system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How do people do this for a living?

Let me start by saying I've worked a lot of shitty labor type jobs where the emphasis is always on productivity. Don't clock in a minute late, and every second you're on the clock you're expected to be actively producing X amount of some product per hour. You don't do a whole lot of learning on the job because the tasks are streamlined efficiently and generally not expected to be all that complicated.

I started my first job working remotely as a junior dev a few months ago and it's obviously a very different environment. Overall, it's fairly laid back and there are times when everything is going great, the objective is clearly laid out and I know how to, or at least have an idea how to, accomplish a certain ticket.

Then there are other times where I'm absolutely paralyzed for hours and hours by an inability to complete a certain ticket. I feel like in just the few months I've been here it's been a sort of firehose of information involving everything from trying to set up authentication to AWS services and other 3rd party integrations for analytics on top of writing code to remove bugs or develop features in languages and frameworks I've never used before. Not one of my teachers in school mentioned anything about JWT's, API's, Package Managers, etc. Prior to starting this position I had some exposure to maybe one of the 25+ technologies we use, and the tech stack is niche enough that it's difficult to find good information about how to set things up and use them properly.

All the same, I feel confident that I could figure out all of these things and be reasonably productive... if I were the only one writing the code. It is way, way, WAY easier to sit here and build entire applications from scratch and work on projects by myself. I've never been working on something by myself and not had some idea of how to proceed to the next step.

It is catastrophically more difficult trying to sift through a massive system that's already been built and try to read thousands of lines of code written by different people in a framework that's already quite counterintuitive to me that uses multiple different languages and syntaxes within itself. I can't read minds and guess what programmers were thinking when they wrote a particular line of code, what the context of this class is inside whole system, and there are next to no comments anywhere explaining anything. There are no UML diagrams or explaining the architecture of the models and their relationships, use cases, or the way the code is expected behave at a high level. My boss just expects me to be able to read the code and derive all that information on my own. But I constantly run into lines of code that are for very specific use cases and are completely unique to this company's structure and/or the problem the developer was trying to solve at the time of writing it.

The result is I just kind of shut down for hours and don't know what to do because I feel incapable of accomplishing what needs to be accomplished. If I ask for help, it's never significant help like a walkthrough of the system parts that actually gives me something I can learn from. it's just "here's one line of code that will move you from this brick wall to the next one". It's like that "give a man a fish rather than teaching them how to fish" idea.

Nobody has explicitly said anything about me being unproductive, but I get anxious whenever I'm in a position like this, and historically I've tended to just quit altogether. But I struggled for months to land my first junior dev job. Most places aren't hiring people with less than 2 years of experience (likely for all the reasons I've mentioned), and I know a lot of people I've graduated with who are still struggling to get positions. Additionally, I'm sure I would just end up running into all the same problems somewhere else. I don't dislike it, but I don't really feel like I'm cut out for doing this professionally and I've already invested a lot of time and money into going to school for this. It's not a lot of money, but it's also the first job that's paid me more than $16 an hour, and I don't really want to go back to those types of jobs.
gpt
\> It is catastrophically more difficult trying to sift through a massive system that's already been built and try to read thousands of lines of code written by different people in a framework that's already quite counterintuitive to me that uses multiple different languages and syntaxes within itself.

This is the job! Welcome! It's why we get the big bucks. Dev salaries are not good for no reason!