It does sound like burnout, and also like not being in the right environment (which contributes to burn out). 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…
Thanks for sharing your experience. I’m also going through similar issues with gaslighting at my job right now which I attribute to a few insecure colleagues and managers in a heavy tech debt laden environment. It’s done major damage to my self esteem lately. I was feeling very confident as a developer and tech lead until joining the team I’m on now. I’ve been constantly questioning myself lately even though my intui…
Ask HN: I've lost faith in myself as a developer, how do I get it back?
181–190 of 243 posts
Re: Ask HN: I've lost faith in myself as a developer, how do I get it back?
#182I highly recommend reading the Linux kernel management style guide at https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/management-st... . It has this gem of a quote: > It helps to realize that the key difference between a big decision and a small one is whether you can fix your decision afterwards. Any decision can be made small by just always making sure that if you were wrong (and you will be wrong), you can always u…
Re: Ask HN: I've lost faith in myself as a developer, how do I get it back?
#183This seems like less of a development problem and more of a self confidence problem. You should have a session with a therapist, there is probably a deeper cause of this in your life and you'd be better off trying to figure out that than finding a bandaid that HN could provide. There are tons of remote options like BetterHelp where you can get an appointment quick without much hassle or commitment, so it's a pretty l…
Re: Ask HN: I've lost faith in myself as a developer, how do I get it back?
#184I highly recommend reading the Linux kernel management style guide at https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/management-st... . It has this gem of a quote: > It helps to realize that the key difference between a big decision and a small one is whether you can fix your decision afterwards. Any decision can be made small by just always making sure that if you were wrong (and you will be wrong), you can always u…
At $company, this is core to how decisions are made. There's no need to get stuck for an extended period of time on "two-way door" decisions; they can always be reverted. Inversely, decisions that cannot be reverted require due consideration. When there are multiple pending decisions, categorizing them into "one-way door" or "two-way door" decisions can help greatly.
Because that company talks about one way and two way doors a lot.
Re: Ask HN: I've lost faith in myself as a developer, how do I get it back?
#185I highly recommend reading the Linux kernel management style guide at https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/management-st... . It has this gem of a quote: > It helps to realize that the key difference between a big decision and a small one is whether you can fix your decision afterwards. Any decision can be made small by just always making sure that if you were wrong (and you will be wrong), you can always u…
Can you explain the last sentence of the quote? Seems ambiguous.
Another tongue in cheek line from the source is this:
> First off, I’d suggest buying “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, and NOT read it. Burn it, it’s a great symbolic gesture.
Re: Ask HN: I've lost faith in myself as a developer, how do I get it back?
#186This is in addition to the other advice here, not instead of.
Re: Ask HN: I've lost faith in myself as a developer, how do I get it back?
#187Is it possible that you're not making the "right" moves because you're the CTO? Leadership is hard and it's hard because you're making bayesian calculations on suboptimal choices. Almost by definition. Say a Jr. dev has a problem that they can't solve. They kick it to an intermediate. The intermediate can't solve it so they kick it up to a senior. The senior can see a couple of solutions, but want's to run it past th…
*there are some things the supreme court does around consistency which aren't like this.
Re: Ask HN: I've lost faith in myself as a developer, how do I get it back?
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. This is the sad truth at way too many orgs, even YC funded ones. Several times I have come in…
Any tips or lessons learned on working with the non-technical folks? This is a struggle I am dealing with and am constantly trying to improve in. They want to do things their way, which might work okay but is inefficient and not in line with the technology goals of the company. Hard to wrangle them - they run off and do things without talking to me or the people in my department, not considering the plans technology…
This can happen when the software group is seen as incapable, unresponsive, or even just slower than "business speed". I'd suggest talking to the individuals and their leadership (separately) to learn more about why they adopted X without talking to your department. You may well uncover missing or broken lines of communication, entrenched negative expectations ("it takes a month to get a simple DB query run, why would anything else be faster?"), and/or find processes so onerous that everyone tries to avoid them.
Re: Ask HN: I've lost faith in myself as a developer, how do I get it back?
#189Long form:
The one (or last?) time I felt this way was when I had just stepped down as CTO of a well funded company I co-founded.
I can say today that the reasons for stepping down had little to do with my competence, though I didn't feel that way at the time. In truth, it was 2007, and my co-founder and I realized that we were in for a very long stretch of no income, and a short runway, and that the best thing to do was to essentially go on standby.
Still, my confidence took a hit.
I took about a month off, which didn't really help change that feeling. I enjoyed the time off, and it was good for me in general, but it didn't change how I felt about my abilities.
Eventually I decided to do whatever I could to reduce any doubts I had about my competence. I started teaching people how to write code, which meant I really had to make sure that I knew what I was talking about. Teaching helped fill in a lot of gaps I didn't know I had, but also helped me see that I knew what I was doing, at least enough to teach others.
I didn't stop at teaching how to write code though. I started consulting, and managed to find gigs that let me help engineering teams communicate better, and taught those same teams how to have more robust practices around code changes, releases, failures, debugging, code reviews, etc. All the other non-coding stuff every coder needs to be good at.
It took years, but eventually it got really difficult to feel like I didn't know what I was doing. It was clear I knew enough to be effective.
I learned another pretty important thing during that time:
I'm not an expert. No one is. The people who say they are don't yet realize what they don't know.
Admitting I'm not an expert does a few things: it allows me to fail and learn, and to be grateful for what I gain when I do. I don't pretend like I'm a beginner that can't function without stackoverflow. I just leave room for the possibility that there are often better ways to do something. I've learned that shutting the doors to those possibilities is a sure fire way of feel incompetent.
Being humble and ok failing makes all the difference. If someone doesn't like my approach, that's fine. Rather than defend my approach at all costs, I explain the goal, define constraints, and reduce any friction towards hearing how to improve the idea. If after talking it out my idea was still the right way to go I make sure to express gratitude for the feedback.
While trying to "get back", a friend of mine who recently lost his fight with cancer, who's leadership abilities and incredible software development skills were something I still hold up as my "end goal", often said: "It's always good to be humble, and almost always better to be humbled."
I try to optimize what I do around that idea. Having a baseline of "there's always more to learn" just makes things better and easier.
It also helps me get stuff done. It helps me have good relationships with people I work with. If someone doubts a decision I've made, my default mode is to assume they're correct. They often are correct, and I grow. Sometimes they're wrong, and it gives me an opportunity to be humble and help them grow with me. Either way, no energy is spent defending an idea because my ego says I need to. Energy is only ever spent on improving my skills and the skills of teams I lead or work with.
Re: Ask HN: I've lost faith in myself as a developer, how do I get it back?
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is nothing to do with one-way/two-way door decisions, you are conflating that concept with an understanding of "unintended consequences" in order to take a cheap shot at Amazon. Ordinarily I'd enjoy that as much as the next person, but this case is too ham-fisted to leave unchallenged.
You're missing the point. The point is that even the most mundane decisions can lead to irrevocable negative situations, so one should think about worst case scenarios with every decision, as engineers are regularly trained to. Classifying things as type 1 or type 2 decisions can create a blind spot, as it did in this situation in my humble opinion. In reality anything can become a one-way-door decision. The "dunk" i…