I joined one of the big-4 tech companies a month ago after years of freelance work. Since joining, I’ve had trouble “hooking in”. For one, it doesn’t seem like I have all that much to do. I’ve submitted a few very simple bug fixes, and I have some larger feature work coming up, but it’s all on the order of maybe a few hundred lines of code. I’ve also spent maybe a week more than I should have on a fairly simple feature, just from fighting with my tools and trying to figure out where to put a few sparse calls in the codebase. It’s really embarrassing. The other issue is that I’m riddled with anxiety every day. For one, I’m worried that my coworkers might think I’m slacking off, or that I’m incompetent or a bad hire. Everyone around me is always on point though many of them are younger than me. Their thoughts are completely clear. I rarely hear them make mistakes or misunderstand anything: they seem to have no weaknesses. In contrast, my thoughts tend to be extremely muddled. I often ta
