Hi there.

I wanted to share my journey into webdev/front-end development & recent job experience. This is mostly just a casual story/rant but maybe it will inspire some of you to stay motivated during & after covid. Hang in there if you are looking for a job, you got this!

This will be kinda long & English isn't my first language so sorry for any spelling mistakes I make.

I started my career about 3 years ago. The first job I landed was at a very small company. Team size was the boss, a backend dev and me. It wasn't a start-up company, it had existed for years. This raised some questions in my head but I was happy to have my first job.

When I started my boss was very enthusiastic. He got me set up ( on my personal laptop, also should have raised questions but yeah ), helped me where necessary and I started working on my first website. We had 1 major client for who we made multiple website.

After about 3 months my boss took us apart and basically said something along the lines of: "So our client doesn't trust us anymore. He doesn't believe the hours we write when working on his projects" We (including my boss) were confused because we worked hard for this client. After a few days my boss told me the client had a 'solution'. He wanted us to install monitoring software on our personal laptops, so he would see & record our screens. I said I wasn't going to do this, because of privacy violations. At this point I was hoping my boss would take a stand and tell the client to F off, but he was our largest source of income, so he really couldn't do that. My boss then tells me he would pay me double the hours when working the clients projects. I said no again and we got into a heated argument, after which I decided to quit.

I found a new job fairly quickly and told my boss I'd quit. I still had a month notice period to work, in which my boss almost completely ignored me. He'd just pretend I wasn't there. When my last day came around, my boss told me to give my key, and I could go home. No handshake, no thank you, nothing. I still think about this guy from time to time.

So after a few weeks I started my new job. I started here in a traineeship. This basically meant I would get a tutor and time to study during work hours. This company was much more organized and I worked on some cool projects. The dev-team size was about 8 people.

Although I had a good time here, I felt like I wasn't learning much. The websites I worked on were very repetitive and not very challenging. This in turn reflected on my work and myself mentally. The bosses expected me to learn & grow as a developer but it turns out self-study wasn't really my thing. There also wasn't any opportunity for them to teach me more because of other projects & deadlines on my own websites.

Don't get me wrong, I've learned a lot here regarding web development / front-end development, but not the things I wanted to learn. I wanted to dive deeper into Javascript and/or back-end. I also mostly worked on projects alone, so I had no one to spar with, no second pair of eyes on my code. The tutor was always too busy. And when they did help they just explained the solution to a problem, not the problem or the origin of the problem itself, which didn't really help me in the learning process.

After about a year covid hit. The company had to let me go, because of the business we were in. Our target audience was mostly cultural ( cinema's, musea, theaters ). This all closed down so there was no more work for me. This actually hit me really hard and it was pretty stressful. Losing your job is no joke, especially during covid.

After a few months I found this company that makes websites & tools for people with disabilities and it really spoke to me. I was super excited and decided to apply. After my second interview there they hired me! I was so happy.

Since then I've worked on some really awesome projects. The lead dev/boss really guided me out of tutorial hell so to speak, threw me in the dark regarding to projects and teached me a lot. I've been working here for almost a year now, and I couldn't be happier. The work and the people are awesome and I couldn't be more on my place.

So that is kind of my story. After losing my second job I felt like quitting webdev. Now I'm happy each day I wake up I didn't quit and still am excited to go to work.