25 years old. Backend developer and creative writer. Views, thoughts and opinions expressed belong solely to me, and not necessarily to my employer or current organization.
What grinds my gears mostly is the fact that I can read all the documentation I want, build all the to-do lists and blog projects as I want, but I still won't be prepared for real client projects.
You'll never be fully prepared for what you're asked to do. That's the point of learning and growing. Muscle only grows because the body repairs muscle fiber damaged through exercise. And so you will only grow as a dev when facing and resolving issues you aren't prepared for. Whether it is difficult or not depends on how you approach the learning process: you can approach it with the fear of the unknown, or you can approach it with excitement for learning and discovering new things. One of these approaches will make it much easier, smoother and much more pleasant to do programming and keep improving at it.
Vera is a former developer turned into a Developer Advocate, currently leading a Global Developer Advocacy team. She has been involved in the tech industry for over 16 years.
Yea! I feel you. Software Development is challenging. There’s just so much to learn, and there’s so much available (libraries, programming languages, etc.) And if that isn’t enough, things are constantly changing.
Recovering interrupter with occasional relapses, lover of spreadsheets, blogger, programmer, adept debugger, conjurer of analogies, and probably other things.
My greatest frustration is a tendency to focus on the "bells, whistles, and animations" of the application instead of working through data state changes and information flow.
Next is the tendency to jump ship without gaining the working knowledge of maintenance (e.g. everybody loves greenfield work but less folks like stabilizing, refactoring, and extending existing systems)
Though while users can be annoying, honestly, the most annoying parts for me are debugging hard to find errors (such as ghost 500 errors), AWS (just as a whole, they make my life hard), and having to handle DevOps tasks (I don't like CICD pipelines)
Hiya! I'm a fullstack developer, with experience with PHP, JavaScript and Go. I'm also an Android enthusiast and I like pretty much everything related to tech.
1 - Dealing with users
2 - the hell-fire filled gap between demo code and real-world code
3 - the fact that past people that worked on projects I now have to work had absolutely no care about data integrity
I hate working with backend developers. Usually, they are preparing backend without consulting with frontend, and usually it is not fully working(or at all), then when you ask them to fix something it takes a lot of time.
I feel a bit frustrated I don't find a company that pays me $60K (remotely). I have 3 years of experience working as a front-end SWE and my highest compensation monthly was $3,300.00/monthly (~40K) however the average for my experience is around 60K.
I try my best to be always up-to-date with the tooling I need to perform my job (mainly React and libs of the react ecosystem), practice english on a daily basis to make sure I can communicate properly and most recently started to take leetcode problems on a weekly basis to ace the coding interview.
I am a frontend developer focused in creating application with React, Vue and Svelte. Currently, I am a software engineering student at Kasetsart University.
I am currently in the process of switching careers and learning some front-end technologies. Although I wouldn't consider myself to be a developer just yet since I am just starting out, I do realize more than ever, how fast technology is changing/ evolving.
I think that is a big challenge for someone just learning, keeping pace with it. By the time you get comfortable with certain concepts, updates are made and it's done in a different way. For a seasoned developer I think it may not be too much of a hurdle, but for beginners I think it can lead to some frustrations.
Vera is a former developer turned into a Developer Advocate, currently leading a Global Developer Advocacy team. She has been involved in the tech industry for over 16 years.
1 - Poor to no documentation on a project/repository.
The amount of time I've wasted trying to decipher a script written by someone no longer with the company is ridiculous, half the time I ended up rewriting the script because it's faster to rebuild it from the ground up
2 - Too many dang MEETINGS!
This meeting could have been an email.
3 - A losing battle trying to maintain untested and unstructured code
Have to change this endpoint url? Let me jump between 15 different files all thrown into the root directory and make sure it's updated everywhere. Someday I'll get everyone on the same page, haha
I feel ya on the meetings. On one hand I feel like they're needed, on the other hand, there is so many of them that on some days I can't get much work done at all.
Working with UI/UX designers who doesn't know how to code or at least the basic understanding of it
(they might sometimes design something that's very difficult or impossible to translate into code)
Working with UI/UX designers who loves fancy UI & animations
Nobody ever stops after writing that 20% of the code that does 80% of what you need. They always have to complete their work by adding another four times as much code just to squeeze out that last remaining bit of functionality. The result: Everything is always bloated.
Top comments (24)
What grinds my gears mostly is the fact that I can read all the documentation I want, build all the to-do lists and blog projects as I want, but I still won't be prepared for real client projects.
You'll never be fully prepared for what you're asked to do. That's the point of learning and growing. Muscle only grows because the body repairs muscle fiber damaged through exercise. And so you will only grow as a dev when facing and resolving issues you aren't prepared for. Whether it is difficult or not depends on how you approach the learning process: you can approach it with the fear of the unknown, or you can approach it with excitement for learning and discovering new things. One of these approaches will make it much easier, smoother and much more pleasant to do programming and keep improving at it.
Yea! I feel you. Software Development is challenging. There’s just so much to learn, and there’s so much available (libraries, programming languages, etc.) And if that isn’t enough, things are constantly changing.
Same here, but I'm starting to realize having a proper mindset does go a long way.
Oh boy…
My greatest frustration is a tendency to focus on the "bells, whistles, and animations" of the application instead of working through data state changes and information flow.
Next is the tendency to jump ship without gaining the working knowledge of maintenance (e.g. everybody loves greenfield work but less folks like stabilizing, refactoring, and extending existing systems)
Last…untested code.
/s
Though while users can be annoying, honestly, the most annoying parts for me are debugging hard to find errors (such as ghost 500 errors), AWS (just as a whole, they make my life hard), and having to handle DevOps tasks (I don't like CICD pipelines)
1 - Dealing with users
2 - the hell-fire filled gap between demo code and real-world code
3 - the fact that past people that worked on projects I now have to work had absolutely no care about data integrity
As a frontend developer:
I feel a bit frustrated I don't find a company that pays me $60K (remotely). I have 3 years of experience working as a front-end SWE and my highest compensation monthly was $3,300.00/monthly (~40K) however the average for my experience is around 60K.
I try my best to be always up-to-date with the tooling I need to perform my job (mainly React and libs of the react ecosystem), practice english on a daily basis to make sure I can communicate properly and most recently started to take leetcode problems on a weekly basis to ace the coding interview.
I am currently in the process of switching careers and learning some front-end technologies. Although I wouldn't consider myself to be a developer just yet since I am just starting out, I do realize more than ever, how fast technology is changing/ evolving.
I think that is a big challenge for someone just learning, keeping pace with it. By the time you get comfortable with certain concepts, updates are made and it's done in a different way. For a seasoned developer I think it may not be too much of a hurdle, but for beginners I think it can lead to some frustrations.
So, Users are definitely a common pain point...
1 - Poor to no documentation on a project/repository.
The amount of time I've wasted trying to decipher a script written by someone no longer with the company is ridiculous, half the time I ended up rewriting the script because it's faster to rebuild it from the ground up
2 - Too many dang MEETINGS!
This meeting could have been an email.
3 - A losing battle trying to maintain untested and unstructured code
Have to change this endpoint url? Let me jump between 15 different files all thrown into the root directory and make sure it's updated everywhere. Someday I'll get everyone on the same page, haha
I feel ya on the meetings. On one hand I feel like they're needed, on the other hand, there is so many of them that on some days I can't get much work done at all.
Nobody ever stops after writing that 20% of the code that does 80% of what you need. They always have to complete their work by adding another four times as much code just to squeeze out that last remaining bit of functionality. The result: Everything is always bloated.