First 6 months: Dreams vs Reality
Tags: engineeringmonday, beginners, career, motivation
Published: 2022-03-07 09:17:44

So six months have passed, 350 commits have been made and 147 daily meetings attended...here is a short recap of what I have expected versus what that looked like in reality.

> _"Well, dreams, they feel real while we're in them right? Its only when we wake up that we realize that something was actually strange."_ - Cobb


## The Code

Like every one of us, I have learned my craft mostly on online tutorials. And there you touch on really wide subjects. In my case, as a react developer, that would be react router, storybook, animation libraries, testing, internalization and concepts like spa, ssg and ssr to name a few. And here is me walking into my first job thinking I will use all those tools daily.

Well, that didn’t work as planned. In reality, the best way to describe how it actually is: you dive in and work much deeper, but with much less tools. And these tools depend on the project that you get assigned. Sometimes it sucks not working with the stuff that you find interesting and engaging, but that is the reality of having a job. On the bright side, there’s plenty of interesting things to learn in the depth of every tool.

> _"Musn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling."_ - Eames


## Scrum is like your mother-in-law, it points out ALL your faults

I imagined my everyday working flow to look something like this: senior developer on the project gives me one detailed task for a week or two, and my communication is solely with him or in rare cases with the backend team - and that’s it.

Ken Schwaber had other ideas. Because of this guy, things called organization, communication, time and task management, planning etc. came into my life. Daily meetings, story points, estimations...whole new world. To this day it is a work in progress, and also - scrum development isn’t particularly student friendly. But as I wrote in the title of this section, it points out all your flaws and gives you something to work on - really important characteristics for your future successful career.

> _"Look if you want my help, you're gonna have to be completely open with me. I need to know my way around your thoughts better than your wife, better than your therapist, better than anyone."_ - Cobb


## The Squad

Totally expected to work with Richards, Gilfoyles, Jian Yangs characters of the world, sometimes with a bit of Mark Zuckerberg ego on the side. Very hard to engage with, even harder to learn something from them.

I still remember my first few days where I was actually shocked how incredibly brilliant, but also so down to earth and approachable everyone were. From giving me advice, to playing Fifa on lunch breaks and having great time on our "spontaneous" parties. Impressed.

> _"I got someone better!"_ - Miles

## The Conclusion

In retrospect, it's incredible how much you can be in the wrong with expectations (👋 estimations). Also, our developer community is incredible in real life too, even better, because you have that human touch too. And for my fellow students, I recommend you start exploring jobs, because you learn so so much - not only about the technical stuff, but more importantly, the processes of developing a product, organizational skills and the mindset behind successful programmers and companies.


![Totem spinning](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/lrqlygfc2pev3awt75zf.gif)