5 ms·

I joined a large company last year after years of freelancing and found immediately that one of the skill sets which I had to develop was my ability to talk abo

I joined a large company last year after years of freelancing and found immediately that one of the skill sets which I had to develop was my ability to talk about technical details. When freelancing I would often be the only person on the project - I would have to talk to clients about the interface and the behaviour, but never about the details. Additionally the way I organize my thoughts about technical things doesn't naturally lend itself to verbalization. It's been a bit of a struggle and initially the sheer amount of time I had to spend talking to people was a bit exhausting, but FWIW, I did get better at it and I think it was actually very valuable for my growth as a dev. Really, it was unrealistic to think that I could be dropped into a completely different atmosphere and hit the ground running with all the skills I needed. You're probably an overachiever to get hired there in the first place, so the experience of not being great is probably somewhat new to you - the rest of us have to deal with this more regularly ;) Good luck!

cableshaft 8y ago
Thank you for putting into words what I experienced with my past job. In just every single previous job, I was either the lone coder (small companies or startups) or mostly expected to figure things out on my own and didn't have to discuss architectural decisions or issues I was having too often. But in my most recent job, I suddenly had to start explaining things in detailed and technical terms multiple times a day to coworkers and managers and was finding it really difficult to have anywhere near as precise of language about it as my peers had when they spoke about the same things. I've gotten better at that over the past three years of being here, but I still struggle with it, and sometimes feel awkward when I have difficulty finding the right words when it seems my peers have no issues describing with precision.
- gfiedler 8y ago
  I'm curious: Did those verbally talented people also produce complex working code? My experience is that people who sound impressive and accurate rarely do.
  - cableshaft 8y ago
    I know the types of people you're talking about, and they do exist, for sure. But no, these people knew more than I did, at least in enterprise software (I came from mobile and video games, the apps mostly were all on the device making periodic api calls, I didn't have to worry too much about scaling to tens of thousands of concurrent users, or know anything about load balancing, or different environments, or query optimization, or all sorts of other fun stuff). I learned a lot from them over the years, from Code Reviews I've received as well as Dev Learning Sessions we used to do every week, where one developer would share their knowledge on a topic with the rest of the group (sometimes they had to research it, we burned through a lot of relevant to our business topics after about 8 months) in a 30 minute session.

cableshaft 8y ago

Thank you for putting into words what I experienced with my past job. In just every single previous job, I was either the lone coder (small companies or startups) or mostly expected to figure things out on my own and didn't have to discuss architectural decisions or issues I was having too often. But in my most recent job, I suddenly had to start explaining things in detailed and technical terms multiple times a day to coworkers and managers and was finding it really difficult to have anywhere near as precise of language about it as my peers had when they spoke about the same things. I've gotten better at that over the past three years of being here, but I still struggle with it, and sometimes feel awkward when I have difficulty finding the right words when it seems my peers have no issues describing with precision.

gfiedler 8y ago
I'm curious: Did those verbally talented people also produce complex working code? My experience is that people who sound impressive and accurate rarely do.
- cableshaft 8y ago
  I know the types of people you're talking about, and they do exist, for sure. But no, these people knew more than I did, at least in enterprise software (I came from mobile and video games, the apps mostly were all on the device making periodic api calls, I didn't have to worry too much about scaling to tens of thousands of concurrent users, or know anything about load balancing, or different environments, or query optimization, or all sorts of other fun stuff). I learned a lot from them over the years, from Code Reviews I've received as well as Dev Learning Sessions we used to do every week, where one developer would share their knowledge on a topic with the rest of the group (sometimes they had to research it, we burned through a lot of relevant to our business topics after about 8 months) in a 30 minute session.