I feel like I am between a rock and a hard place and I would like some perspective and/or advice from other developers or programmers to help decide what my next course of action should be.

I got into software dev around the beginning of the pandemic when my institution hired a new supervisor for a new team called the Application Team (subset of ITS) specifically for creating customer business applications on campus for different business needs. It started as taking over support for customer Microsoft Access Applications that were initially suported by a contractor for over 15 years.

After getting to the start of the 2nd year, we had trouble keeping other developers on because the pay isn’t high enough to keep a new developer on longer than a couple months. Needless to say, this opened up an opportunity for me to start learning C# and .NET and gave me an ability to get promoted with new responsibilities. It was always understood that I will be learning on the job.

That being said, fast forward to the last year or so, I am the most senior developer (under my supervisor - who has 40+ years of experience) and we were able to promote non-IT people to beginner developer positions - with the idea my supervisor will help train them in how to do software development and the full software dev life cycle etc.

Now, to where I am struggling. My supervisor is holding 2 weekly meetings, at 3 hours a piece, where he goes through the development of a real product we need to implement for our institution. I was asked to join these meetings because I could add some additional value but also because since I am still relatively new to development work, we thought it might be good to reinforce some of the stuff I’ve learned on top of learning new concepts we are building out for the first time(like apply business rules with a MVC type of paradigm).

The main problem is I am struggling with these meetings because they are so basic and I find it hard to pay attention and stay focused and engaged through our meetings. Some of the stuff I just can’t learn by watching 3 hours of demonstration, it’s not a good a way of learning for me. I personally need to see a demonstration, then I need to apply it to my own situation and “play” with it to make sure I fully understand. Simply watching someone do all the work and talk through the process isn’t effective for me to learn - at least to a point. Especially if we don’t have “work” to do that helps reinforce what we are learning in the sessions. I feel like the new developers are getting more out of these sessions than I am because I just don’t find them all that helpful, even though I do see nuggets of good information from time to time.

Does this sound like a situation where I just need to “man up” and accept I am going to have to go through this 6 hours every week, even though the benefits feel marginal at best and a waste of time at its worse. The last training sessions and this one has been watching him debug a business rule for almost 3 hours between 2 days and I just don’t feel like this is helpful or I am learning because I can’ stand to pay attention for longer than 15 minutes. It’s making me wonder if I made a mistake switching to software dev a little bit. Maybe I need an attitude adjustment. Maybe I need to speak to my supervisor about the training, but I feel he’s more focused on our new developers right now. I do agree that some of this is very important and I need to be involved with some of the training due to the decisions we make as a team but I feel like this time could be better put towards self taught training.

Thank you to anyone who takes the time to read and reply. I really appreciate it.