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Ask HN: Am I incompotent for web development?

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Re: Ask HN: Am I incompotent for web development?

#31

Post by gorbachev »

randomtwiddler wrote: post #26
Vanit wrote: post #9

You know what makes a senior dev? They've already made all possible mistakes and learned from them. You're on the right path.

I'm very senior these days. Most of my job appears to be unsticking people. But even I get stuck plenty, and while I can quickly unstick most problems the other devs face I can't solve all of them. Getting stuck still happens. The real difference between what I face now and early in my career is that I have developed a sense for when to plow through, when someone else might know the answer, and when to route around.…

I often talk about a type of pattern recognition with this sort of stuff.

Over time you start to develop a sort of automatic pattern recognition skill that separates problems to "I've never seen this before" and "oh, this looks very similar to x". Also it becomes much easier to know what's hard and what's easy, like you said.

You still obviously make the wrong call here and there. More often if you're in a completely new field, like the OP.

Re: Ask HN: Am I incompotent for web development?

#32

Post by s1k3s »

Do you have any previous experience with programming? Because if you don’t, leaping from HTML + CSS to JavaScript is a huge task. JS is programming, the others aren’t. I know people tend to put them together because that’s the regular FE stack, but the learning curve and skills required to do JS are way different than the other two. So I think you should just keep at it, but also keep in mind that JS is a programming language and you’re essentially learning a whole new thing there.

Re: Ask HN: Am I incompotent for web development?

#33

Post by Flankk »

sys_64738 wrote: post #12
arkitaip wrote: post #4

Web dev is in a state of shit where devs are pushed towards increasingly complex and fragile stacks. The fact that you're learning Vue, micro services, docker and god knows what else just to do front end is sad and doesn't reflect on your competence or ability. Eventually you will learn this stack but unfortunately be forced to learn a new one fairly soon. That's the real challenge with web dev: are you ready to do o…

Agree with this web view. It’s a dumpster fire of absolute garbage peddled as engineering. Sprint planning validates it as there no time to highlight the garbage being generated under the guise of software development. The key skill for this work is efficient use of google and copy/paste. This is the end game of where this whole malaise has ended up. I don’t know how software development recovers.

The web has always been bad, just never quite so complex. The stacks are more complex and fragile and I would argue fragile because of the complexity. Most of these tools are intended to improve developer experience but I have yet to see evidence of that. I'm just glad I'm mostly working with C++ these days.

Re: Ask HN: Am I incompotent for web development?

#35

Post by Aeolun »

calebkaiser wrote: post #13

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 u…

Also, if you do go ask for help, tell them what you already tried (and you know, actually try some things, even if that ends up being a waste of time).

I love helping people that have put in the effort to try doing something themselves, but I hate helping people that just dump their work in my lap.

The “I tried nothing, and I’m all out of ideas.” trope.

Re: Ask HN: Am I incompotent for web development?

#37

Post by Aeolun »

rvense wrote: post #8

Nothing you say suggests that there's anything wrong with you. A lot of this job is knowing stupid details, and once you get to tools like Docker, what's happening under the hood is actually quite complicated and there's a lot to understand. You just don't notice except when things don't work. It takes a long time to get really familiar with one stack, and even longer to learn enough to fully be able to connect the d…

> I ask a co-worker to let me try to explain the problem

This is a magic power, 4 times out of 5 in my experience telling someone about your issue resolves the problem or confusion.

Re: Ask HN: Am I incompotent for web development?

#38

Post by eveningtree »

Allow me to give you an internal perspective:

Web development is hard. The individual parts are manageable, but bringing them together is a mess. We web developers are aware of this. It's like an open secret.

And it takes time getting comfortable with the mess, and letting the brain develop its own map of how things work. And you will do stupid mistakes along the way. Those are funny actually.

I'll give you my current perspective:

I've been at this for a decade, and I am definitely not incompetent. Last week I spent the night fixing a seemingly simple bug. It ate up my night and sanity. I went to bed angry. Woke up, are realized that I was looking at the right service, but editing the files in the wrong folder. Of course I didn't see the output. And I couldn't stop laughing.

This sort of silly mistakes happen almost once every month.

It can be frustrating, it will be. In webdev, things are in constant flux.

But try looking at it through a sense of humor, and you will see how funny it all is. The mentality will carry you through the decade.

We are just anxious & weak monkeys, with big brains, worrying about glowing glass powered by stone with lightning. It's surprising we even made it this far.

You and I deserve the leeway to make some mistakes for ourselves.

Re: Ask HN: Am I incompotent for web development?

#40

Post by Vanit »

randomtwiddler wrote: post #26
Vanit wrote: post #9

You know what makes a senior dev? They've already made all possible mistakes and learned from them. You're on the right path.

I'm very senior these days. Most of my job appears to be unsticking people. But even I get stuck plenty, and while I can quickly unstick most problems the other devs face I can't solve all of them. Getting stuck still happens. The real difference between what I face now and early in my career is that I have developed a sense for when to plow through, when someone else might know the answer, and when to route around.…

100% this, my statement was short therefore very incomplete :)
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