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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?

#61

Post by maartenh »

serial_dev wrote: post #21
maartenh wrote: post #10

Argh. We all have these stories of lost hours because of an assumption that proved to be wrong. Nowadays, whenever I help someone debug an issue, I insist on starting from zero assumptions (by making self depricating jokes, and stating that I need to understand the context properly). Furthermore, the culture/way of communicating in German might a _lot_ more direct and interpretable as negative than in Brazil. I'm Dut…

Just one more thing to consider: the OP (and you) might think that the negative experience is due to different cultures and that is certainly possible. However, we also need to keep in mind the possibility that he/she is working with negative people, that are simply a*holes. If that is the case, I'd recommend looking for a new team. I'm also an immigrant in Germany and so far my experience has been positive on most t…

Agreed! And in any case, if the company culture doesn't suit the OP, assholes or not, don't stay. This can be a huge energy leak. I realized this only too late at one of my previous jobs.

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

#62

Post by b20000 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #58
b20000 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yeah, i guess that implies that management are a bunch of incompetent idiots.

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

#63

Post by b20000 »

stemlord wrote: post #57
b20000 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

experience seems to be far less important than leetcode BS in getting hired. experience is really all that should matter.

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

#64

Post by sircastor »

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…

I’m be Doing web development for 17 years. I’ve been through all kinds of frameworks and paradigms.

Most recently I’ve been learning Typescript (finally) as in my new role, _everything _ is written in it. I described it like a toddler. Every time you do something it says “why” and then you explain and it asks “why?” About your explanation.

The advice here is good. Communicate with your team. If they’re worth their salt they will respond with support and good faith.

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

#65

Post by marcosdumay »

b20000 wrote: post #62
marcosdumay wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yeah, i guess that implies that management are a bunch of incompetent idiots.

Personally, I'd be happy to see a single place where management doesn't do the "we need a metric, this is a metric" dance in some context.

Anyway, it's hard to say somebody is an incompetent idiot when literally everybody does the same thing. It's certainly caused by some structural feature of companies.

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

#66

Post by mariusor »

> (I had to stop at 17 o'clock) to find out that I'm running a microservice in a Docker Container and the changes I made on a mail template had no effect, when I send them, since I was working on local files. I feel myself an idiot and can't tell anyone

This is not your failure. This is your team's and your manager's failure. They should be aware about your knowledge levels about the application you're working on and provide this kind of information before hand instead of leaving you flailing around. I would be more upset at them than at yourself, but sadly a lot of senior developers have the empathy of a bag of bricks.

Don't be ashamed of the amount of time it takes you to find solutions, acquiring knowledge is not always a straight path. The important thing is that you learn.

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

#67

Post by majewsky »

> Yesterday was for me like disaster. I worked until 22 o'clock, (I had to stop at 17 o'clock) to find out that I'm running a microservice in a Docker Container and the changes I made on a mail template had no effect, when I send them, since I was working on local files.

I am a senior IT architect with 10+ years of industry experience. Just this Friday, I was debugging an issue in a Docker image together with a colleague, and we were completely baffled why none of our debug output was showing up when we ran the test job in the CI on the Docker image. After half an hour, we realized that we had been pushing the image into the wrong repo, so the CI never picked up the changes.

It happens to everyone. Don't sweat it.

> From now on, I will reading the docs more and not trying hunt the exact answer on stackoverflow at first place.

When mentoring, I always encourage my juniors to take time out of their workday to just read up on things. If you're going to have to use a difficult new library, give yourself an hour or two to just read the documentation on that library to understand the principles on which it is based. Even if you don't have any specific new technologies lined up, maybe take the time every once in a while to just read a random manpage. You don't have to memorize everything in there, but just getting a vague comprehension of what all these tools that you use are actually capable of. Once you run into a situation where these capabilities can be useful to you, you might just remember reading about it somewhere, find the relevant part in the manpage, and save yourself some time hunting on SO.

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

#68

Post by SahAssar »

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…

The guideline I always tell to juniors (and I can't remember where I read it) is that if you don't spend 15 mins on it yourself you're wasting others time, if you spend more you are wasting your own time. After a few times of breaking that rule both ways they usually stop asking before trying to find the answer themselves but also sometimes feel more free to spend more time on something if they want (since it's your time).

Of course 15 mins is meant as a loose time, as a sort of benchmark for "give it an actual try yourself, but don't spend a day stressing out yourself without help".

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

#69

Post by 3np »

m0xai wrote: post #51
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 mi…

No need to apologize - just keep in mind that some replies are written believing your colleagues are criticizing everything you do. Doesn't make the advice less useful, but it can affect the sentiment.

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

#70

Post by mst »

kypro wrote: post #28

Well in my first couple of weeks as a professional dev I managed to wipe the production DB with a dodgy SQL query so you're probably doing better than me (= I think most people here can relate to this though. There are still times I'm working on something and think, "oh god, I'm in over my head here". And I'm a senior dev so I'm paid to know what I'm doing. I agree with what another commenter here said about being tr…

I think we've all done something like that.

I try to insist on my production account being readonly and having a separate user for deploys.

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