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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?

#51

Post by m0xai »

3np wrote: post #46

> My colleagues said but nothing negative about my work. I can read this either as "my colleagues said nothing but negative about my work" (what most others seem to be reading) or "but my colleagues said nothing negative about my work" - are we right in assuming the first? > Edit: Keep at it :)

I'm sorry for my bad English, it became worse, when I learned German last year :) My teammates are very kind and they are supportive. But I'm the only Front-end dev in my small team. I ask for help from people, who works in other teams. Almost everyone when I ask something, they help me/show me the right way. But I chosen to not ask often questions to hide my incompetency :) Here I understood that it was clearly a mistake. I have to be more transparent, especially now, at the beginning of my carrier.

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

#52

Post by abraxas »

The cognitive overhead for coding web apps in a modern enterprise environment is enormous. It tends to be a big pile of spaghetti where the hipsters changed the noodles to the RPC flavour and called it "microservices". Most times it's poorly documented, haphazard and impossible to test without connecting to the whole zoo of service dependencies.

It's not you, it's them.

If you want to do web dev you'll have to put up with this shit as most places do not want to return to sanity because somehow I'm being told that the cloud "empowers them to go build faster". Nevermind the evidence is sorely lacking but this is how they all roll. From 40 person startups to Fortune 500 they are all cargoculting hard on microservices and cloud. Developer experience has taken a complete backseat and fighting for it is a real uphill struggle.

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

#53

Post by hahamrfunnyguy »

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…

100% - The #1 developer mistake is not knowing when to ask a co-worker for help. Juniors make this mistake more often, but I've observed the same pattern in developers with lots of experience too.

When to ask a co-worker for help: domain specific problems, open ended questions, subjective questions that would be hard to input into a search engine, etc.

Ask questions when you would spend a lot of time tracking down the answer. Don't ask a co-worker a question that a web-search could answer quickly.

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

#54

Post by aristofun »

You can’t imagine how many incompetent developers are there making good money and not feeling a bit of shame. Just go use long enough every other popular software (camtasia, google search to name a few examples).

So don’t worry :)

But seriously the fact that you care about your professionalism alone puts you on the next level above the army of bad but self confident developers.

I wish you to use it as a tool for your growth, not for feeling bad.

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

#55

Post by nix23 »

You will do many of those stupid mistakes in the future (take it easy, your palms are already sweaty then), i say that with confidence since i drop'd a database midday (insurance company) on the production system instead dev (just one of my ~many proud moments).

Just have a eye, or try to implement strategies that this ~cannot happen again.

Wo gehobelt wird fallen spaene ;)

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

#56

Post by s1k3s »

whtrbt wrote: post #49
s1k3s wrote: post #32

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…

I agree that HTML + CSS are very different, but why do you say they aren't programming?

Bad wording on my side, but I think you get the point.

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

#57

Post by stemlord »

b20000 wrote: post #47
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…

so leetcode grinding doesn’t work and maybe experience is more important then, after all?

I thought leetcode grinding was just for passing the interview, not the actual job?

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

#58

Post by marcosdumay »

b20000 wrote: post #47
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…

so leetcode grinding doesn’t work and maybe experience is more important then, after all?

I imagine it's patently obvious to everybody that leetcode grinding tells you nothing of value. I question the actual experience of anybody that didn't find that out yet.

I believe people put it in interviews because they need some metric, and hey, it's a metric. Quite like the constant attempt on estimating the work done on some software.

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

#60

Post by marcosdumay »

eveningtree wrote: post #38

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 curren…

Oh, that reminds me of an entire day I've lost recently trying to find the error on a personal project because the "deactivate cache" checkbox wasn't marked on my browser. Yes, the web is complex.

(I have about 30 years of programming experience, about 20 of them professionally, a CE diploma, a post-grad in machine learning... All of those gain me ability of not keep wondering the thoughts the OP had, it doesn't save from the stupid mistakes.)

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