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Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
21–30 of 245 posts
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#22I was a self-taught guy largely working by myself. I went to some big Microsoft education conference and met other people and realized most of them weren’t smarter than me or doing something much more complicated.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#23Working on teams with great functional test coverage, so it's difficult to accidentally break something big. The mindset that if someone makes a mistake and introduces a bug, it's not their fault, it's the tooling/process's fault has stuck with me throughout my career.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#24Learning the syntax of my language really well.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#25since confidence is orthogonal to capability: positive encouragement and uplifting comments from my seniors did the most for my confidence.
if the capability is the question, well i don't have any answers. 10 years in and the imposter syndrome is still strong.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#26[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#27For personal development, it was merely shipping things. The more I published, the better I felt about myself. The more I published, the more I had learned and had to refer to. Now when I'm taking on tasks I can instantly recall how each of the pieces of the problem can be stitched together from things I did previously (or at least know where to look for foundations to build from)
For the confidence? It was working with others. The first job I had I got to sit down with one of the company's programmers as part of my on boarding and watch him work through tickets. After I saw just how flawed everyone was I felt a lot better about myself. I suppose that's a weird thing to say: Oh he was pretty shit, so I shouldn't feel bad about my poor performance...but that's not the point I want to make really. More that, it is wrong to compare your efforts to learn and grow against the final product of others. Once you sit down with the experienced devs and see how they shape and form the product and all the bumps along the way it doesn't feel so bad to struggle on your own.
Ultimately the skills that I honed that gave me the best boost in confidence were not really the direct programming parts where I put letters and numbers in files. It is the debugging. Understanding how things move and where to look for problems makes me feel like I can solve any problem with the right tools.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#28My perspective is different than what has been posted, so here it goes.
I knew I could outwork everyone and brute force being a better programmer by a function of continuous improvement through hours of work. (btw I was wrong, there is always someone out there that will outwork you...and they will be smarter than you, but hey it made sense to me).
I didn't realize I made it until
a) People would recognize me in meetings because of my code
b) New programmers started to ask me for advice
...now I'm in the Sr Devs, Tech Leads, and Lead Architects ask me for advice level. Honestly, I still have the same attitude, if I work effectively, I can keep getting better. Notice that I remove the "work harder" part.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#29I was a self-taught guy largely working by myself. I went to some big Microsoft education conference and met other people and realized most of them weren’t smarter than me or doing something much more complicated.
I have a similar story except the confidence came when I landed my first on-site job. Once I got in the team, the same realization came to me - I am not any worse than these guys here.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#30For me the moment was a year or so into my first programming job, this was in the 90s. We were debugging some device driver issues and found that we'd made bad assumptions about the order in which things happened between our interrupt handlers, device driver thread and application threads. Once I took the time really mapping out what all can happen in an asynchronous environment and then setting up long-running stress test with multiple clients it clicked in place that you really have to continuously test your mental model against what could happen in the real world.