Ask HN: I've lost faith in myself as a developer, how do I get it back?

>I had one job where there was a lot of technical debt, but my manager did not respect me and my colleagues had what was basically a "learned helplessness" attitude. So I'd go around trying really hard to make things better, but everyone responded to me like I was just crazy or naive or didn't know what I was talking about.

Heh, the job I just left had a team like this.

I'd bring up ideas _for discussion_ all the time, at the very least to make my team members reconsider how we handle certain things. Even if my idea weren't the accepted one, we really had good reasons to improve our status quo. Yet just like what happened for you, when I'd call out some issue or situation the response from the team was that I misunderstood something or was crazy or etc. It gave me a lot of self-doubt, but I'd also bring up the issues to a senior engineer and he'd agree that usually my topics were worthy of at least some discussion since they had the potential to become improvements.

Probably the first thing that should be acknowledged here that being good CTO isn't the same as being a good dev.

I'm not a CTO and never have been, so feel free to completely disregard my advise, but from what I've observed being a good CTO is far more about communicating effectively with the rest of the org, understanding business requirements and ensuring the development team is equipped to solve problems than being a good dev. To some extent you also need to be available to unblock devs when there are key decisions that need to made at a higher level.

In a smaller company you might need to wear multiple hats from time to time, but when you're acting as a CTO your job isn't to be a good dev and to do things the right way, but to ensure you have the right devs and architects in your team so they can tell you the right way to solve problems. The most you should be doing is approving and guiding their decisions. If you feel you have something to offer as a dev then by all means, share your opinion with the team, but your not there to be a dev, you're there to be a CTO.

It sounds like you're taking too much on honestly. You can't be expected to know everything or be an expert on everything technical problem that comes your way -- that's not what a CTO does. A CTO just needs to have a solid high-level understanding about how things come together and delegate everything else.

I think first you need to decide if you want to be a full-time CTO or a CTO who is also a developer. If you're going to continue to be a developer while being CTO then you'll probably just need to accept you're statistically unlikely to be the best developer on the team to solve every problem and therefore from time to time you're going to do things wrong and you're going to need to seek help and feedback from other devs.

For what it's worth a small-medium sized company I used to work for had a CTO who was also a dev (he was the first dev), but by the time I joined the team he was also the weakest dev there. Thing is, he acknowledged that and that's why we were there. He picked up a few dev tasks from time to time where he could and when he had time, but otherwise he would trust us to tell him the right way to solve problems and let us get on with it. He was a great CTO in my opinion, not because of his dev skills, but because he trusted us and gave us the resources we needed to get our jobs done. There were many occasions I needed help from other devs on the team or even external resources and he would always make sure that help was available to me so I could do my job well. That's your primary role as CTO in my opinion. You're not suppose to be a good dev, you're just suppose to ensure you have a team of great devs who have everything they need to be great devs.

> just make a decision, any decision.

The nuance here is if you're making a decision that has a gross positive value, then you likely have a large number of "wrongness" choices that still result in a net positive. If you're not sure which of them to take then take any one that has a positive EROI (the ambiguity makes them all appear similar returns). Remember that EROI is marginal so even if you end up in a lossy situation _after_ the decision, so long as it's less loss than before you're net better off than you were.

If you're making a decision which all decisions seem to have a net negative EROI, then there is no opportunity at hand. Keep looking for a real opportunity.

I don't have advice or answers to any of your questions. I don't know if your situation will get better or worse. I appreciate the humility implicit in your question, and it makes me feel a little better about related things I'm dealing with in my own life. Thank you for that, and I'm rooting for you to get where you want to be.

That might be true (I don't know, I've never done it), but my point is that I would have thought that I could implement something as large as Linux or macOS in a few months, when in reality that's certainly not true even with my ~decade of experience, let alone when I first dropped out of college in 2012.