Pryde

I was recently fired from my first software job out of college and I don't really know how to bounce back smoothly.

For some context, I'm 22 and graduated with a B.S. in both Computer Science and Mathematics in May. I took a job just before graduation with a small custom software development firm that focuses on custom web and mobile applications for businesses in and around my local area, and in which all employees work remote full-time, which I’ve since learned may not be the best situation for me. During the interview, much of the discussion revolved around mobile experience, and as such I believed that I’d be primarily working on mobile application development, which may have been true had our contracts at the time not all been web applications. I had no real experience with the stack the company used, nor significant experience with web development.

I live in an at-will employment area, so I was fired without notice, because I was taking too long to accomplish tasks and milestones on the contract I was assigned. This is an issue that had been discussed with me a 3 or 4 weeks prior to the termination of my employment, and my employers and I agreed to a 2-week probationary period to assess my progress before deciding on continuation of my employment. At the end of this period, I was not proactive in obtaining feedback on my performance, and as such received little-to-none. Today, I was told that my performance was not satisfactory, and I was let go, which seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Now I’m unemployed and have no idea what to do next. I've considered looking for freelance work while I find a solid job, but I don't really know what to look for. I've reached out to my former employer to receive more feedback on my performance to know exactly what I need to improve on, so I feel that I'll have a solid foundation to make the changes necessary to be a better employee, but how do I overcome losing my first serious tech job due to performance?