👨‍💻 Three months into my first dev job and I still search the same basics

I joined a product company in Hitech City three months ago as a junior front end developer, salary 5.2 lakh a year, and I still search for the same basic things every single day. Yesterday I looked up how to centre something on the page for what must be the twentieth time. Our team lead walked past, saw my screen, and said nothing. I felt my face go hot and closed the tab. The other juniors seem faster than me. One of them joined the same week and already fixed a bug in the payment page that three people had looked at. I took four days to change the colour of a button because I did not understand how the code was organised, and I was scared to ask. When I finally asked, the senior explained it in ten minutes and said it confuses everyone at first. That helped for about one day. My plan now is to write down every question I search for in a notebook and see if the same ones keep repeating. After two weeks the list has 31 entries and 9 of them are repeats. Maybe that means something, maybe it just means I have a bad memory. I am also trying to read one small part of our codebase after dinner, around 30 minutes, with no pressure to understand all of it. Seniors and people who have been through this, when did it stop feeling like you were pretending? I am not looking for a magic fix, just a rough idea of how long this phase lasted for you, six months, a year, longer?

Comparing yourself with the junior who fixed the payment bug is a trap I fell into for months. In my batch at a bank's IT office, the fastest starter left within a year and the slow ones stayed. Speed in month three tells you very little, at least from what I saw.

Took me four days to change a button colour in my first month too. Finding the right file was the whole job.

Nine repeats out of 31 sounds like a good result to me, not a bad memory. I kept a similar list in my first year at a company in Madhapur, mostly date formatting and git commands. By month five the repeats were down to two or three, and I stopped checking the list. The feeling of pretending lasted longer than the searching, around a year for me, maybe a bit more.

Twenty searches for centring is normal, I still search it after four years and I won't pretend otherwise. It eased for me around month eight, when I stopped feeling bad about searching and noticed seniors doing the same thing in front of me.