It has been a year since graduation, and I always feel like I haven't made much progress. I haven't learned much technically, and work hasn't been as smooth as I expected. I feel like I might be the next one to be laid off in the team, and I feel very bad.
This article is mostly about venting my emotions, expressing and sorting out my frustrations. I saw a saying before, if you can't think clearly, writing it out can help you organize your thoughts.
I've tried it a few times, and I think it's really helpful. Although what I write down is just a bunch of random thoughts, it does help organize my thoughts.
A Messy Life#
I don't really know how to describe my mood. Anxious? Irritable? I feel a bit helpless...
Poor Interpersonal Skills#
I now live with my girlfriend, and I often inexplicably yell at her, pouring out (or rather, criticizing) her problems, speaking confidently, occasionally praising myself for having perfect logic, thinking that she should have realized her problems earlier.
In reality, when I calm down and think back, I realize that I'm just dumping my emotional garbage on her. It's just impotent rage. And then I feel guilty because I think I'm not doing a good job. Isn't this just making her suffer because of me?
Poor Financial Management#
I often worry about my financial situation. I work in this company now, with a pre-tax salary of 15k, and after tax, I have about 12k left. I'm based in Shanghai, so theoretically, I shouldn't be short of money. But in reality, I'm paying for my own stupidity. I rented a 6k apartment to be closer to work, and my daily expenses are around two to three thousand.
Although my girlfriend also has a job, she's a bit silly and her salary isn't high. It's good enough if she can support herself. So I didn't ask her to help me with the rent, just to take care of her own living expenses. Half a year ago, I even let her stay at home and study for a certificate without working, and I covered part of her living expenses. As a result, she didn't pass the exam and it was all in vain.
I'm burdened with high rent... I also like all kinds of electronic products. Just after graduating, I was immersed in the idea that I could buy the things I've always wanted because I can earn money now, and as a result, I made a lot of impulsive purchases. The result is that I'm always in debt and haven't saved any money.
As a result, the debt makes me extremely anxious, always thinking about ways to earn more money, but because of my own inertia, I haven't really done anything, and I fall into self-doubt and start a vicious cycle.
Now that the novelty has worn off, I'm slowly not obsessed with those material things. Because I found out that many of them are just pseudo-needs. I started trying to save money in every possible way. But the previous debts still make me feel suffocated. Because I still have to buy some equipment for my girlfriend, I'm living a very difficult life, but my financial situation hasn't improved.
Speaking of criticizing my girlfriend, part of the reason actually comes from this. She has been in Shanghai for almost a year, and I can't say that she hasn't helped me with the financial pressure, but it's very limited, almost no help at all. It's more about emotional value, and I'm really happy to be with her. I really hope that she can realize when she should work better and at least earn enough money to share the financial pressure with me.
Poor Work Situation#
I work in a data company, mainly working on web projects and maintaining databases with some scripting. It's a bit like full-stack development. My work style is solution-oriented. Basically, when I encounter a problem, I learn how to solve it. In the end, I can always come up with a solution that is not too bad. But I haven't successfully led a project in the company, I'm not that good, and I'm embarrassed to say that I'm a full-stack developer.
Actually, I have learned a lot in this company. Our frontend is Vue, backend is PHP, and we mainly use ClickHouse for the database. Through reading code, thinking and pondering on my own, I have gained a lot.
But I think I have taken too many detours in learning these things in this company. Most of the people in my team are fresh graduates, not much more experienced than me. There are more differences in work styles. My boss is also a mysterious person, he doesn't teach or guide, always saying a bunch of riddles like "you have to finish the test paper yourself to truly learn", and then he rushes me to finish. In other words, I don't have a strict mentor to guide me here, I have to rely on myself to explore, it's all trial and error.
I don't deny that I need to understand things on my own to truly learn, but deep down, I still hope to encounter a better boss who can guide me in projects, instead of just saying riddles all the time. The company is not mine, I can't keep exploring and making mistakes indefinitely, it's really exhausting without standing on the shoulders of giants to learn.
Even so, I have explored a lot in my own field of expertise. I have seriously studied a lot of underlying code in the team, and through this, I have understood what top-down design is and tried to incorporate it into my development process. My understanding of object-oriented programming has also deepened, and combined with top-down design, I have written what I consider to be beautiful code. Of course, the people in the team are actually just fresh graduates, and no one can look at my code and judge how well I wrote it.
I also tried to develop some headless components on my own. I previously wrote a headless component called FixTable, which only requires modifying the <table/> tag in the JSX code to my FixTable, and all the other UI code remains unchanged, and you get a table with fixed headers and columns. This component received unanimous praise from the team and was praised as very advanced.
But in terms of project management, I feel like I've been stumbling. I haven't learned anything important and haven't grasped the key points. When I was an intern, my boss gave me a project directly, but didn't guide me. I was really inexperienced and made a lot of mistakes, and in the end, I failed, and I haven't gotten any decent projects since then.
To be honest, I'm really frustrated. I have the ability to write code, and I know that I lack the ability to manage projects, but at least let me learn from someone first, why let me take the lead and fail, and then sentence me to death without giving me any projects?
And then something that made me very sad happened, to summarize, I experienced two high-pressure projects. One was a web project, and the other was a database delivery project. The web project lasted for about 3 months of intense overtime work, and during that time, the pandemic happened, and I worked on the project for three months while being sick. The database delivery project tortured me for over a month, working until midnight every day and waking up at 9 am to go to work.
My enthusiasm has really been worn out, I'm just too tired. I used to be interested in programming, but now sitting in front of the computer makes me feel sore all over, I don't want to code, and I don't want to explore anymore. When I get off work and go home, I immediately lie down and watch YouTube shorts or Netflix.
Now when I see web development, I feel a little nauseous. Because our company is a B2B company, the frontend requirements are not high, and the backend doesn't need to consider concurrency at all, all the performance bottlenecks are on the ClickHouse load. Under the perfect web framework, writing code feels like bricklaying, just mechanically filling in business logic into functions. Everyone is focused on the hours, only concerned about not making mistakes, going live, and it's difficult to write something interesting.
I really want to change fields. Now I'm finding time to learn Rust, hoping to switch to Rust and write more challenging and creative code... But Rust or C development also requires experience in the field, and I don't know how to accumulate relevant experience. To be honest, I don't want to do development in the traditional Internet industry anymore. Either I want to go for something more radical like web3, or something more low-level like software development.
Conclusion#
I've talked a lot of nonsense, it's all unclear. After reading my output, I realized that I'm scared of work and I'm pessimistic because of my financial situation.
Now, I want to change jobs first and slowly save some money so that I have some savings. Then my mindset will probably change. I will post some study notes related to Rust in the future!