If this sounds like you:

So you've just graduated from college / gotten a great internship / gotten your resume in good shape and practiced interviewing, and you got the job. Congratulations: you're a junior programmer! Welcome to one of the world's best value-for-money professions, with relatively low stress and high pay. You feel tremendous relief that you've finally passed the bar.

But a few months into your new job, something's not quite right.

You're spending a lot of your time on things that seem unimportant. Often it feels like you're banging your head against the wall. You have an assignment—it seemed very important and interesting when your boss explained it to you—but you seem to be stuck in a maze of twisty little passages all alike, not making much progress.

You're isolated. You're not talking to anyone about your work. You don't really want to talk to anyone about your work, and as days pass, you want to less and less. Why? If you talk to someone about your work, they'll realize you've been banging your head against the wall for weeks. They'll know.

For now, though, it's enough to make you miserable that you know: You're not getting anything done. Your goals don't make sense to you, you're not sure what direction to go in, and you don't really have the power to move the project in any particular direction. You get a few things done each day, but feel demoralized by their sparsity and their insignificance. And the longer this goes on, the less you want to ask for help or input of any kind.

What happened?

Know that your situation is very common, and that it is solvable. Read on.