41–50 of 63 posts
Personally, I just am happy dicking around with programming and never being better than an average programmer. I'm more interested in money and other things. :/
Imposter syndrome is a good sign! It means you have some understanding what "good" actually is. It's the opposite of Dunning-Kruger. You can go forth and slowly learn the stuff you're missing.
Stay humble, but don't forget that you are some good.
The same goes for painters, musicians, poets, writers, anyone that you think is "good" is actually just someone who found their thing and hammered the hell out of it until they squeezed out a handful of really good works if they're lucky. What you don't see is the massive pile of absolute garbage most of these people produce and keep from the public's eye. I think the defining characteristic of someone who's actually good at a creative activity is whether they can admit this and get past it as just part of creating.
So, instead of saying how can you be like all of these guys, how about how can you just improve your own skills? Since everyone sucks at this to some degree or another, all that really matters is how you improve what you do and get better at it. Ultimately, that just takes hard work, study, and trying to find any tricks and hacks that are being kept from you.
As an example, I'm teaching myself to paint and I suck at it, but I don't give a shit if I suck at it, I enjoy it. So for the last almost month I have been painting the walls of a box over and over again until I learn how to do it right. It's fun, I like it, and I don't care if other people are better at it than me because I'm finding my thing and I keep improving because I keep working at it and failing until I get it right.
I will give you slightly different advice than most people here (that advice being "just keep programming, and experience will come on its own). First, figure out what it means to actually be a good programmer. For example, do you want to be a JavaScript ninja? Or do you want to know everything there is to know about how your OS works? Or do you want to be able to put together a mobile app that is cleanly architected…
I will give you slightly different advice than most people here (that advice being "just keep programming, and experience will come on its own). First, figure out what it means to actually be a good programmer. For example, do you want to be a JavaScript ninja? Or do you want to know everything there is to know about how your OS works? Or do you want to be able to put together a mobile app that is cleanly architected…
Great response Igor. This is pretty much how i try to stay up to date. The thing i find frustrating is when you finally become really good at technology often there is already a new out there which you are totally clueless in and feel like you are back to being a junior. Being a programmer for an average intelligent person feels like you are constantly chasing your own tail...
Basically, focus on getting things done and building things. If a part of what you are building seems like too much work, someone probably has already built a solution for that. Otherwise, don't worry about using the absolute cutting edge stuff. At one point there was a tongue in cheek saying that "it would take more time to evaluate the popular JavaScript frameworks than to write a new one" (or some such). It still holds today, so don't sweat the name of the tech and stick to the stuff that you can be productive with.
Like everyone else here? I hate to burst your bubble but the vast majority of the programmers here are not nearly even close to as good as you think they are. Mostly they're good at talking like they are and memorizing obscure facts about computer science. The reality is that everyone who codes pretty much sucks at it or they get lucky a couple times and do something significant. The same goes for painters, musicians…
Writing is a very different process than reading. You start making connection between ideas and concepts when you write about them. And that's a process that makes you absorb more knowledge than you would normally absorb by only reading.
Like everyone else here? I hate to burst your bubble but the vast majority of the programmers here are not nearly even close to as good as you think they are. Mostly they're good at talking like they are and memorizing obscure facts about computer science. The reality is that everyone who codes pretty much sucks at it or they get lucky a couple times and do something significant. The same goes for painters, musicians…
FWIW, I'm 40 and have been programming professionally for 15 years, and programming as a hobby for probably 8 years before that. I still run across stuff I don't understand, all the time. And I'm not one of those people who have "1 year of experience 15 times" instead of "15 years of experience". I'm pretty aggressive about learning new stuff and expanding my horizons. And yet the pace of change is so fast, there's a…
Something to note on thinking everybody is a super-brilliant "10x" programmer: You're not seeing the same people post deep, insightful things here on HN. There are people who know a lot about this one thing, and can write very accurately and intelligently about it, but don't know anything about HTML or desktop programming (C, C++, others), server-side logic, etc. The same goes for each of those fields, and every othe…
Like everyone else here? I hate to burst your bubble but the vast majority of the programmers here are not nearly even close to as good as you think they are. Mostly they're good at talking like they are and memorizing obscure facts about computer science. The reality is that everyone who codes pretty much sucks at it or they get lucky a couple times and do something significant. The same goes for painters, musicians…
It's useful to have a definition of good that allows people to feel confident about their experience and good about themselves because feeling this way helps to engage them further in the practice.
What you actually just did was entered a group conversation to tell almost everybody there that they are bad programmers before doing a humility display for everybody to see.
When I think of the steady progression from apprentice to journeyman to master, I feel that what is good is the progression, and what is bad is anything that stops the progression: lack of confidence, over-confidence, or the kind of severe lack of ability that causes people to be rejected from a market before they are ready to compete in it.
I've gotten the feeling that you are quite confident so while it's great that you are dialling back any arrogance and concentrating on continuing to learn I wouldn't say that it's necessarily healthy for everybody in tech to raise what they consider "good" to be top-1% of Google R&D as this could just serve to stop them from even trying.