Dev it all

So, I’ve been looking for a new role recently. I’m still hunting around and I’m in multiple different processes.

I’ve also been through a few already. Both good and bad, for an assortment of different reasons. Gratefully, this has all been incredibly helpful in understanding the current landscape and work environment of web development, locally and remotely.

The topic for this post is about figuring out where you currently stand in your career. What your current limit is. What you can achieve… and how you’re probably under-selling yourself.

So just a quick bit of info about me to give this some context.

I believe myself to be a senior-level developer at this point in my career.

I know a bunch of different technologies in the FE scope and a few nuggets in other areas as well. I like to tinker with related concepts like design or web performance. My thinking before taking part in my numerous interview processes was that I was an average intermediate dev.

I have changed my thinking.

A lot of the problem with how we define how good we are comes from salaries. If we have a particular salary we can look at averages to tell us where we land, job-title-wise. If we aim for a particular salary when job searching, this will tell us where we’re headed.

The truth with that is it’s a load of rubbish.

Wherever you think you are, you’re probably off, by at least a little bit.

I put a hopeful salary figure down when carrying out my searches. I was getting interviews, I was going through processes. Success. However, I was also getting interviews for roles that hit my requirement but had ranges above and beyond that as well.

After going through this a few times. Figuring out if any of the roles fit and deciding that I had something off. I found roughly where my lower limit sat.

A number of the roles I’d been interviewing with had me do technical tests that didn’t phase me or they had fewer years of experience listed and didn’t include certain aspects that I do, that I want to continue doing. For the former, I don’t want that. I want to find a new challenge, I want to learn and push myself ever upwards and for the latter, I only want my activities to expand and broaden, not stay the same or even shrink.

With that, I changed my requirements. I upped what I was looking for, pushing for roles that I thought were out of my league in my initial searching.

You know what. I still got interviews. I’m still in the process. Nothing had changed, just the reward at the end of it all.

While this is great. Woohoo, I can do more than I thought. It was imposter syndrome all along. It’s now time to find the upper limit. Where will I fail? This is a hard one as you’re going to need to go through these same processes until you hit a roadblock and try and push over it, ultimately failing and likely causing some slight (or serious) internal shame.

My roadblock was found when interviewing for a Web3 related project.

I’ve got an interest in this space. I do pixel art and I’ve got some of my work set up as NFTs. I have project ideas around tenant management and accreditations that will eventually see the light of day. So surely I can get in with one of the big boys.

I missed off a great chunk of what Web3 is about at the moment. DeFi.

When it comes to this space, it’s like working in a whole new language.

Even now, I use some of the protocols out there like Anchor, I went down the rabbit hole with Wonderland and I’ve danced around with different tokens. But I still don’t understand the financial aspects fully.

So, back to the point. During this interview, involved a technical test creating some graphs that were populated with data from the Graph and the Uniswap V3 subgraph. While also having extra functionality around time intervals and other odds and ends.

I got through most of that.

I like GraphQL and I get it. I just haven’t used The Graph before so it took me a minute of documentation diving to get all that going.

I like fiddly aggregations of data that led me down to the extra functionality.

What came after that though…

During the review, they were happy with what I’d created. However, they dove into further topics around DeFi. My brain won’t even summon them correctly now as they didn’t sink in at all.

I stumbled. I couldn’t answer questions. It broke me down. I left that call feeling pretty shook.

This is my upper limit. It’s kind of specific to Web3, but ehhh…

It showed me where to look is the best way to think about it. It showed that I don’t have some of these extra softer (sort of) skills that in this case the Web3 market demands.

It was also in a much higher salary range than I was aiming for.

So, from there.

I identified where I’m strong. The certain technologies, types of organisations I could work in, and the salary range that I’m after. I wrote all this down, along with what I want to work on for the future.

I mean it, you should write it down. It can be online, in a notebook, or on your damn wall.

If you want to remember it and you want to have active targets to push you forward. You will need the reminders.

This has led me to some promising interviews. I’m enjoying them and they have an active enthusiasm for me possibly joining their teams. Simply because they see that I’m a good fit and my skills are just right.

Deal with the embarrassment, the shame, or whatever. Ignore the imposter syndrome.

Test yourself, you test your code don’t you?