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

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

#211

Post by aprdm »

ghiculescu wrote: post #206
optymizer wrote: post #65

How are you the CTO and a developer? If you're coding features as the CTO your company must be really small so it doesn't really matter if the code isn't 'perfect'. If the company is big enough where people have the time to call you out on shitty code and think they can do better - awesome! Let them code it, and you can focus on technical direction. Tell them what to do. Delegate. Let them write the code - it's what…

This and the comment below are super broad advice that you absolutely don't need to listen to. I'm the CTO at 100+ person company and write code about 50% of the time. Do the work you enjoy most. As long as customers are happy and you keep finding more of them, the rest will work itself out.

100+ person but how many devs? It doesn't feel reasonable for a CTO to be coding 50% of their time. Coding is usually the lowest impact / ROI activity one can have after having a couple of folks under them.

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

#212

Post by michalf6 »

Are you keeping yourself physically fit?

Are you taking care of your body?

Are you sleeping well?

Are you eating well?

Also, consider checking your hormones. Age and stress will move your thoughts in this direction. There are ways to counteract though.

Mind and body are inseparable, one influences the other.

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

#213

Post by bgroat »

gcmac wrote: post #159
bgroat wrote: post #56

Is 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…

Reminds me of this excerpt from an Obama interview: > When problems reached him in the White House, he said, it was because they were unsolvable. He generally was being asked to choose between two bad options. “By definition, if it was an easily solvable problem, or even a modestly difficult but solvable problem, it would not reach me, because, by definition, somebody else would have solved it,” he said. “So the only…

This is where I learned it, and it's why I'm much more forgiving of leaders than most people I know.

Which isn't to say they should be unaccountable. But these are people who make impossible choices all the time

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

#214

Post by bgroat »

incompleteCode wrote: post #156
bgroat wrote: post #56

Is 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…

This reminds me of a Buffet'ism (if you will): "it is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong." I heard it on a podcast, though I'm pretty sure he didn't coin the phrase.

I wouldn't be surprised if he coined it.

Admittedly, I'm a Buffet fan, so I think he can do anything.

But he is pretty famously a bit of a wordsmith

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

#215

Post by pkrotich »

My initial reaction is you’re a CTO not a developer. Perhaps you’re trying to play both - something got to give if that’s the case given the leadership overhead.

As others have mentioned- hire the best and empower them. If being a developer is your passion then perhaps you should consider giving up the CTO role.

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

#216

Post by thewileyone »

As a CTO myself, I can commiserate. I'm still a decent developer but I'm also a decent project manager, systems architect, software architect, tester, business analyst, software engineer and sysadmin, not only because I have my hands in all of these roles now but also because I've done these roles in my career. I'm also a decent salesman, service delivery manager, business strategist, etc.

Unfortunately, when you step into a CTO role, skills-wise, you have to become a generalist to do your job better.

If you're losing faith in yourself because you feel your technical capabilities is diminishing and so is your perceived value to the organization, I fully understand. You need to reevaluate what your value in your role. Is it important that you're the best developer? To me, no. As others have pointed out, your job is to make the better decision in a sea of decisions; I say better and not best because sometimes the best decision is not the right decision for the business.

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

#217

Post by ankurdhama »

> When I look at a new feature I just think that I will make it shitty or get called out on not doing things the "right" way

Fix your expectations. Perfect things don't exists. Don't get trap into the idea of perfectionism. In retrospective, everything will look like "not doing the right thing", don't take that personally, that's how retrospective works.

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

#218

Post by 8note »

sam0x17 wrote: post #168
AstroDogCatcher wrote: post #136

Earlier 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…

A proper 1 way door for your example would be to build warehouses in a way where cell phones don't work. Once people have died, you cannot make a change to allow cell phones quickly and cheaply. You're stuck with the warehouses, and either have to stop operations and build new ones, or accept the risk that more people will die

2 way doors aren't about making bad choices, they're about the response time and cost for when you identify that the choice was bad. You can make bad choices for 1 way and 2 way doors.

The best example I can think of for your argument is the flint water system. What looked like a 2 way door was actually a 1 way door, when the choice to switch water sources completely destroyed the pipes beyond usability, and any water flowing through the pipes would be contaminated, regardless of the source.

A 2 way door equivalent would stop being contaminated once they switched the water source back, even though people had drunk contaminated water

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

#219

Post by Toine »

hutzlibu wrote: post #177
gcmac wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of this excerpt from an Obama interview: > When problems reached him in the White House, he said, it was because they were unsolvable. He generally was being asked to choose between two bad options. “By definition, if it was an easily solvable problem, or even a modestly difficult but solvable problem, it would not reach me, because, by definition, somebody else would have solved it,” he said. “So the only…

"So the only decisions that came were the ones that were horrible and that didn’t have a good solution." This should probably be a must read for any wanna be presidents and leaders who are only after the power and glory.

So 100% of wannabes

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

#220

Post by [deleted] »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #148
tombert wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's no reason you shouldn't have been able to. Programming basic things like an operating system shouldn't be as hard as it is. (Honestly, programming an entire OS is easier than programming within existing systems, at this point, for many applications – but only if you can cope with bare-bones serial I/O.)

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