Falling For Him✅

Ch 55 : I'm tired of being tired

Maria's POV

3 weeks out of going home, it’s time to take a step back on an incredible journey on the other side of the world.

It has been a series of experiences, learnings, and amazing encounters.

To give you more context, I took training in Engineering to do internships, test what I like and don’t like, and get exposure to the real world. That’s how I randomly landed in Sharjah.

It was hard to find my first internship. I would always pass the first interview, but the coding interviews were not my strong suit.

So when the CEO of ExpenseCheck, decided to give me a chance after a 30-minute Skype call, I went nuts with a ridiculous victory dance in my apartment. The fact that I was suddenly moving from Abu Dhabi to Sharjah was like the eatable flower on the hotcakes.

With that happiness came a sense of extreme gratitude, not only for the opportunity but for the underlying trust he placed in me.

And with the extreme gratitude came a sense of “Oh boy, I better not screw this up”. I had never worked before and got hired as a Junior Django developer, which I had close to no experience in.

So during the first weeks, I’d rush to say “Yes” to any request, would get into solutioning really quickly, without necessarily thinking through all the aspects of a given problem. I’d try to get things done very quickly, because I thought that’s how I’d prove my value, only to realize later it was incomplete at best, and that it had broken production at worst.

Whoops.

That wasn’t sustainable.

Don’t get me wrong, I was doing good things overall, but got really stressed when something would go bad, as I’d spiral into wobbly fixes.

As I became more comfortable with the tech stack, and with the support of the whole team, from CEO to Sales to Senior developers, I became more mature and learned to take more time to evaluate everything that was at stake before jumping into implementing a solution. I’d give more reasonable time estimates, based on facts rather than trying the rest of the team happy.

Basically, I learned how to say “I know you want this quickly but it’s going to take 3 more days if we want to do it right.”

Which actually made them much happier.

Eventually, it spiraled upwards, as I gained more confidence and was able to take it to the next level. I started questioning why we would do things a certain way, or do them at all, and the more I’d do that, the more I’d be empowered, listened to and involved in the product decision making.
So, as much as you want to prove yourself, make sure you process all the different variables of a problem. Ask questions. Explore the different perspectives at stake.

Not only is it okay to say things are going to take time, or that you don’t know something, it’s actually a proof of maturity.

Shortly after I joined ExpenseCheck, a new Senior developer came along Sienna. We were transitioning away from a web agency that had been developing the website for a year, and while those folks were nice and friendly, I experienced some early friction with the new starter. She was a nice friend.

While the agency's main developer would tell me to just go for it and code however I felt like it, my new colleague would tell me not to touch anything. She was always complaining about how badly things had been developed. No tests, no decoupling, no blah-blah-blah, $%#$*?! — this is me censuring her intense Italian cussing.