Ask HN: Give a novice dev a dose of reality?

11 points

13 years ago

Hey all, posting under an alias since my normal nick is linked to me IRL. I'm a pretty novice developer (1-2 years professionally, 3-4 since I first learned Python), and as my previous questions might demonstrate, I have very concrete career goals.

At my current job, I'm working on things that I believe have little or no impact on where I want to be in a few years. I need quantitative/statistical experience to do what I want to do, and I'm not getting it at work. At the same time they're very accommodating when it comes to my part-time education (walking in late after morning class, taking time to study, helping me with math theory questions), and I'm also building some general dev experience, which is always good.

So HN, I need a dose of reality here. Am I expecting too much for someone with my experience? Should I swallow my pride a bit, take advantage of my job's accommodations and work on this boring, semi-relevant work? Or do I need to leave as of yesterday?

EDIT: In the past I've "aimed high" for gigs, and I'm worried about getting rejected based on my (potentially inflated) view of my skills. Should that complicate this question at all?

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