Storytime!

Anecdote

Here I tell you about my first day on my new dev job, fresh out of bootcamp.

My team all joined on the same day-- three new hires (me and two more experienced devs). My new boss, a confident senior dev who had a long tenure with the firm, was walking us through our tech stack. All of a sudden he paused, and said, “Oh, by the way, we’re going to use TypeScript. You all know TypeScript, right?” Coworker 1 nodded, Coworker 2 nodded. There was that unspoken sense of duh; we’re all professionals here, of course, we use TypeScript.

Then all eyes were on me.

I don’t do well with peer pressure. In Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies model, I’m an Obliger; I like to please people and put my own concerns aside. Of course, my bootcamp hadn’t taught TypeScript; we’d only had three months to learn full-stack JS! And of course, I wanted to say yes!

I had a probably visible moment of panic before going with “No, I don’t know TypeScript.” My boss simply nodded, saying, “you can learn on the job,” and moved on.