I woke up this morning thinking “I might lose my job today”.
I did lose my job.
The writing has been on the wall for a while. Firstly there was the conversation a month ago about me not picking up PHP & WordPress up quickly enough. Within a week I had much more knowledge and therefore also confidence about them – and my employers had noticed too.
But recently there have only been snippets of coding to do. The most recent decent block of coding was nearly three weeks ago, and I was really quite impressed with what I did – for a junior. It wasn’t noticed though.
And ever since then, all I had been doing was content loading. Very repetitive and boring. Copy and paste, copy and paste, copy and paste. Not at all web development.
Ostensibly there is no place in their company for a more junior web developer like myself. They need designers. They need content writers and content loaders. They need experienced web developers. I simply don’t think they were large enough to handle someone with raw abilities that still needs a little manouvering in the right direction at times.
I do not at all hold it against them. They were great to work for, great to go out for beers with. The team were excellent, I worked with 4 genuinely nice yet intriguingly different characters. Bar the last two weeks, I really wanted to work there for a very long time. It is definitely going to be a successful agency.
They were visibly gutted to be letting me go. They clearly didn’t want to be doing so – they said how well I fitted into the team, how well I worked with others – how much they really liked me as a person. How I had never let them down once.
I was fairly gutted but I was also well-prepared. I didn’t enjoy the repetitive, frustrating nature of the content loading in recent weeks (the software was buggy). I am not sat here with a tear in my eye. I am sat here with hope, opportunity and beer. Maybe a slight tinge of disappointment.
The opportunity now is to spend the next few weeks working on my portfolio, which is weak, certainly compared to my capabilities – I know so much more now than I did 6 months ago when I created it and most of the websites on there.
After today which will involve nothing but drinking super strength cider, playing roulette machines in local bookmakers and finding out where my local drug dealers hang out, oh yeah and claiming lots of benefits…arrrrrggggh my back…where was I? Oh yeah, after today I will get on with my myriad of projects that I have planned – in fact, not even planned but in my head. And finish those I never finished months ago.
I could sit here and moan. I could sit here and wonder what I could have done better – there sure are some lessons to learn.
On the way back I passed a funeral procession. It was quite fitting – things can always be far, far worse.
I have no doubt in my mind that I will be a web developer, and a fucking good one at that. I have come far in the past few years, especially this year, and I do not give up.
If you know anyone that needs a website, please let me know.
I will be a web developer again.