My approach was something like this: for a few years (maybe until all my kids were at least age 3 or 4) I simply didn’t try to push my career forward.

When I was at work I put in plenty of effort, but I didn’t work much overtime, I didn’t do my own software projects outside of work, and I didn’t even spend much time reading programming blogs.

Young children are really overwhelming, if you are going to really parent them!

My career was fine. Career advancement is a marathon, not a sprint. Mmmm… that’s not true – I’ve seen people sprint through the career ladder. But if you want advice on how to do that you’ll need to ask someone else. MY approach to career advancement has been a marathon; keep improving until I am so ready for the next level that it’s really obvious, briefly do enough politicing to secure a promotion, then go back to the self-improvement. For me, the approach worked (I’m a “senior director” level non-manager-track software engineer today.)

When my kids were young I really just focused on them; these days they are in highschool and college and they work WITH me on my outside-of-work person programming projects.

Honestly, from what you are saying it sounds as if you have a fairly GOOD boss who just isn’t giving you the level of support that you need as a brand new developer. My advice would be to say that to him something like this: “Boss, I understand you are busy and have a lot of other things requiring your attention, and you have been very understanding when I’ve tried to operate with little direction. But I am feeling that as a relatively new developer I need a bit more mentoring and direction. Are there any assignments where I could pair up closely with another developer and do the work together? I think that after one or two assignments like that I would be much more effective.”

Hmm… A few thoughts based on my somewhat extensive experience (~25 years working in this industry now).

How hard it is to get used to conventions. So I’m doing TS React and C# .net. I know react but this app is something else. So many custom hooks.

There are two things here. One is getting used to the conventions – that’s something you actually pick up fairly quickly after you’ve done it a while because you start seeing the same (or nearly the same) conventions in new locations. The other is getting used to a new codebase you haven’t worked in before – and that one never goes away. As far as I can tell it ALWAYS takes a while to get familiar enough with a new codebase to feel comfortable in it.

there are no timescales (only 6 employees). I get given something to do and left to it. I’ll be wondering am I doing it right is it taking too long but nobody ever comes for an update

That can be a bit of a red flag. For the moment, while you are brand new, just take advantage of it. But in the longer term you probably want to push for some clearly expressed expectations, or else set some yourself. A project with no dates tends to float along blithely for some time until one day someone suddenly decides it’s 3 weeks overdue and has to be finished by tomorrow or heads will roll! Once you have enough experience to be confident in your estimates, you’ll probably want to head this off by creating estimates even if they aren’t requested.

It’s just difficult as I’m used to working shitty jobs where you are pestered all the time.

And THAT, unfortunately, isn’t really a feature of the job so much as a feature of having a good boss. Poor tech managers will micromanage and pester you all the time; skilled tech managers will set clear expectations then let you handle it yourself. You likely won’t always get a manager who does this well but you should enjoy it while you have it.

Wait for a passing blimp. Project the bat signal on the blimp.

Congratulations and welcome to the industry!

So, what are your first impressions? Is there something so far that has surprised you about the job?

Thank you. It’s a thought that has been rolling around in my head for some time and this was my attempt to put it in words.

I like the way you express this. “Cis / Trans” isn’t about your gender, it’s about whether your gender has CHANGED. (Although it may not be your GENDER that changed, but what people THOUGHT your gender was.)

In a similar way, I (a cis male) usually call myself “straight”, but that’s not really accurate. I don’t feel like I’m attracted to whatever gender is different from mine (which happens to be women); I feel like I am attracted to women (which happens to be the gender that’s different from mine).

Putting it differently, if some magical spell were to transform me into a woman, I don’t imagine that I would then be attracted to men, I imagine that I would be attracted to women. So instead of calling myself “straight”, I should probably be saying that I am “gynosexual” (attracted to women).