My situation is that the salary I get might be too big and might be one of reasons that I might be fired.
It feels that I should be working like 10 hours per day, and plus weekends to finish what they expect.
I am getting good salary, but far away from highest in the market. Still I did not even believe I ever will be able to earn as much as I am earning now. I would be happy if I earn 2x lower, but with condition that I can do things fast enough for that salary.
Of course I want to get a better salary, but the problem is I am not able to find a way to be so much productive as they are expecting. I have read various articles, even bought a book about productivity and read it. I have learned those things, maybe some not applying 100 %, like using keyboard shortcuts, I have not learned all possible ones, but most frequently ones which I need I have learned. And I see my boss not even using those but still do things much faster.
One of reasons can be that boss knows how everything should be coded, and when I code, and he reviews my code, there are lot of comments what needs to be fixed, and often it consumes big part of time to fix them, often happens that the same amount of time is consumed to make fixes which were commented in code review.
This is very serious. I have been fired from first job for low productivity after 9 months of work, then from third job after 8 months of work. And now I am in 4th job, already working 7 months, and now they might start think that I had enough time to get up to speed, plus my salary is highest I ever had got in my carreer.
I asked this big salary, because friends said that if I ask too low in interview, they might not hire me because they might think I am bad.
I do not think I am that bad in coding, my code quality is similar to other colleagues in my opinion.
So I am able to do good in job interviews where they cannot reassure how quick I work. In many interview I get some tasks during interview and also some give to do task at home, and it means I finish those quickly enough to win the job. Also they see my knowledge and my code quality from questioning and those tasks, which means it is not bad, since I pass.
But the problem starts after I had won a job. Almost always they are not happy about time I take to finish real world tasks.
If I had not tried to improve my productivity, of course first thing would be to find information on productivity and apply it. But it looks that I reached the limit.
But I do not want to struggle all my remaining life. Especially if I would get fired again after so short amount of time working, this would raise red flags in interviews.
My real carreer bottleneck is productivity and ideally I would like to start to be more productive and be able to earn as much as my friends, like almost twice.
But first priority is to have no stress and no risk of being fired and I can accept even lower money than I get now and be happy and from this point to learn to be better and raise my salary bit by bit, to not have stress for too big salary and expectations.
I understand that it would not be ideal of course, for the same reasons as it is not good to ask for lower salary in the interview. But I do not know what to do to have better life quality and to not be unemployed suddenly.
If you will say to not ask for lower salary, please say then what are other options, besides working overtime.
Plus my dream would be to work like 4-6 hours a day, because I have many fun things to do in life, but first goal is to do good with 8 hours a day.
You might also think about freelancing option where I can choose my conditions how I want. For me biggest problem is that I have bad people skills, and freelancer needs to deal good with clients. I would need some colleague who could do the dealing then, but I do not think I can do this anytime soon. Plus with freelancing and one man with low productivity, I will not be able to take big projects, because they will not be able to wait for so long. Unless it is possible to freelance on big project where several people work on one.
Update
My experience
I am not so new in the market, I have like 6 years of experience. I had worked with various frameworks and tools, but the wide experience does not make me that much productive. Eg I know codeigniter and zend frameworks. When I am wokring with zend, my codeigniter knowledge does not help me. So I am at same speed as if I would knew only zend.
Update
Are automated tests taking too much of my time?
I am considering this. I love tests when I have to edit my code and not having to manually retest everything. Plus good programmers say to use TDD. I discussed and said - that this is taking extra time, so is it worth to cover everything? He replied - it does not take much time to write a test. I do not believe that it does not take much time - I think it takes few times or maybe even 10x more to write a test than write a line of code which implements that case. So it might be only worth for complex functionality maybe. But Robert Martin writes in his book that we should test asymptotically 100 % because then we save lot of time by not having manually test.
Update - some people are even able to intentionally waste time and still are not fired
I am also thinking how unproductive I have to be that some people are able to work on their own projects during work hours, or watch movies, or play computer games, or just read news and Facebook and still not be fired for productivity.
I think even when I am less productive, when I work without wasting time, I should at least do same amount of work as those time wasters. Or maybe the problem is that those timewasters know how to talk nicely and they lie?
Update - about quitting job option
Some of you suggest quitting. I am again not sure if this is a best option, when I am working only 6 months. They have invested money into me so that I get domain knowledge, also technology knowledge - I gained very valuable experience of writing automated tests. And I myself invested nerves of being afraid that I might be fired. After getting the knowledge, I am more productive than I was 7 months before. So quitting might be also a wrong thing to do. And record on CV with 6 months in good company does not look good, especially after working 8 months in previous company.
What I want to know - is it ok to ask to reduce salary to compensate low productivity so that everyone would be happy?
Summary
I do not feel that I am lacking lot of technical skills for my salary and position. My friends do not even write automated tests but earn almost twice as much because of good productivity. I can make even complex (at least the most complex ones I have been assigned to do) features working. But I was fired for low productivity from 2 jobs. It is my 4th job, I do not want to be fired again for same reason and I do not want to work overtimes unless there is a special case like bug which does not allow users to use application. Can I ask for lower salary to compensate my lack of productivity skill when I am out of options how to improve my productivity? If not, then what are other options?