I have a junior web developer job. My first one. I am three months in.
Everything started jollily. I impressed at first with my CSS. Though I then had my probation extended as I hadn’t picked up WordPress or PHP enough by the time I started my first project that required them.
As soon as I had finished that project, I was feeling so much more comfortable using them.
And then the coding ran out.
I have spent all last week, and much of the end of the previous week, copying and pasting repeatedly.
I don’t want to sound ungrateful – I’ve been given my first opportunity in the web industry and dearly appreciate it. When I was coding, I loved it.
Now I am doing nothing more challenging than copying and pasting (and with criticism of my punctuation too – despite using correct English punctuation rules).
I do appreciate that I am a junior. I do want to muck in where necessary to ensure the success of those that have taken a chance on me. But I fear a lack of progress – I still need to prove myself to them.
Annoyingly I have not had chance to do any coding in my spare time recently due to my hectic social life – London is hard to resist. I have so much I want to do on my own projects, and so much I want to learn to improve my abilities in my job. I am looking forward to a few purposely quiet weekends in December so I can at least practice my new-found WordPress/PHP skills.
I guess my question to anyone reading who has been a junior, is what did you go through on your first web developer role? Did you have to do lots of tasks that didn’t involve coding? Is it par for the course?
I am hoping that it is just a blip…I don’t mind too much, it’s mainly the exceptionally frustrating repetitiveness of it that was draining on me by Friday…I want to progress and pass my probationary period, which looks shaky, and data entry is probably not helping me.
This could have ended up quite a rant on Friday night but having had the weekend to think it through, I should understand that this is not going to be the perfect job all of the time – likewise I am not the perfect junior web developer. Yet.
I just cannot wait to get back on with some actual coding. Though may well be waiting until 6:30pm tonight to do so! I will be a web developer again soon.