I've reached different performance levels in different environments. It's a bit embarrassing to see how the environment impacts me. When I feel the confidence and encouragement of others, my capacities increase and I out perform, and when I don't, I sort of 'shut down.' I suspect it is because I grew up in a verbally abusive household and I go numb. That is what it is, and experience has shown me I can't just snap my fingers and get over it.
It's okay to require a positive environment. It's okay to change jobs to get it. BTW I have reached high engineer ranks at FANGs.
I have also noticed that when the environment is negative and I am working hard, I reach burnout more quickly.
Ask HN: I've lost faith in myself as a developer, how do I get it back?
101–110 of 243 posts
Re: Ask HN: I've lost faith in myself as a developer, how do I get it back?
#102I would encourage you not to think of this as a personal, internal issue. We are obligate social animals.
This self-doubt isn't happening in a vacuum. You haven't gone into depth here (and that's fine) but it sounds like a lack of psychological safety. And even if you are the CTO you cannot create a supportive environment by yourself.
Who around you is calling out what you do, or making you feel (even subtly) that what you're doing is shitty?
(and yes, if that's the environment, it absolutely contributes to burnout)
Imagine you have opinionated or senior developers, maybe with a tiny chip on their shoulder - they know better than their idiot boss! And you're not the sort of person who wants to ride roughshod over them. Their opinion matters to you.
There are absolutely ways they could advocate for their own views and express disagreement without making you feel stupid.
If anything like this sounds right (just spitballing after all), I don't know what to do without more details. Gonna be hard to say "be nice" without sounding like "don't tell me I'm wrong." But not impossible.
Wishing you the best.
Re: Ask HN: I've lost faith in myself as a developer, how do I get it back?
#103From a distance, it is very hard to diagnose, but try to sleep more, do more sports, take a holiday (at least 2 weeks).
Al of those can help re-wire and put things into perspective.
Re: Ask HN: I've lost faith in myself as a developer, how do I get it back?
#104This sounds a lot like burn out or depression to me (I’m not an expert on that field!). Get yourself checked. It happens to the best, especially now during pandemia.
Read about „imposter syndrome“ and „decision fatigue“.
Re: Ask HN: I've lost faith in myself as a developer, how do I get it back?
#105You're having an emotional problem, not a technical one. Therefore you need to ask a therapist, not other developers.
Peer support is really undervalued in the modern world. Empathy and advice from people similar to oneself can be just as, if not more, healing as professional support, for certain situations.
Re: Ask HN: I've lost faith in myself as a developer, how do I get it back?
#106It is interesting to see what you have described as part of your role as CTO. I'm a CTO as well, and of a relatively medium sized company (~600 people). I'm also an avid developer and engineer, but those developer and engineer skills are primarily tasked with exploring new technologies. The CTO role really does vary a lot from company to company, and CEO and CEO. I prefer the approach of a CTO being very technical, but not focused on things like active code production. The technical part comes into play when you are thinking about the future, and trying to make decisions that will influence the company many years down the road. Any focus that is narrow enough to get 'called out' right away would be an indicator of too narrow of a focus.
In a way the biggest fear for a CTO is getting called out 3 or 4 years down the road for problems in the core direction you set. It happens, and will happen, and we all work to make those events as rare as possible.
Re: Ask HN: I've lost faith in myself as a developer, how do I get it back?
#107Unfortunately, you may need to let go of your tech work, or shunt it over to "nights and weekends." I was a manager for 25 years, and one thing that I learned, was to never put myself into the critical path. I could do tech projects, but they needed to be "nice to have on the side" projects. Management requires that we work on interrupt. We can't have that sweet "fugue," that makes us productive developers. What I di…
It's possible still to do some real coding as CTO. One thing I like about Stripe is that the leadership will make sure to take a week or so each year to ship a real feature and then write up all the little pain points that they experienced and ensure they are addressed - it helps quite a lot with developer productivity.
Re: Ask HN: I've lost faith in myself as a developer, how do I get it back?
#108My first though though when you say these things is: I wonder what the company culture is like? The environment could be toxic if your feeling so much doubt.
I think being a CTO brings it's own unique challenges, perspectives and context. You were a developer. Your not exactly one now and that has to be considered. For one you have context that developers don't and they may not understand that. It also depends on the specific situation. Good code, 'right way', it often just translates to "my definition of right or good". Lots of subjectivity to software development, as weird as that sometimes feels. Lots of ego and ego is a problem.
In my experience a group of developers can believe something is right very strongly and be completely wrong about it and that really sucks because we're social animals and, for better or worst, concensus is often at play in decision making.
No idea how to fix your specific issue but I think it requires openness and sharing and accepting that different people have different opinions on what's correct and everyone has to accept that it differs from person to person. Did you want to share anything specific? Not sure if it'll help but it might give you more insights to get a set of different opinions from outside your usual circle.
Re: Ask HN: I've lost faith in myself as a developer, how do I get it back?
#109The highest level of mastery is realizing how much you don't know and that nobody knows anything compared to what there is to know.
Beyond the feeling of unease that comes from the above realization, who is the voice the back of your mind who is critical of your code or your technical decisions? Is it an old voice from childhood, a parent or a teacher, or is it current, your peers for example? These voices are sometimes triggered by events going on in your life, work related or not.
Is it really your code or is it that you don't work in a supportive environment? Perhaps someone is gunning for your job and being subtly critical in ways that are getting to you.
You might want to look at "egoless programming" and work on getting your ego out of your code and into the competitive workplace where it is more relevant.
Re: Ask HN: I've lost faith in myself as a developer, how do I get it back?
#110Some good advice here. One thing you may want to consider is that CTO of $x MM company and CTO of $100x MM company are two completely different roles. As different as engineer vs manager. If you haven't actively adapted over the last 8 years, this may just be the result of being in a job you don't like. Whereas regular-exec work might be a lot of management, architecture decisions, etc., high-level-exec work is more…
This rings true.. I was a CTO of a startup growing to $10x M company, and now am the CTO of an $100x M company, and the envelope of work is very very different.
I spend far more time thinking about, researching about, and developing about what we will do in 2-3 years, instead of 2-3 months.