You finish courses, you build projects, you learn new stacks, but when comes this magical moment when you can be called a developer?
Everyone wants to be one, and the question keeps popping up. If you made your first “Hello world” page or “To-do” app, is it the right time to enter the world of those who proudly wear the title? Or do you need actual work experience for that? Or a product that is fully functional and brings you some additional income?
But what if that’s not enough?
An HTML-page with plain text describing how long it took you to make it doesn’t have any actual functionality and the fact that your “To-do” app is called “Tasks” and have 123 animations doesn’t really make any difference (because there are at least 124 people who made it with 125 animations).
As for the work experience, this seems to be a proper measurement. But what if all you’ve been doing at the job is making the same buttons with slightly different colors? And the rest of it was attending meetings and discussing the agile methodology and how long your next sprint will take. An over exaggerated example, but still the point is you didn’t really “develop” anything. It’s like having a license but not doing any driving. The experience is still stacking up and your car insurance payments may get lower, but your actual skills are close to the ones that the new drivers have.
Then comes the making of your own “Project”. The one. Now you’re building it, developing it. All by yourself. And yet, sooner or later you notice that at least half of the time is spent on making the content for the project (editing texts, correcting typos, looking for the right images, etc.). Not even that, but when it comes to the actual development part you realize that a huge part of the codebase is if not copy-pasted, then at least taken from all over the Internet, remade and inserted into your project. And sometimes you don’t even fully understand how it works. Or you understand it at first, but, as the project grows, you suddenly realize you forgot how some of its parts function. And there is also a question of the success criteria. What should it be? The fact that the project generates you a certain income or that it was made with a certain goal, and you can consider it achieved? And then you realize that there is a no-code tool doing the same but ten times faster. What you’ve developed has already been developed and is also more effective.
However, let’s say, you are confident enough to call yourself a developer. But what level are you?
Some say there is a particular way to define junior, middle, and senior developer. The first one can make the job done under the guidance, the second one doesn’t need the guidance and the third one can make a completely different type of job done without having any initial knowledge of how to do it. But then we have our last case again. The one with making something that has already been done in a better way. You still developed it yourself from scratch, right? You just didn’t know that there’s an alternative (or, in most cases, you did know that; you just thought you could do it better). Does it mean that you are a senior developer who reinvented the wheel? Or that you are not even a junior one?
There is a certain approach of learning foreign languages that is based on the natural order of acquisition. The main concept is that whatever you do, you’ll end up learning the language for as long as it takes, regardless of what you do if you do it consistently. Meaning that there isn’t really any magical recipe to become fluent in a few months, you simply start learning, keep doing it, make all possible mistakes and wrong choices and eventually you start speaking the language. If you stick with learning it, obviously.
Maybe it’s true for being a developer as well. Maybe we all are half-stack front-to-back mid-level junior senior developers with a portfolio of twin projects of different shades of color palette.
Maybe there is no point in looking for an answer to the question if you are a developer or not. You just keep doing what you’re doing and eventually get a certain result. Then you remade it until it gets better, and then you set yourself a new goal. And the loop never ends. Because, to the contrary to programming, having an infinite loop of goals might be a good thing. You just need to approach them one at a time.
But who am I to tell you all this? I’ve just spent several hours on making a Rock, Paper, Scissors game in React, so yeah… Thank you for reading.
