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Not feeling confident in your workplace? Feel like your skill levels are below average compared to others? There is no quick fix, validation and change in intuition takes time. Let’s make it clear and reproducible.

Scenario 1: I am a student, learning programming. Trying to land an internship (or going through one right now), and secure employment, but I feel like my portfolios are lacking.

You have not heard of Jira/Asana/Trello yet.

If you have only began the journey in programming, you should know that rushing through courses is not the best route to take. The first two to three years of programming is meant to teach you basic concepts in the industry. These are your vocabulary, and google search keywords. You will need to use these words to communicate with teammates and stake holders.

You may feel that you still want to acquire as much knowledge as you can in the short span of time, that’s fair. You want to speed through courses and start providing value to potential employers.

Here is what working programmers do on a daily and weekly basis:

Weekly — Plan out features/bugs/releases to work on. Divide them into tickets, and place those well-sized tickets onto a Sprint or Kanban board. Assign tickets to different teammates. The team should have a high level sense on what finishing tickets will accomplish for the project.

Daily — Single developer work on a single ticket. If the ticket is sized correctly, the amount of work will not drag out over a week. If tickets are consistently dragging over weeks, they are either too high level/broad, or too many has been assigned to the same developer. Once the team reaches a good cadence, they will be able to create and finish many tickets in each weekly cycle. This helps the project to be more polished and can generate more values with its customers.

So, how do beginners become comfortable in a workplace? Easy, look for small and simple tickets, volunteer to take 1–3 of them, and start contributing.

Avoid large tickets that look complex, start with short and simple ones, and build your confidence over time.

Every ticket you are assigned and finished solves someone’s problem. You also get compensated for doing them. You do not need to start with hot-fixes (which directly impacts production) or entire features (touching database/backend/frontend/mobile). Be warned: Places that will assign those types of tickets to newcomers are incredibly short staffed. If you are feeling adventurous, you can stick around to pick up lots of experiences quickly in different areas, but most likely they will not become well-managed anytime soon. (They have a tendency to get into trouble)