My first job title was Graduate Developer. I held onto it longer than I should have.
It was useful to begin with. When I made mistakes, well - I was only a graduate. When I didn’t know something, that was expected. Nobody looks twice at a graduate asking a question they probably should already know the answer to.
The shift happened gradually. I stopped making the mistakes I used to. When I did get something wrong, I owned it instead of hiding behind the title. I was being trusted with bigger clients, and the label was starting to work against me.
So I asked to drop it. They agreed.
And then I started to notice something that hadn't been obvious before.
The Silence That Should Have Been Reassuring
Every performance review was positive.
No criticism. No areas to work on. Not even small things — speak up more in meetings, improve your handovers, anything. I’d only been doing this for a couple of years. Surely there was something I could be doing better?
They must have missed something. I couldn’t be doing this well. At some point someone was going to notice.
But underneath that was a darker thought. If there was nothing to improve, was anyone actually paying attention? Was anyone invested enough in my progression to notice what was missing?
To be fair to the people around me — my line manager tried their best and genuinely cared. But they were as constrained by the business as I was. The issue wasn’t the people. It was that the environment didn’t create the conditions for growth. And without those conditions, positive feedback stops being a green light and becomes a ceiling.
The Job I Had Wasn’t the Job I Wanted
The work was varied — configuring existing software products for clients, writing one-off scripts, managing data migrations, a bit of technical support. Valuable exposure, all of it. But the projects I was working on had no persistent codebase, no source control, no CI/CD. They were delivered and forgotten, because they were never intended to be maintained. I was often working alone, some direction from my manager, but mostly figuring things out by myself.
The variety did mean I worked across multiple tech stacks, dipping into different layers as the project demanded. Web development one week, a Perl script the next, a data migration after that. At the time it felt like breadth. In hindsight it was closer to sampling — enough of everything to get things done, not enough of anything to go deep.
There’s a metaphor I keep coming back to. When you start secondary school, you don’t specialise immediately. You study everything — languages, sciences, arts, humanities — not just to build a complete education, but to discover what you’re actually good at and what genuinely interests you. The specialism comes later, once you’ve had enough exposure to make an informed choice.
Early career works the same way. The variety of that first role was my curriculum. I just didn’t know yet what subject I was looking for.
The Glimpse
About three years in, I was asked to join a digitisation project. Part of an initiative to preserve 1.8 million historical films, photographs and sound recordings.
It was the first time the job felt like what I thought the job was supposed to be.
Proper software development. Requirements gathering sessions. Source control. CI/CD. A persistent codebase that would outlast the project. And for the first time, a real team — people to learn from, to share ideas with, to ask questions of without feeling like I was exposing my ignorance.
I also started thinking beyond my own ticket for the first time. My UI was the entry point to the whole system. I needed to understand what every other part required to make sure I was capturing the right information in the right way. The shift from configuring an existing product to building something new — considering the UI and UX, keeping it consistent with an established product suite — was the kind of problem I hadn’t known I wanted to solve.
The Realisation
And then the project ended.
Nothing like it followed. I asked for more variety in the work I was given — more of what that project had felt like. The answer was effectively no.
Looking back, I’d optimised myself into a corner. I’d become so efficient at the work I was doing that moving me elsewhere didn’t make business sense. That’s not malicious — it’s just how short-sighted resourcing decisions get made. You become indispensable at exactly the wrong thing, and the business has no incentive to change that.
Nobody was going to hand me the way out. If I wanted something different, I had to be the one to go and find it.
For me, that meant leaving. It wasn’t the only option — it was mine, at the time, for my circumstances.
It’s hard to progress when you don’t know what you don’t know. I didn’t have a word for what I was feeling yet. I just knew “keep it up” wasn’t a direction — and that nobody else was going to give me one. Whatever came next, I was going to have to be the one to make it happen.
Share your moment of recognition in the comments. Someone earlier in their journey might need to hear it.
