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Ask HN: How do you deal with the powerlessness feeling of coding?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with the powerlessness feeling of coding?

#21

Look into stoicism. Everything you are describing is core to the dichotomy of control: “The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own...…

> Feeling powerless comes from not taking control. You have many things in your control you can be doing. Once you do that, it'll be a hell of a lot easier on your conscious.

Thanks for this one. It really hit me up.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with the powerlessness feeling of coding?

#22
post #16

To be frank, you’re struggling with junior web dev problems. Learn to be an engineer.

The webpack issue he's talking about was something I encountered when using Webpack and ES6 Typescript for the first time. I had to dive into Webpack, Rollup, Babel, and Typescript configurations. It took a week but I finally nailed down the issue as a noob. My background was in EE, debugging wires for logic gates etc, but the principles hold the same-- our job is to problem-solve.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with the powerlessness feeling of coding?

#23
Without seeing any of your code, what I've written below can be considered wild speculation.

I've experienced this kind of page-reload relating to buttons that are of type SUBMIT and no specific ACTION is specified in the FORM tag. Sometimes, the default SUBMIT behavior triggers earlier than an attached Onclick() handler. If there's no ACTION, it reloads the same page.

You might try adding the following attribute to the FORM element:

ACTION="javascript:void(0);"

This should prevent the form from SUBMITting to itself. The job to submit the form then relies on JavaScript code in an event handler to submit the request properly.

You also might try switching the type to BUTTON if you just want to attach an Onclick() handler to it.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with the powerlessness feeling of coding?

#24

> What am I suppose to do? Debug it ? I don't event know where to start from. This is the problem. Know that it's mostly a psychological thing. Start by reading the code of the feature you're trying to use. Go through it with a debugger. Yes, the first time it will be hard and take a long time but you will get used to it. To the manager just say "it's gonna take a little longer than estimated, there's a bug we didn't…

Not only read the code but read the logging and the error messages thoroughly.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with the powerlessness feeling of coding?

#25

Look into stoicism. Everything you are describing is core to the dichotomy of control: “The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own...…

The hard part is when there is a quick and un maintainable way to implement something without leadership to demand doing it the right way. Some times the quick way is the best way. It just needs to be explicitly stated and decided. Too often there's discussion but no decision and no follow through.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with the powerlessness feeling of coding?

#26
post #14

It sounds like you are struggling with two different things. Problem 1: Your manager isn't giving you the space to diagnose and fix the issue. The solution to this is to explain to them the situation in as much detail as it takes why you need a certain amount of time. If they don't want to listen then it's time to start looking for different employment. It's a great time to be looking, seriously, the market is crazy…

> It's a great time to be looking, seriously, the market is crazy hot right now.

It still can take several months of dedicated search - full time - to pass through all the filters on the way.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with the powerlessness feeling of coding?

#27
hello,

a bit o.T. here, but i think, that 50+% of (web) development is communication (with people).

especially in "common" projects - mostly CRUD stuff - this is much more essential than any other technical experience/knowhow ever.

why? its easy to delve into technical details, its hard to explain them to people, especially, if those people are non-techies ;))

br, a..z

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with the powerlessness feeling of coding?

#29
> and only a few people on earth know because webpack is so hard to understand

Absolutely not true.

This isn't a comment about webpack (nor is yours) but looking at this specific example, how to deal with feelings of powerlessness is gain power. In this case, take apart webpack. It's JavaScript, after all. Create a new project using webpack using your default tooling, create a project using webpack with no magic tooling, reproduce the problem with webpack in with your repo in various states/at various points until you really understand the issue. Understand what webpack is doing under the hood until you're not powerless.

Extrapolate and figure out how to debug Python/Django. Bang your head against the code until you get frustrated. Take a break, a breather, some space. Go back to it. Eventually something will give and you'll figure it out.

Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with the powerlessness feeling of coding?

#30

Look into stoicism. Everything you are describing is core to the dichotomy of control: “The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own...…

The practical problem with the boiled down stoic approach is that in modern life almost nothing falls firmly and clearly into one of those two categories.

In OPs situation for example, webpack problems aren't under their control. But whether they use webpack, to some possibly very small extent, is. So now OP has the choice of whether to _consider_ it under their control, and push for a different tool that might make life easier. That may or may not be a good or satisfying use of time and energy, and OP is on their own for that, the stoic "control vs not" dichotomy has not been useful here.

This applies to like, basically everything that could cause someone mental anguish these days. Foreign wars, economic inequality, accessible biking infrastructure. These are all problems for me. All of them are outside my individual control, yet I still have a degree of influence to affect them.

Under this simple stoic approach, which bucket do I put them in? Assuming responsibility for every event I have any power to influence seems like a path to despair. But abdicating responsibility for things I feel powerless to change is also grim.

Maybe it has always been like this. And yes I am read up on the stoics and know that they have a lot more to offer for these calculations. I'm merely pointing out that giving people the simple "control/not control" technique is rarely very helpful.

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