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Talk to your coworkers to find a mentor who can help you. I have read this story before and the folks that don't ask for help (and learn their dev tools, both s
by duped 5y ago
Talk to your coworkers to find a mentor who can help you. I have read this story before and the folks that don't ask for help (and learn their dev tools, both standard and internal) are let go regardless of whether they want to move on or not. Difficulty navigating code is the tell tale sign - if others are being productive and you're not, ask them what they are doing and how they work. You will learn the tricks and tools of the trade.
It's fun to start new projects because it's easy and there's quick payoff. That said, no one really has a place for a serial project-starter on their team and the majority of your work in your career will be like this. Learning how to explore and modify/test a large existing codebase is crucial not only to how we work on software, but also to learn how to build (or not build) new projects from scratch in the future.
That's not to say there aren't codebases that are easier or harder to learn, shops with crappy tools, or that there aren't awesome startups doing new things all the time. If you want my advice, I'd say stick around for at least a year to eighteen months and learn how to navigate and work in a big codebase with tech debt and legacy, because when you move on to start a new project you'll know how to avoid the pitfalls or how to deal with it as it arises in that project.
- MathCodeLove 5y agoThanks, all great advice. Really appreciate it.
- noicebrewery 5y agoTHIS. Please ask your coworkers for help. If the company isn't a toxic shithole your colleagues will be happy to help out. Modern screen sharing, code pairing and mobbing tools have made doing this in a remote working environment incredibly easy, almost more so than in meatspace. As for the massive codebase, try to specialise in an area and own it. Take lots of tickets around that module / namespace / whatever and you'll end up in a niche with lots of ideas about how to modernise, optimise or otherwise improve that code base, as well as teach you a lot about the companies coding standards and practices when you're ready to move horizontally into other parts of the code base. You will become trusted as an expert in that area and valued by your colleagues. Large code bases are a reality in programming. All of your smaller app and websites are built on top of the massive code bases of your favourite JS frameworks, web servers and web browsers, which are built in operating systems that also have massive code bases. All of those code bases, by the way, started out small as well, and grew to meet bigger and more demanding requirements. You are kneecapping your potential if you decide to stop at the software development equivalent of barre chords.