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Ask HN: Does anybody else feel overwhelmed while reading HN?

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Re: Ask HN: Does anybody else feel overwhelmed while reading HN?

#21

Post by groby_b »

Here's the dirty secret: You'll always feel that way.

I'm in this for 30+ years now. (Yikes!). My resume is somewhat nice. I've got a deep store of knowledge and experiences. A large group of people considers me somebody you ask for advice.

And yet, every day, I still learn something new.

Sometimes because it's a new paper cycling about. Sometimes an HN article. Sometimes because some other senior person shares from their wealth of experience. And quite often because a junior does something in an unexpected way - knowledge comes from every corner.

I still feel like I have no idea what I'm doing. I'll probably feel that way for the rest of my life. All my colleagues do.

So, don't worry. There's always somebody who's better than you, and that's great, because you can learn from them.

Re: Ask HN: Does anybody else feel overwhelmed while reading HN?

#22

Post by twoquestions »

smacktoward wrote: post #16

Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt. Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench. Care about people's approval and you will be their prisoner. Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity. -- Tao Te Ching , Stephen Mitchell translation ( http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/taote-v3.h... )

I need to get this carved into my steering wheel.

I need to burn it into my brain that it's acceptable to be adequate.

Re: Ask HN: Does anybody else feel overwhelmed while reading HN?

#23

Post by yeswecatan »

abakker wrote: post #9

What you are feeling is the exact opposite of hubris. It is good that you feel overwhelmed by looking at the universe of possible technologies and the pace of change within them. It sounds to me like you need to make peace with that, and then decide for yourself where you want to build expertise. You can extreme depth, extreme breadth, or something in between. According to IDC, worldwide IT spending is going to be ar…

Thanks for that. I have definitely taken the extreme breadth approach (just what my job calls for) which I don't necessarily view as a benefit. I feel like having extensive knowledge in a few different areas is much more beneficial than being a jack of all trades. Maybe just me.

Re: Ask HN: Does anybody else feel overwhelmed while reading HN?

#25

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

I'm guessing there's a few factors at play that lead to your perception:

(1) HN covers a lot of areas of software development; more than any one person can really be expected to know. But each reader is ignorant regarding how big a fraction of the covered technologies are well-understood by the other readers.

(2) HN stories often involve technologies related to web-development, containers, or virtualization. Those technology areas spawn inordinate numbers of tools, frameworks, etc. This exacerbates issue (1).

Re: Ask HN: Does anybody else feel overwhelmed while reading HN?

#26

Post by yeswecatan »

bingo_cannon wrote: post #7

I was overwhelmed at first. Every time a Show HN would pop up, I was amazed at how individuals could deliver on so much alone. So I accepted these things: - There will always be people who are better than you, in any field. I see it as a positive and a great learning opportunity. - There will never be time to learn everything you want to learn. The question I try to answer is: Am I doing the best I can at the moment?…

Complacency may be a blessing at this point. For years I had the mindset that it's a bad thing.

Re: Ask HN: Does anybody else feel overwhelmed while reading HN?

#27

Post by smacktoward »

twoquestions wrote: post #22
smacktoward wrote: post #16

Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt. Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench. Care about people's approval and you will be their prisoner. Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity. -- Tao Te Ching , Stephen Mitchell translation ( http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/taote-v3.h... )

I need to get this carved into my steering wheel. I need to burn it into my brain that it's acceptable to be adequate.

If that excerpt spoke to you, I can't recommend the whole thing highly enough. Mitchell's Tao is beautiful -- one of the few books I can honestly say changed my life. (I wrote a bit about how here: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2016/08/books-love-stephen-mitche...)

Re: Ask HN: Does anybody else feel overwhelmed while reading HN?

#28

Post by codyb »

bingo_cannon wrote: post #7

I was overwhelmed at first. Every time a Show HN would pop up, I was amazed at how individuals could deliver on so much alone. So I accepted these things: - There will always be people who are better than you, in any field. I see it as a positive and a great learning opportunity. - There will never be time to learn everything you want to learn. The question I try to answer is: Am I doing the best I can at the moment?…

And then you need to realize that if you spend a bit of time every day doing a little something, you'll be able to deliver some pretty big things over time.

The hardest part, I find, is starting. But once I do, boy is it a lot of fun to keep that ball rolling! There's nothing so enjoyable as hacking away at something and seeing those incremental changes fall into place.

Re: Ask HN: Does anybody else feel overwhelmed while reading HN?

#29

Post by beckler »

As much as I love HN, it does make me feel extremely inadequate as a developer sometimes.

I often dream about building some project that would provide me passive income to no longer have to work a 9-to-5. It's not that I lack the skills to execute on it, but as a father and a husband, I struggle to find time to commit to such ideas while balancing time with my family. The only time I attempted to build my own product, I ended up getting fired from my daytime job because of performance reasons. It only discouraged me from attempting to pursue anything further.

I've learned that I just can't compare myself to others here, because it just makes me horribly depressed.

Re: Ask HN: Does anybody else feel overwhelmed while reading HN?

#30

Post by patio11 »

Attempting to be as accomplished/skilled as the union of people you read on the Internet is a fool's errand. You have to accept you'll never know everything and that, for almost all things, there will be someone -- or a lot of someones -- much better than you.

Pretend you were working at a company with a hundred engineers. Do you understand how easy it is for every single one of them to simultaneously feel like you do? The React mavens feel like they're just knocking together JS and wonder when they'll be allowed to do real engineering. The backend specialists wonder why they don't understand networking or servers better. The DevOps folks envy folks who build things. The American office wonders why they can't speak foreign languages; the German office marvels that anyone can learn Japanese; the Japanese office worries their English isn't up to the global standard.

There's nothing wrong in specialization -- it's how we stay sane. A very workable and easy to understand formula early in your career is specialize in two things; you don't have to be better at X and better at Y than everyone you meet, you have to be "better at X than anyone who is better at Y" and "better at Y than anyone who is better at X." This is very, very achievable, regardless of how highly competent your local set of peers is.

Also, unsolicted advice as a sidenote, but life is too short to spend overly much time in negative work environments. Assuming the negativity isn't coming from you, changing environments to one of the (numerous!) places where happy people do good work might be an improvement.

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