Swastik Yadav

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My first developer job and why I left it

Swastik Yadav
April 27th, 2021 · 3 min read

Recently I left my Software Engineer job at a consulting firm. This was my first job and this is my story on why I left it.

How I got my first dev job.

I don’t have a CS degree or any other degree for that matter as I dropped out of my college the very first year in 2018 to work on my Idea.

The idea is to fix the reason, because of which I dropped out. Well, that’s a different story.

For the next 1.5 years, I learned basic programming on my own from the internet. Based on that learning I was selected for a programming boot camp (AltCampus) in June 2019.

6 months down the line I was a full-stack MERN developer.

Jan 2020 got a job offer, but the company demanded to learn Ruby On Rails. So, went out of the comfort zone learned a new technology in two months, and joined the company.

Why I left the job.

My intention to learn to program was never to get a job, I just did it for some exposure. But soon realized I won’t survive there. As the nature of my job was very repetitive, it felt more like doing labor work than programming.

Talked with senior management, they said and I quote:

We know the work is boring, repetitive, and you are not learning something new, but someone has to do it.

Somehow, I stretched for a year and left as my sanity is more important than money.

Now, you might say it was a bad decision, I should have stayed to gain some experience. See, I don’t know if it was a good or a bad decision, but all I can do now is try to make this decision right.

I would not have left if I would have been financially unhealthy. But my family is doing just fine and I think I can take my chance as I don’t have any responsibilities on my shoulders at this point.

Getting my hands dirty

I am a bit skeptical about sharing this but let’s just do it anyway.

I have tried a few small things here and there in the last few year to get my hands dirty in building and selling products. Here are 4 of them.

1. Streaming platform for schools

2017, I was 18 y/o in the final year of my school. With one of my friends, I tried to build a platform (with the No Code tool WordPress) where schools can record their lectures and stream on the platform subject and class wise.

We build the demo version and tried to convince my school to use it. But, as you might have guessed, my parents were called to the school and I was forced to focus only on my final school year.

Today in this covid situation, the world needs such a platform.

2. Learnist

In 2020 every week I use to discuss programming stuff with two of my friends over zoom. One day I thought why not get more people involved in this discussion.

So, we created a Twitter account and set up a basic website. And we were able to get 50-60 people showing up in one of the sessions.

Managed around 6-7 awesome sessions. But then we stopped, don’t know why but we just stopped. I guess because none of us were serious about it.

3. Product Suggestion

Feb 2021 - There is a digital entrepreneur on Twitter. I proposed to him a web-app version of his product through cold emails.

Also built a prototype and shared it. He kind of liked the idea, but I was not able to get him on a call.

Learned a lot about sending cold emails which work and which don’t.

4. Email Templates

Apr 2021 - Inspired by ThemeForest which sells all sorts of themes and templates I decided to niche down only on email templates. But it failed and here is why.

The plan ahead.

It’s been over a year I haven’t touched the MERN stack. So, going back to it. And after that will start working on my idea.

After leaving the job, I have been reading and learning a lot about content creation, building products, and startups.

I will keep this post updated about my journey. So, join the newsletter if you are interested.

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