Ask HN: Am I incompotent for web development?

Just one more thing to consider: the OP (and you) might think that the negative experience is due to different cultures and that is certainly possible.

However, we also need to keep in mind the possibility that he/she is working with negative people, that are simply a*holes. If that is the case, I'd recommend looking for a new team.

I'm also an immigrant in Germany and so far my experience has been positive on most teams, so if someone feels that a team is hostile, negative, belittling, don't stay there too long only because "I must be too sensitive and I can't handle how Germans communicate". It's not always your fault.

It's worth considering getting a coach for some of your skills either within or outside of the company. The reply about transparency was perfect. But you also want to be able to develop without necessarily always feeling like you're pulling at the team. Someone who isn't part of your company that you can talk to and get advice through problems will add cool perspective to what's happening too. Don't underestimate the people around you suck. Plenty of "seniors" are actually junior by ability but get hired, and hide it by shoveling work and zero support on others. There are often volunteer orgs for getting a coach like https://codebar.io

When you feel incompetent (as you do), and you get the feedback from being incompetent (as you have), you probably are incompetent. That said, you can always improve. It's first job, its whatever.

Nobody learns new technologies as quickly as you seem to expect yourself to learn them.

What you are describing sounds pretty much what I would expect a jr developer to struggle with. The key, as mentioned by others already, is to ask for help proactively.

If you're not getting help after asking, that's when I would start to think about whether I'm in the right place. Not because of my skills, but because if your employer doesn't support you properly, your likelihood of failing in the job goes up dramatically. This is especially important early in your career. Don't stay at places that don't properly support you.

> to find out that I'm running a microservice in a Docker Container and the changes I made on a mail template had no effect, when I send them, since I was working on local files

A couple of decades of programming in, and I could still very easily make this mistake if I started working with Docker, because I’m not familiar with it. I would pick up on the problem much faster than you did, but that’s because I’ve trained my intuitions over the course of many years, not because I’m cleverer—through experience, I know that if a change doesn’t seem to take effect, it will be either that I touched the wrong thing (edited the wrong file, talked to the wrong server, ran the wrong program, whatever), or that there’s a cache in the way and I need to recompile something, restart something or clear some other kind of cache. You don’t yet have this experience. Persist, and you’ll pick it up over time.

As a more personal suggestion from my own experiences: if you possibly can, find someone that seems to actively enjoy explaining things and get them to take you under their wing. Most people aren’t like that, but there are a few here and there; I’m one, and I love having people ask me things and getting to explain them to them, and watching them grow. (And if you’re an introvert and worried such a mentor will wear you down with extroversion: don’t worry, I don’t observe any correlation between extroversion and enjoying teaching.)