Ask HN: I've realized I'm a bad software engineer and I'm over 30, what's next?

Why do you have to come at me like this? This is a feeling I go through all the time. It's partly imposter syndrome, but partly that you're probably holding yourself to a higher standard than others.

> I'd been assigned a medium complexity task

Who decided that it was medium? A manger? Some lead? You? You can't really compare what is easy and what is hard when it comes to software. I worked on a project that timelines started to slide when I came on board. Not because I didn't know what I was doing, I had just moved from one project to another. It was because the manager didn't account for the time it would take for me to learn the code base. He assumed that developers were cogs in a machine that can be replaced with no downtime. That doesn't work.

> I've realized I'm not a senior software engineer as I thought and now I don't know what to do next.

There are two pieces of advice I can give you here;

1. Nobody else knows what they're doing either. We're all making it up.

2. You're going to fail at something, a lot, before you get good at it. Go dunk a basketball and get back to me if you think you should just coach(manage) because you couldn't dunk

>A third option would be to take a break from work and try to learn to write good code

You're already at a place paying you to write code. Why take a break to do it for free?

you're probably fine

> You know there are issues, so that is a good thing.

That was my thought too. Programming is kind of like American Idol--a lot of programmers don't know how bad they are. The submitter said they failed to accomplish a medium complexity task, but it's not clear what this means: got stuck and gave up; missed a deadline; finished, but with poor quality?

From one of the submitter's thirty previous Ask HN submissions, I see experience working with a variety of tools, including machine learning. With batteries-included languages and powerful libraries, you can get pretty far in Tinkertoy mode, assembling the pieces of a solution. When you're faced with a task that demands more programming skill, it can be an adjustment.

If you have a passion for software development, self awareness, and a desire to improve, I think you'll be okay.

Depends on the path right? If its backend/systems related yes it may require you to write actual code and the person may still feel out of his depth. But there are areas in front-end for example where writing testcafe/cypress stuff is more like "go here, click on the thing, then click here", which doesn't need much more than basic coding ability.

If you do want to take a break to catch up, I strongly recommend making contributions to large open source projects. They are a fantastic experience in learning to maintain large complicated codebases with a constantly updating set of contributors.