A core characteristic about me, even since I was little, is that I love learning about new things. Truly, I have no idea what life would be like if I had grown up during a time period where I didn’t have the world’s collective knowledge available to me just by opening my phone. This is no doubt a strength in most cases, but as I began my job search I began to find the detriments to such a personality. This issue became more compounded by the fact that I am a person by nature who enjoys putting all my energy into what I’m doing; as you can imagine, this can be pretty difficult when you’re trying to juggle multiple job possibilities.
I quickly found myself struggling with shifting between different needs. I would put everything into researching a company, writing a cover letter, finding out their tech stack, and then looking into the resources available to start learning the technologies that I didn’t already know. Everyone had their own advice to give on how to spend my time, and for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to try and follow all of it. One recruiter suggested that I try to get experience with freelance work, so I started looking into that. A friend impressed upon me the importance of learning a certain program, so I started diving into that. A company I really liked was using Angular, so I started learning that. At one point, I found myself switching between the Node.js, Angular, and Computer Science Fundamentals extra courses on Learn within the same day!
If that sounds exhausting, you can likely guess how I was feeling. Every new company I learned about, I spent so much energy figuring out how I could mold myself to be the perfect candidate; if that conflicted with a different company, I found myself trying to juggle both demands. I was learning a little about a lot, but that ultimately wasn’t amounting to more than being able to say I ‘had exposure’ to each topic. I was completely drained, and that came to a head one day with my career coach, Katie, as I found myself completely dejected by feeling like the whole process was yielding no results and not only unable to devise a plan about how to move forward but resistant to even hearing great ideas (shout out to Katie for having the strength of character not to roll her eyes or just hang up on me every time I whined because I know I would have.)
I soon spoke with Tana, my education coach that I had worked with previously. We talked about ‘analysis paralysis’; this idea that I was spending so much energy on figuring out the absolute best plan, that I wasn’t actually achieving anything. Props also go to Tana for putting up with me in that moment. As I left that conversation, I started to make some realizations; that I couldn’t impress everyone, and that sometimes choices have to be made just for the sake of moving forward.
I would say that experience was the biggest turning point of my job search, as I finally found myself making some choices. I wouldn’t worry about freelance work (for now), as I wanted to find a company that was willing to accept what experience I already had. I decided computer science fundamentals would be what I focused most of my downtime on, as it’s something I not only found very interesting, but also represented a weakness I initially had and was also applicable to all job prospects. Rather than trying to learn several different languages or frameworks at once, I decided to pick PHP as one to master.
I would never say any of the choices I made are what other people should do as well. There are definitely downsides to what I decided, and likely some opportunities I missed out on because of that. But since working to get over my analysis paralysis, I feel so much more confident in myself, both as a prospective applicant and as a software engineer. I feel great about my computer science fundamentals. I’m loving learning about PHP and the intricacies of what the language allows. I traded breadth for depth, and while I may not know everything, I’ve learned to be okay with that.