Daily Despair of a Junior Dev
Psychologists Don Kelley and Daryl Connor describe this phenomenon in a paper called “The Emotional Cycle of Change.”
I remember talking to a friend about how he got so good at playing guitar, and he said, he’d played his songs, or songs he loved, until listening to the song or playing the the song damn near made him vomit. I never learned more than a few songs, and my ability to play with others never amounted to anything better than, ‘meh.’ I stopped wanting to climb the hill toward mastery. I did not climb out of the, ”valley of despair.”
I have heard of the “plateau” everyone reaches when learning, but I do believe a “valley” is a better image of this struggle. You can see where you are starting on your side of the valley, and perhaps you can see where you want to go on the other side of the valley, but every time you start off, you refuse to look down the switchbacks you must first take to get to the bottom of the valley, and then when you are there at the bottom, with a rushing river roaring down the middle, bushes with thorns creeping into the path, and you are looking up toward the ridge of the destination is incredibly more daunting. So You quit. You jump in the river and pray to make it to civilization before you are smashed upon the rocks and fallen trees.
As a developer, this emotional rollercoaster is all too prevalent, as I have been asked at every sprint to implement something new in terms of a feature, or a new architecture, or something — the funny part most of the time is I am not the one looking over across the valley at the destination. It is my manager.
“Oh hey, Humble, you see that over there?”
“I kind of see it, It’s a bit far, also the fog escaping the valley below is kind of blocking my view.”
“Well, Humble, that is exactly where you have got to get going toward, or our product is finished, dead in the water, over.”
“I don’t think it’s that terri…”
“Here are a few buzzwords from some techie articles I just read with my boss. Now off you go. You’ll find yourself in even greener pastures over there. Now go!”
I have been in this state of uncertainty for basically my entire career. I love it. It is why I became a software engineer, and I’d have to say graduating with a mathematics degree helped me get very comfortable, “not knowing.” My career makes me keep sharp for learning new… technical… things. The “emotional cycle of change,” is insightful, because change is difficult even when you wish to change. I seem to have learned the trick to getting myself to change faster, more for the long term, and be happy about — I take baby steps. Baby steps are all it takes to start walking, and then to start running. As a developer, I am at the almost walking stage in my career.
I can read/review code and find optimizations and best practices. I can draw a simple cloud architecture for a business problem. I have experience to fall back on when something comes up in deployments, and configurations across distributed services. Most importantly I have no shame in fighting for something that is found to be incorrect and admitting I am at fault.
I enjoy my baby steps down into the valley of despair. I have strong, resilient, chubby baby legs and good pudgy baby knees for my age. The best part about baby steps is I am cautious with each step, and of course I crawl when I need to crawl. I think my child-like curiosity for finding a solution is the real secret to getting out of my, ”valley of despair.” So, if you find yourself exhausted and frustrated working on a solution, then step back — shake out your baby legs, do some baby squats, and take small baby steps.
