It has been a year since graduation, and I always feel like I haven't made much progress. I haven't learned much in terms of skills, and my job 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 my mood is very bad.
This article is mostly a venting of my emotions, a way to express and sort out my frustrations. I saw a saying before that if you can't think clearly, writing it out can help organize your thoughts.
I've tried it a few times, and I find it really useful. Although what I write down is just a bunch of random thoughts, it does help organize my thinking.
Chaotic Life#
I don't really know how to describe my mood. Anxious? Impatient? I feel a bit helpless...
Poor Interpersonal Skills#
I now live with my girlfriend and often inexplicably yell at her, pouring out (or rather, criticizing) her problems, speaking confidently, and occasionally praising myself for my logical thinking. She should have realized her own 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 a fit of impotent rage. And then I feel guilty for making her suffer. I think I'm not doing a good job. It's just making both of us suffer.
Poor Financial Management#
I often worry about my financial situation. I work in a company now, with a pre-tax salary of 15k, and after tax, I have around 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 2k to 3k.
Although my girlfriend also has a job, she's a bit naive and her salary is not high. It's good enough if she can support herself. So I didn't ask her to help me with the rent, as long as she can take care of her own living expenses. Just half a year ago, I let her stay at home and study for a certification without working, and I covered part of her living expenses. But in the end, she didn't pass the exam, and it was all in vain.
I'm burdened with high rent... and I also like various electronic products. Just after graduating, I was immersed in the idea that I could earn money and buy the things I've always wanted. As a result, I ended up with a lot of debt and couldn't save 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, starting a vicious cycle.
Now that the novelty has worn off, I'm slowly not obsessed with material possessions. Because I realized that many of them are just false needs. I started trying to save money. But the previous debt still makes me feel suffocated. Because I still have to buy some equipment for my girlfriend, I'm living a difficult life, but my financial situation hasn't improved much.
Speaking of criticizing my girlfriend, part of the reason is also because of 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. I'm really hoping that she will realize sooner or later and stop doing a bad job at work, at least earning enough money to share the financial pressure of our lives.
Poor Job Situation#
I work in a data company, mainly working on web projects and maintaining databases with scripts. It's a bit like full-stack development. My working style is solution-oriented. Basically, when I encounter a problem, I learn what I don't know, and 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 front-end is Vue, back-end is PHP, and we mainly use ClickHouse for the database. Through reading code, pondering, and thinking on my own, I have gained a lot.
But I think I have taken a lot of 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, not willing to guide or show the way, always saying a bunch of riddles like "you have to finish the test paper yourself to truly learn," and then rushing me to finish. In other words, I don't have a mentor in the strict sense to guide me here, I have to rely on myself to explore, it's all trial and error.
I don't deny that I have to understand things on my own to truly learn, but deep down, I still hope to encounter a better boss who can guide me at least in the project, 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 to learn without standing on the shoulders of giants.
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 it means to design top-down 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 my team are all 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, without changing any other UI code, to get a table with fixed headers and columns. This component received unanimous praise from the team and was considered 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. My boss gave me a project to work on during my internship, but didn't guide me. I was really inexperienced at that time and made a lot of mistakes, and in the end, I failed, and I haven't received any decent projects since then.
To be honest, I'm really frustrated. I have the ability to write code, and I know I'm not ready to manage a project, but at least let me learn from someone else first. Why did they let me take charge and then give me the death sentence when I failed?
Then something that made me very sad happened, to sum it up, 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 I also encountered the pandemic at that time, working 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 starting work at 9 am.
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 home from work, 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 front-end requirements are not high, and the back-end doesn't need to consider concurrency at all, all the performance issues are on the ClickHouse load. Under the perfect web framework, writing code feels like moving bricks, just mechanically filling in business logic into functions. Everyone is focused on the hours, only considering not making mistakes, going live, and it's difficult to write something interesting.
I really want to switch fields. I'm currently finding time to learn Rust, hoping to transition to Rust and write more challenging and creative code... But Rust or C development 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 rambled on a lot, and it's all a bit unclear. After reading my output, I realize that I'm just scared of work and pessimistic because of my financial situation.
For now, I want to change jobs first and slowly save some money to have some savings. That should help change my mindset. I will also share some learning notes related to Rust in the future!