Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

Imagine buying a hammer, that hammer not working, the hammer's design being so complicated that it's impossible to understand or mend, and then having to design and build your own hammer, and then putting up with that situation over and over again and accepting that as the status quo. That would be the correct analogy.

With just NAND gates and D flip flops as primitives, building a full 16bit ALU, then an ISA for it, an assembler, compiler, operating system (with memory mapped keyboard and screen) and interpreter. Then writing a Sudoku game in that interpreted language, and seeing it reduce all the way to just bits. And then running it on the simulated computer.

Really have a holistic view of what actually happens when I run a computer. Also demystified compilers for me.

Second thing was learning concurrency control, transactions and all that. The Eureka moment for me was understanding that git and databases solve a similar problem. After that, both tools lost their mystery.

Second last but not least, making web apps! A low entry barrier way to make things anyone can use really boosted my confidence.

Last but not least, learning the statistical underpinnings of machine learning.

Of course, I'm still in University so I am by no means an expert at any of the above, but even at my level these things really help with knowing your true place.

More importantly is to use an IDE with a good fast global search function and get comfortable with it. At least for me, 99% of navigating a large codebase is global search.

>The amount of politics, power jockeying, engineers who hide behind decisions as if they were technical only to be highly personal preferences, how many people reject simplicity and prefer complexity while calling it simple, lack of documentation, etc.

Learning on my own and participating in online communities, receiving feedback and coming up with project ideas led me thinking that this field is creative and people treat it as a craft. The hiring process has you either do leetcode, show off your projects and talk about them or both.

Given the above, it's easy to understand why someone would expect to see the same in the job. But instead what you get is completely the opposite. My first job felt like I joined a restaurant that actually is a fast food joint, and the metric of performance that makes people happy is how many burgers I can churn during a sprint. Documentation? Can happen later. Testing? Slows us down, test by hand.

And on top of that I had teammates who refused to use the phrase "I need help" and "I was wrong", almost as if it's a sign of weakness. I don't know if it was their upbringing, culture or just because they had to demonstrate perfection to show how worthy they are of their position, but it sucked and I ended up spending more time tiptoeing around their ego than being an actual junior engineer, so I had to quit and recalibrate my career goals.