Maybe you are using unit / integration tests atm but if not this is very important in giving you confidence to make changes.
Try to understand the business case for the app - network with other departments / colleagues - this will give you more insight and opportunities to learn.
If you can take on the responsibility and deliver the app, it will boost your profile in the company, and maybe lead to better things. If it's not working for them, try to understand why and what you can do to solve it. Remember that understanding the pain of others is a massive part of being a successful IH.
Give it a few more months and if you still hate it, consider making a switch. But do this professionally, don't leave your current employer in the lurch.
Remember that in professional software dev, the grass is rarely greener. Most (all) projects have their own problems. A huge advantage of being a IH is that you make your own choices, but like you say it is very hard!
In the meantime, hang about on IH, listen to the podcasts and start a side hustle?
good luck
Matt
Working for somebody else often leads to bigger and better experiences. Over my career, I've been in and out of Corporate America, startups I was a non-founding engineer and even taking stints of focusing solely on my own stuff.
For me, I've gained experience in every realm of my career, but some of the more unique experiences have been working for somebody else. Scale's different at a company pulling in a few million to a few tens of millions of revenue per year. Things like working on databases with billions and billions or rows and handling 150 million impressions a day aren't experiences I've had with my own stuff. That's not to say that it's not possible, it's just that those were good experiences and they helped me learn an epic amount that has been applied to my own stuff.
I wouldn't look at working for somebody else as a bad thing, unless you're not finding value in the experience. If you're not learning and growing, then you need to find something else. I'm hard pressed to think that in your first development gig that you're not learning anything.