How do I learn on a job with tight deadlines and unrealistic expectations? /u/glaz5 CSCQ protests reddit

Background: I got hired in August at my first dev job as a junior dev, and this job is one of those ‘fast paced environments’ that is a standard 10hr day and drains you mentally – but it is a first job and bad job market so I’ve made my peace with that aspect for the time being and decided to tough it out.

However, my biggest concern is genuinely that I am not learning efficiently and I feel so stupid working here every day. I have been 6 stressful months into this job and while I have learned a lot, I am still given tasks everyday that I have no clue how to do.

For example, I will be given a task like “Build this entire payment provider”. As soon as I get this ticket I am stressed and dreading it, because it will be given like a 3 hr ‘estimate’ (Sure it’s an estimate but they get mad about overages and bring it up in quarterly reviews so I rarely log time over) and I know I am gonna have to find a way to build this thing out in their broken codebase that I still haven’t wrapped my head around before the deadline for the ticket at the end of the sprint.

For me personally, I really need to break things down and isolate each part of it to understand/learn – but that feels unrealistic given the time estimates and the fact that I have tons of other tasks lined up in my sprint that I am confused about so I can’t spend most of my day on one task allotted for 3hrs. So, what I end up doing is basically copying what I see in other places, reaching out to other devs for help, asking ChatGPT etc – whatever I can do to get the task done ASAP. Obviously while this tends to work, I am not learning by doing this and makes me feel more like a stressed out robot than a growing programmer.

What I used to do was get the tasks done during the workday, then spend hours after work studying what I did. However, this makes each day around a 14hr workday and just wasn’t reasonable given that I was sacrificing the time I have for working out and taking care of myself to instead doing unpaid work.

So, how would you guys do it? Is this a matter of continuing to take the time to study after work?

TLDR: I can’t seem to learn/work efficiently with unrealistic deadlines and expectations, and that is making me a worse programmer and stress out. So how do you guys do it?

Background: I got hired in August at my first dev job as a junior dev, and this job is one of those ‘fast paced environments’ that is a standard 10hr day and drains you mentally – but it is a first job and bad job market so I’ve made my peace with that aspect for the time being and decided to tough it out.

However, my biggest concern is genuinely that I am not learning efficiently and I feel so stupid working here every day. I have been 6 stressful months into this job and while I have learned a lot, I am still given tasks everyday that I have no clue how to do.

For example, I will be given a task like “Build this entire payment provider”. As soon as I get this ticket I am stressed and dreading it, because it will be given like a 3 hr ‘estimate’ (Sure it’s an estimate but they get mad about overages and bring it up in quarterly reviews so I rarely log time over) and I know I am gonna have to find a way to build this thing out in their broken codebase that I still haven’t wrapped my head around before the deadline for the ticket at the end of the sprint.

For me personally, I really need to break things down and isolate each part of it to understand/learn – but that feels unrealistic given the time estimates and the fact that I have tons of other tasks lined up in my sprint that I am confused about so I can’t spend most of my day on one task allotted for 3hrs. So, what I end up doing is basically copying what I see in other places, reaching out to other devs for help, asking ChatGPT etc – whatever I can do to get the task done ASAP. Obviously while this tends to work, I am not learning by doing this and makes me feel more like a stressed out robot than a growing programmer.

What I used to do was get the tasks done during the workday, then spend hours after work studying what I did. However, this makes each day around a 14hr workday and just wasn’t reasonable given that I was sacrificing the time I have for working out and taking care of myself to instead doing unpaid work.

So, how would you guys do it? Is this a matter of continuing to take the time to study after work?

TLDR: I can’t seem to learn/work efficiently with unrealistic deadlines and expectations, and that is making me a worse programmer and stress out. So how do you guys do it?