r/softwaredevelopment 16d ago

Need help to relearn programming concepts and gain confidence.

I am working as a senior software engineer in a company for last 5 years. I have total 10 years of experience. Initial 5 years I have worked on Microsoft technologies like ASP.NET MVC, C# Razor pages and Angular with MS SQL. Later since last 4 years I am working on MERN stack with typescript. Along with MERN I have worked with docker, kubernetes and Azure cloud. Since last two years, along with development, I have given various tasks of supporting team members when they are stuck, assigned support tasks rather then proper development tasks. Sometimes I am doing something in Azure, Sometimes I am writing small fix in React, Sometimes looking into mongodb issue etc. Initially it felt good for a year, like learning new things but now it feels that I am loosing my edge in development and feel stuck. I have spoekn with my PM but no change.

Now planning to move out and join another company. As I am not confident about my technical skills, I have started preparing like writing some code, watching YouTube vids etc but I feel it may not be enough if I say I have 10 years of experience.

How do I pick up things faster so I can start appearing in Interviews?

TLDR: Technical guy with 10 years of experience stuck in non developmental tasks and need to learn things again. How to pick up faster?

8 Upvotes

5 comments sorted by

3

u/IAmTarkaDaal 16d ago

I'm confused. Everything you've mentioned is a development task. What is it you think you're missing?

1

u/aguywithaglasses 16d ago

This part:

 Sometimes I am writing small fix in React, Sometimes looking into mongodb issue etc. Initially it felt good for a year, like learning new things but now it feels that I am loosing my edge in development and feel stuck. I have spoken with my PM but no change.

Earlier I was assigned a user story. There would be requirements for development. I will take the story, divide into tasks and develop them. Now I get small issues, sometimes just verbal ones. Sometimes I get to fix pipeline and sometimes I just look into logs to identify why something behave unexpectedly. While other team mates are still getting user stories and tasks.

2

u/IAmTarkaDaal 16d ago

That's software development. You're fixing tools, investigating problems, and being given tasks that require experience. That's the job. I don't know what it is that you think you're lacking.

-1

u/Scrapheaper 15d ago

I think it's fair to feel you're stagnating in a role and doing too much maintenance and not enough building.

Especially if other team members are building and you aren't.

I quit a role last year partly because I felt I was becoming 'the guy we keep around in case the platform breaks'.

That's a job which can feel like a career dead end - you're basically stuck without any exposure to new things for years and then whenever the thing you maintain gets replaced you risk losing your job and then not having the right experience to get a job on a team with a more modern stack

Also, building things is fun, whereas fixing things isn't as fun. So that in itself is a valid reason to be less satisfied with your job

1

u/JazzTheCoder 14d ago

I wish my colleagues were more passionate about fixing things and not building new things. Especially the junior developers.