How I learned failure as a developer
Let me start off by saying that I am currently a Full Stack developer working with languages such as ruby, php and node on the server side and javascript frameworks on the frontend such as react and angular. This however was not the case 2 years ago. In fact that was my first failure at starting web development.
It all started on a dreary September day… alright we will stay away from the creative narrative writing here. I had an interview for a position to be a vb(Visual Basic)/ Traditional ASP developer. I was shocked because this was my first opportunity that someone gave me to show what I could do. Well in all honesty I knew nothing about VB/ASP and literally tried to just fake the interview so that I could get on the team and learn in my off hours to catch up with what they were looking for. This was not a senior developer role and in fact they were looking for someone they could train so in a way it wasn’t all just fake.
The story continues as the interview process took place I was thrown in front a computer to do some which I now refer to as menial tasks such as bubble sort and simple login page recreation. I was freaking out because I had never taken a look at how VB/ASP syntax even worked and how it was even coded. In fact the only language for the server side that I even knew and it was so minimal in fact just functional not even OO was php that I had played around with in my spare time as a support tech. Needless to say I was literally screwed! However I ended up after an hour of digging around on the interwebs finding solutions that I could use to figure out and complete the requirements of the interview tests. The rules specifically said that google was okay to use so no I was not cheating.
In the end of all of this they directed me to a room to where the developers were sitting down on their nice and shiny glass L shaped desks. The Senior developer looked at me and simple asked the question “Explain how a bubble sort works”? In my pure fright I couldn’t come up with even the first thing to say. The developer started throwing out solutions which I now know were just fake answers that he could catch me in a lie referring to. I picked up the first answer he had spoken and was like yep that is how I did it. Brutally he came back with “Your Fucking lying aren’t you, you googled the solutions”, Oh man was I shaking now. I said yes, I am sorry the answers I found were online and I didn’t understand how the code worked at all. He calmly said thats okay it doesn’t matter how you came to the solution the truth is you just need to know how it works. Oh wow was I surprised and after that I was a lot less shaky and could have a nice conversation with the group of developers. I ended up getting the job and started two weeks later.
So I put in my two weeks and was all ready even took a weeks vacation in prep to move to a new house. Needless to say I didn’t last long at that job. In fact I lasted one whole day. The pressure got to me and I caved. When I walked in on that day I sat down with the developers patiently waiting for a desk to work with. Eventually and I say eventually because it took 2 hours for them to get me somewhere to work, I was thrown in front of a computer and given directions to access the ticket system. From there I was given tasks to do directly from the start. This frustrated me because previously in my conversation with the developers they had referred to this place as a team learning environment. If I am sitting at a computer by myself how is that team learning? By the end of the day I had just been nauseas and fed up with how I was treated. I called my previous job back in which I had left on good terms to come back as a support tech. They graciously took me back and that my friends is how I learned failure as a developer.
