As the title states. I’ve been a software developer for a year now and work for a tiny company, where the salary isn’t amazing. I got paid more at Apple Genius Bar, but it wasn’t as challenging.
I still feel like I’m stupid, I’ll rely on the owner lead engineer for help on the more complex problems and because we have a great set of conventions I’ll frequently be going back to old projects to extract the logic from their. Whether that be reading from Excel spreadsheets or the controller flow, as we use GraphQL api for most calls.
Does it just click at some point?
The reality here is simple actually. Try to get another -better- job and, when you succeed, you can consider yourself “ready” because your peers evaluated your skills and they consider you good enough for the job.
Self doubt happens, don’t worry. Look to learn your tools, find good teachers and mentors, but don’t let it stop your tries for better positions.
While this sounds right, it is probably a path to depression. At this point I’m pretty much qualified for any web dev job I want, and I know I’d be one of the best hires they ever made, but I also know the interview gods are fickle bastards. I can easily see myself getting a string of rejections and taking a hard hit to my mental health.
An interview is not a fair assessment of your skill and fit, it’s just the best tool we have for the job. Therefore, don’t let the outcome of interviews tell you how good you are or what you’re ready for. Imo you kinda just know these things.
As for OP, sounds like they’re maybe still learning rule 1 of software development; the job is 90% figuring out how to do shit, it’s not actually so much about what you already know, although that certainly helps with the figuring out part. Once you’ve figured out how to figure out most of the problems that come up in your job, you’re more than ready for a new challenge, if you want one.