Two years ago I started my career in tech. I started as QA Tester and then transitioned into a developer role a year after. Not without a lot of effort and a lot of personal time invested.

You can find that part of the story in this post about how I switch careers from Biology to tech and how I learned Android for a year. Today I want to talk about how I started my first role as Android developer, how I switched companies and how my first year as Android Engineer has been overall.

My first role

My first role as Android developer started out just a year ago. The company I was working at provided me with the opportunity to transition from QA to Android developer by dedicating half of the time to each role.

This transition was thanks to the time I invested learning Android on evenings and weekends. I went through the Android Basics Nanodegree, the Android Developer Nanodegree and as well I got the Google Developers Certification. That part of the story is explained in more detail here.

After two months I switched to full time when they hired another QA. Here's were all the challenges began!

Transitioning someone into a developer role is a lot harder than just providing them with a laptop and a git account. And here I explain some of the roadblocks I got during that time:

Lack of expectations

The first problem I faced was not knowing the expectations that the company had on me. My thought was that they expected me to deliver since the very first day, probably not like my experienced colleagues, but deliver by doing small tasks. This feeling caused me a lot of pressure. By not having clear goals, I was constantly thinking I wasn't good enough and that I was an impostor.

Lack of mentorship

There was no concept of mentorship in the company and the environment didn’t allow us to work together. We barely did pair-programming, because there was always a deadline and the company wanted us to keep delivering. Luckily my colleagues were always willing to help! They sat with me to help me whenever I got stuck or asked for help.

Lack of feedback

I never got any feedback during that time. What was I doing well or bad? What could I improve? I didn't know since I didn’t have anyone whom to report.

Lack of learning culture

I think that in order to keep up to date we need to continue learning by reading blog posts, watching talks, attending conferences, trying new things, etc. The company didn’t offer learning hours during working time, which is unfortunately quite common as other devs told me. Without having learning time, I felt I wasn't entitled to spend even 10 minutes to read a blog post I found to be interesting and relevant for my job.

The problem was not only the lack of an explicit learning time allowance, but also that when I requested it, it got denied.

An example of that occurred when I finished my tasks for the sprint and we were already at the end of it, so I asked if I could spend the rest of the day learning Kotlin. This request got denied.

Another case was when I requested to attend an Android conference, and then I was asked to take days from my paid time off.

Impostor syndrome

The lack of expectations, the lack of feedback, and the lack of learning culture in the company made the first 9 months of my developer career even more challenging. I have the feeling that it contributed to increase my internal impostors syndrome.

One example of it was opening and reviewing pull requests. Sometimes I'd ask a colleague to check my code privately, rather than opening a pull request, to avoid showing my code to everyone.

Other times, when I was reviewing, I would spend minutes staring the "approve" button, worried of approving something that another colleague would have considered wrong.

And when I didn't agree on something, I was never speaking loud enough worried of a backslash due to my lack of knowledge.