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

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221–230 of 245 posts

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

#221

Realizing that external dependencies are regular codebases just like the one you're working on. That you can open them up in VSCode, look around and figure out any bugs or issues you're having and even open pull requests to improve them. At that point, you lose the feeling that there are magic things out there that you will never understand and that for the most part everything is just regular old code that regular p…

My favourite language for this is Go. The standard library is totally exposed and easy to jump into, right there for you to learn from and to make sense not only of the library but how to actually write Go in the first place.

CGO_ENABLED=0 for new projects though :)

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

#222
post #53

Realizing that external dependencies are regular codebases just like the one you're working on. That you can open them up in VSCode, look around and figure out any bugs or issues you're having and even open pull requests to improve them. At that point, you lose the feeling that there are magic things out there that you will never understand and that for the most part everything is just regular old code that regular p…

This is indeed a superpower. I don't really remember when I felt that external dependencies were magic, but thinking about this, it explains a lot of the behavior I see on some developers who are very negative about the more challenging parts of the job. Some of them don't really believe the research stuff we do at work are even possible. They're constantly surprised when other devs finish those tasks. Some don't bel…

I’ve never met a developer with that attitude, but I’ve met too many managers with it. You’ll be even less of a fan of working for those developers, I guarantee it.

That mediocre dev is a straight shooter with middle management written all over them…

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

#223
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, that's definitely true. To me the issue is they assuming everyone around them is like this. I'm totally fine with lack of experience or knowledge, but a co-worker constantly underestimating their peers is not alright.

The senior developer above me is like this for me, and it’s rough because it shakes my self esteem AND often leads to me having to support and extend a fragile and changing 3rd party library to solve a rather specific problem that would be better solved with custom code. Where it really stings is when I do something of my own initiative (like, for example, create a transparent API over memoizing and caching some expe…

With many exceptions (the left-pad debacle comes to mind), it’s generally much better to use a third party library instead of supporting your own implementation.

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

#224
post #141

If anything, my confidence gets lower as I get more experience. 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. It just all makes me feel like I don't belong in the field. It's all so overwhelming and complicated, an…

I couldn’t agree more.

I could live with apathy towards documentation, but it goes beyond apathy. There is often outright hostility to anyone who “wastes time” writing documentation or doing design work. Agile grifters have absolutely ruined this profession.

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

#225
post #141

If anything, my confidence gets lower as I get more experience. 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. It just all makes me feel like I don't belong in the field. It's all so overwhelming and complicated, an…

Writing extremely good quality software is hard and expensive. In the vast majority of cases all you need is okay software developed by people who just want to get the job done. Understanding how software creates value and what kind of software at any moment is valuable; and which parts of your job is tied to that process makes this much clearer. If anyone reading this just want to write bash scripts that don't viola…

Writing bad quality software is often even more expensive.

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

#226
post #141

If anything, my confidence gets lower as I get more experience. 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. It just all makes me feel like I don't belong in the field. It's all so overwhelming and complicated, an…

Judging by my performance reviews, I’ve gotten way worse at my job over time. They LOVED me as a junior, they despise me as a senior/lead. Only difference is that as a junior, when the boss came by and said “let’s do it this way,” I said wow, cool, teach me! Now I say “No user has asked for this, your design is overcomplicated, and we need to factor in an extra three weeks for the overdue tech debt fixes I’ve been wa…

There are a lot of zombie companies that only exist due to bailouts and zero interest rates. Sounds like you’re at one of them. Inflation and interest rates aren’t going down any time soon.

It’s all cyclical. The decadence today will eventually give way to another recession, and we’ll build something better from the ashes.

I’m also growing increasingly disgusted by the state of the industry. Things weren’t so messed up 10 years ago, but salaries were also not so ludicrous at the time. I suppose I should be careful what I wish for, but I’d appreciate some disruption right about now.

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

#227
The ability to use the debugger for troubleshooting any unfamiliar code has drastically increased my confidence. Unfortunately I was not taught to use such tools while at university where we used to code on a daily basis.

Also, using state of the art IDEs to be able to navigate between my own and third-party code removed pretty much all of my anxiety when dealing with code in general.

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

#228
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The senior developer above me is like this for me, and it’s rough because it shakes my self esteem AND often leads to me having to support and extend a fragile and changing 3rd party library to solve a rather specific problem that would be better solved with custom code. Where it really stings is when I do something of my own initiative (like, for example, create a transparent API over memoizing and caching some expe…

With many exceptions (the left-pad debacle comes to mind), it’s generally much better to use a third party library instead of supporting your own implementation.

I know this is the mantra, but my experience has been highly mixed and only generalizable to how low in the stack it sits.

For, say, security implementations for authorization and access controls, or even low level HTTP request routing? Absolutely. The goal there is to adhere to something standard and battle tested by experts, and the third party libraries tend to be fewer in number, and of higher quality, with longer term support and clearly defined upgrade paths.

But that’s the lower level stuff, where your special custom needs are superseded by the primary goal of just “doing the one right thing”, or “adhere to the commonly agreed upon standard”.

For all the other things that make an app unique - things like CSS frameworks, UI components (beyond basic, accessibility-minded building blocks), chart drawing, report generation and caching - my experience has taught me otherwise, the hard way.

Being stuck using a 3rd party library that doesn’t do what the client or business needs it to do, having to juggle our own internal patches and bug fixes with updates to the library itself, all only to have the library abandoned or deprecated in favor of the author’s next pet project, really sucks and often comes with a high opportunity cost and a high development cost.

I now consider third party implementations of higher level features (and especially anything front-end) to be something that needs to be evaluated as equally costly as an internal implementation by default, and not favored just because somebody else wrote it.

Maybe I’ve just been unlucky in my experience, though. I also suspect ecosystem makes a difference. The PHP and JS ecosystems are full of poor libraries with snake oil sales pitches. I suspect this is different with, say, Rust.

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

#229
post #222
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is indeed a superpower. I don't really remember when I felt that external dependencies were magic, but thinking about this, it explains a lot of the behavior I see on some developers who are very negative about the more challenging parts of the job. Some of them don't really believe the research stuff we do at work are even possible. They're constantly surprised when other devs finish those tasks. Some don't bel…

I’ve never met a developer with that attitude, but I’ve met too many managers with it. You’ll be even less of a fan of working for those developers, I guarantee it. That mediocre dev is a straight shooter with middle management written all over them…

I think it depends on the industry and in location. In my neck of the woods I'm seeing an uptrend towards more technical managers, or sometimes a mix of lead developer and manager, who can actually get things done.

It's a matter of preference but IMO/IME it works better when a manager is actually good at it.

A manager that is supposed to be technical but only wants/knows how to do the management part, and can't make more than the basic stuff won't really fly. I've seen a couple of those getting fired during probation period.

On the other hand, the "bad developer" that thinks packages are magical will eventually settle as an expert beginner in a low-expectation environment. Which is fine.

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

#230
What boosted my confidence as a new programmer was celebrating small victories and milestones. Completing my first project, solving challenging coding problems, and receiving positive feedback from colleagues or mentors gave me a sense of accomplishment and reassurance that I was on the right path.
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