Ask HN: Am I incompotent for web development?

This is not right but good advice ;-)

I'm sorry you're experiencing this level of stress. The situation you're in is one that many (I might even say most) junior, and even senior, engineers find themselves in. If I can give you one piece of advice that was critical for me, which I share with every new engineer, it is this:

Be radically transparent with your team when you struggle. Tell people when you're stuck, when something is new to you, when you're uncertain of where to go next. And tell them soon.

In my first jobs, I constantly felt like I was "interviewing" for my position even after I started. I thought that if I couldn't do something simple, I wasn't living up to the skill level I had promised them when they hired me. So I would hide the fact that I was struggling. Worse, after 2 days of being stuck on something "simple," I'd feel like I couldn't possibly tell the team--they'd think I'd wasted their time for two days!

The key for me was to simply be transparent. If I was assigned a task that used some technology I'd never seen, I simply told the team upfront "Hey I've never used Vue before. I'm going to read the docs and familiarize myself with the framework, but if this is particularly time-sensitive, should someone else take this ticket or can anyone recommend a better approach than learning Vue from scratch?"

Then, whenever I hit a confusing bit of Vue code that I couldn't decipher in 20 minutes, I'd simply post a link in Slack and ask "Can anyone help me understand what's going on here?" and explain where I was getting confused.

If your team hired a junior, they don't expect you to be a senior. If they see you working, see where you're getting stuck, and see where they can help, things will go much more smoothly. Where conflict occurs is when a junior disappears for 3 days, then shows up with a PR that needs to be redone (speaking as a person who has been that very junior).

I started out building websites as a hobby in about 1996 and somewhat professionally in about 2001. I’ve worked on many different web projects over the years, using various different platforms, frameworks and libraries. After 20-25 years in the game, it’s really only been in the past 3-4 years I’ve really felt like I’ve known what I’m doing. Even now stuff still throws me.

So, don’t be discouraged. Don’t think you’re stupid/incompetent for not knowing everything yet. It really can take a long time to understand how all the parts of the stack work together.

Aside from continuing to improve your craft, think about how you can improve your relationships with your colleagues so they become more supportive, or consider leaving and finding a workplace that is more nurturing to less experienced team members. Such places do exist and it’s worth making the effort to find a workplace where you feel supported and valued.

Good luck to you.

Aah this reminds me of my early days in software development. One time i had to recompile qmail over and over with debug printfs just because i couldnt figure out why it didnt work. Spent two weeks on it. Turns out i had the wrong permissions on a directory. Felt like an idiot. Could have used strace or something better instead - or heck i could have the manual! I still feel like that when i pick a radically different to what i am used language. 7 years ago when i first tried Haskell i thought to my self: “bro can you even code? what am i even doing here?”.

Fast forward to today and i usually get a “feeling” about why things might not work, and dont even need to dig deep to figure out why, i just “know”. Thats called experience. Comes with time and practice. Gradually you develop a sense to why or how things should work, and thats why experience is valuable.

So give yourself time. And sleep - sleep sometimes lets your mind work on solutions, hence the expression “we’ll sleep on it”.

Thank you sir, I read this and thought what I did all the time. If I was more transparent, maybe I felt better and could think without stress.

This means to me that talk with my project managers and colleagues more make more comments/updates on Asana :)