I'd really like to develop better abilities to identify and prevent burn out my self. I thought I was just too dumb to keep up. Too lazy to keep focused. It wasn't that, constant quotes that didn't land, unhappy clients and extreme hours that resulted in unhappy management due to the project being over due. Hard work over a long time with nothing but negative feedback left me so drained I was very unproductive, embarrassingly so. I thought I'd never be a good developer but a change in jobs instantly changed that. Long hours, harder work but loads of positive feedback. All of a sudden I could focus all day, learn quicker and get so much work done. I thought I had more self control but it turns out I require certain things from my environment to perform.
This really resonates with me. When I was just starting out, I was assigned a mentor- a senior dev who refused to pair with me, who would ghost me for days at a time, always promising that "even though he was busy now, he'd get in touch with me this afternoon" and then vanish until I'd ping him after stand up the next day, where he would make the same promise. All the while, I'd try hard to learn the codebase and fix bugs without help (fairly difficult for a brand new, fresh out of college grad) but without help from my assigned mentor, all I got was shame and derision in stand ups for not producing enough and for "being afraid to ask for help" (no one really believed that such an amazing senior dev would refuse to give me the time of day). This convinced me I was stupid, that I couldn't be a good developer, and that I should go back to QA. Burned out and dejected, I gave my manager a heads up, put in for a transfer to another team as a QE, and tried to deal with the heart-crushing reality that I was too stupid to learn something new and that I needed to go back to what I was at least marginally acceptable at.
Turns out, my request to change teams was approved but my request to change positions was denied and they kept me as a junior dev. But this time, my team actually responded to me. I found a senior dev who not only didn't mind answering questions, but he actively got excited when I'd reach out for help because in his eyes, I wasn't a nuisance, I was proactive. And it was infectious. All of a sudden, instead of dreading going to work or getting a ticket assigned to me, I got excited! I learned more in just a week with that new mentor than I had in three months with my old team. I never became a 10x rockstar code god, but I learned to love my job and found out a lot about myself. I didn't realize it before all this, but apparently I'm the kind of person who needs something from my team too.
Wow that sounds very similar to the culture I was in juniors were left to flail and management was bitter at their lack of performance. No mentoring existed. I think largely because management there were extraordinary developers that didn't need a lot mentorship themselves, or maybe after a few decades had forgotten the amount of input they had.
The attitude at the company I'm at now is amazingly different. The owner is trying to step back so he sees his most valuable work to be mentoring and teaching. The result is a company that can't stop growing. Everyone is developing their skill set and taking on new responsibility's.
I think the previous companies management took on so much of the day to day work they had little time for themselves let alone training others. They're genuinely brilliant and harder working than anyone I've met but just didn't build people.
Ah yeah, I worked at a place that had a clearly-communicated "sink or swim" approach. The stress level was pretty high the entire time I worked there. The stressfulness of the environment was exacerbated by them letting people go without either a) clearly communicating where people were falling short, or b) providing any resources whatsoever to help people grow/improve. The employee handbook they provided to staff was a 1-page PDF that said "DO IT". I'm not joking nor exaggerating - this was sent out after staff asked for any sort of employee handbook because they kept getting reprimanded for things they didn't know were expectations/rules.
Not only does it make all the difference when you actually support your employees, it's also the law in many regions. Needless to say, I am always extremely appreciative of employers that support their team and help them grow.
