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Working lifeChapter #22

From 0 to 100

Two weeks into my new job and the feeling of learning faster than ever.

Laura MontironiJune 11, 20264 min read

I have been in my new job for barely two weeks and I feel like I have gone from 0 to 100 all at once.

I am not just talking about starting a new job. That is already a challenge in itself.

I am talking about entering a new sector, a new role, a demanding and enormous company, with new technologies, new processes and a way of working completely unlike anything I had experienced before.

During the months of the bootcamp my world was learning web development step by step. Building my own projects. Building APIs. Designing databases. Fixing errors.

Little by little I gained confidence and got comfortable inside my zone of knowledge.

And then I arrived here.

🌍 A completely new world

Suddenly I found myself opening gigantic repositories with thousands of files.

Trying to understand complex business logic.

Reading Ruby when my brain still thinks in Python a lot of the time.

Discovering tools and concepts I did not even know existed.

And the list keeps growing every day.

There are moments when I feel I spend more time trying to understand the ecosystem than writing code.

💻 Programming is only one part

Because that has been one of the biggest surprises of this experience: discovering that programming is only a small part of the job.

There are processes.

There is business.

There is accounting.

There are metrics.

There are monitoring tools.

There are whole teams coordinating with each other.

There are conventions.

There are ways of working that exist so that hundreds of people can build something together.

And all of that is new to me.

🧠 Being a beginner again

Sometimes I feel like I have landed in a foreign country.

(And technically that has already happened to me once. 😆)

I understand some words, but I do not speak the whole language yet.

And yes, impostor syndrome shows up constantly.

So does comparison.

It is impossible not to look around and see people who have been programming for years.

Software engineers who were writing code long before artificial intelligence existed.

People who understand enormous systems with an ease that looks almost magical to me.

And then the questions appear.

Am I good enough?

Can I really do this?

What if I still have far more to learn than I imagined?

I try not to dramatise it because I know two weeks is a very short time.

It would be absurd to expect to master all of this so quickly.

But I also want to be honest.

There are days when I feel completely overwhelmed.

🔄 Everything at once

Because I am not learning just one thing.

I am trying to understand the business.

I am trying to understand the product.

I am trying to understand Ruby.

I am trying to understand code written by other people.

I am trying to understand why certain technical decisions exist.

I am trying to understand how everything fits inside a system far bigger than I imagined.

All at the same time.

And that is frightening.

I am afraid of failing.

I am afraid of not living up to the opportunity in front of me.

🔥 Stronger than the fear

But there is also something stronger than that fear.

Curiosity.

Because every day I discover something new.

Every day I understand one more piece of the puzzle.

Every day a conversation that yesterday seemed incomprehensible makes a little more sense today.

And even though I still feel small inside this enormous world, I also feel that I am exactly where I want to be.

Not because it is easy.

Precisely because it is hard.

🎯 All or nothing

Because if there is one thing I have learned about myself, it is that I have never known how to do things by halves.

I have always been a bit “all or nothing”.

And if I have ended up here, surrounded by brilliant people, facing complex systems and learning more in two weeks than I thought possible, I intend to make the most of every minute.

Maybe in a few months I will reread this post and laugh at everything I still did not understand.

Or maybe I will discover that I still have far more to learn.

Probably both.

🚀 I have gone from 0 to 100

But today, after two weeks, the best way I can find to describe this experience is this:

I have gone from 0 to 100.

And even though it sometimes makes me dizzy, I have no intention of getting off this train.

Topics

#Ruby#onboarding#fintech