Nobody tells you this early enough: the job is mostly reading code, not writing it.
I probably spend four hours reading for every one hour I spend writing. Reading to understand what’s already there before touching it. Reading to figure out why a test is failing. Reading to trace a bug through three services and a queue. Reading a PR someone else wrote and trying to understand their intent.
Writing is the easy part. It feels productive because you can see the lines going up. But writing without reading first is how you get the second system everyone eventually builds and then spends two years untangling.
The developers I learn the most from are the ones who read slowly and carefully before they write anything. Not the ones who type fastest.