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Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

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Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

#151

Post by rramadass »

magarnicle wrote: post #116

The attitude of my bosses. In two separate jobs, when first starting out I worked on some simple projects that led me to 'fixing' some other problem I encountered. Both times that problem was well solved in some other way I was ignorant of, but they gave me a "well done" and didn't make me feel silly for being proud of my 'fix'. I was just learning the relevant languages and jobs, so their response gave me confidence…

>The attitude of my bosses.

This is absolutely IT! Everything else is secondary. Nothing boosts a noob's confidence as the fact that his boss trusts him to deliver on the project and gives him the responsibility and positive support needed to do so.

Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

#152

Post by vidyesh »

mindfulmark wrote: post #8

Realizing that external dependencies are regular codebases just like the one you're working on. That you can open them up in VSCode, look around and figure out any bugs or issues you're having and even open pull requests to improve them. At that point, you lose the feeling that there are magic things out there that you will never understand and that for the most part everything is just regular old code that regular p…

> That you can open them up in VSCode, look around and figure out any bugs or issues you're having and even open pull requests to improve them.

I think the real skill then is to learn to navigate big codebases in few days time than taking a few weeks and then feel dejected by the time spent and still unsure.

I often feel ambitious for such endeavors but navigating big codebases take time, any tips?

Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

#153

Post by halkony »

bmitc wrote: post #141

If anything, my confidence gets lower as I get more experience. The amount of politics, power jockeying, engineers who hide behind decisions as if they were technical only to be highly personal preferences, how many people reject simplicity and prefer complexity while calling it simple, lack of documentation, etc. It just all makes me feel like I don't belong in the field. It's all so overwhelming and complicated, an…

It sounds like you have a commitment to excellence not shared by your peers. As sibling comment points out, good enough is good enough for most businesses. I like Paul Graham's quote from his book. "The goal of big companies is not to write quality software, but to suck less than their competitors."

My confidence as a software engineer comes from the gratitude of my users. Giving them something that makes them light up and say "I had no idea I needed this." I've worked in many organizations where layers of bureaucracy smother that joy. Having a direct line to my users is incredibly motivating.

Many comments touch on the "do it for the users" mentality and I'll add my own take. There's a book called "The Science of Drawing" by Harold Speed. It's a pretty rigorous dissection of drawing written in 1913. However, despite its clinical writing style, the author notes that the highest praise an artist can receive is "Oh." Not "It's beautiful," or "I really like it," but a raw and spontaneous emotional reaction. Dissecting art is only as useful as a means to produce more of it, the emotional communication is the actual core of the medium. Software is very similar in this way.

Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

#154

Post by kmoser »

My first job at a software company was in the shipping room (this was when software was still distributed on physical media) when I was 16 years old. As I walked around the office I realized I was at least as skilled as most of the programmers who worked there, who were about 10 years my senior. Shortly thereafter the company gave me a desk and hired me as a programmer.

Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

#156

Post by topspin »

JohnFen wrote: post #59

As a new programmer? Nothing. Fear of inadequacy was a constant companion. Over the years, though, as I saw more and more code written by programmers I respect and from companies I respect, I noticed that mine was no worse than theirs -- and I realized that my skills were, at the minimum, just fine. Warts and all. (Edited to swap "mine" and "theirs" to be what I meant to say)

> as I saw more and more code written by programmers

That's what worked for me. By the time I was hired for real, full time coding work I had already done lots of C-64 Basic and assembly, x86 assembly, C in DOS and Win32 and had been reading DDJ for years. When I discovered the hopelessly abysmal code that supposed veterans had built their careers on I knew I was worthy.

Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

#157

Post by yayitswei »

mindfulmark wrote: post #8

Realizing that external dependencies are regular codebases just like the one you're working on. That you can open them up in VSCode, look around and figure out any bugs or issues you're having and even open pull requests to improve them. At that point, you lose the feeling that there are magic things out there that you will never understand and that for the most part everything is just regular old code that regular p…

This. My favorite language for this is Clojure. There's usually not much library code to sift through because it's so terse.

Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

#159

Post by chx »

You can't break anything. It's still true (in like 99.9999% of cases) so just go ham. Try, try, try, try. Nothing bad can happen. This was very helpful back then for me. Not sure whether it's still helpful but back then this was on a computer my parents smuggled into the country...

I was smiling reading git here -- the above happened before CVS was invented. I am old.

Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

#160

Post by halkony »

ftxbro wrote: post #131
arjvik wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of Turing complete systems are you thinking of?

It could be a game like terraria or minecraft or factorio, or a game map editor, or a middle school hand calculator, or spreadsheets, or an automatic hotkey or macro app, or anything that is at all flexible or extensible. Of course several of these wrap real programming languages but it's not obvious at first especially if you never did programming. There are so many ways, and it's likely that embryonic hackers will…

So your distinction is that hackers gravitate towards extensions of turing completeness (i.e. code representations) as opposed to mechanical systems like basic engines and or machines?

This seems mostly true in my personal life. As a hacker, it explains my 5 year obsession with minecraft and gmod in my teens. I got deep into gmod e2 and then actionscript3 (RIP). It also explains why some mechanically gifted people I know don't "get" the flexibility of code, despite their intuition for systems. I think it takes a certain conviction to modify and extend abstract systems. Problem diagnosis is not obvious and can be very frustrating. But the dopamine hit of seeing things work together is enough to keep me going.

Overall, my hacker foundation is built on a never-ending loop of frustration and desire. Frustrated things aren't working with a desire to make things happen. I didn't program professionally until recently, but I instantly understood the mentality. I'm grateful for the wisdom my career has given me to pursue it.

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