Ask HN: Confused software developer

First of, believe in yourself. This sounds clinched, but what I mean that you should do is dare to take on more responsibility.

Presumably you don't advertise yourself as 'experienced' when applying for the job openings because you feel you won't be able to add value the the company you're applying to. I presume you don't trust yourself to be able to complete the tasks the company will ask of you and that you refuse to have the company lose money because of you.

The solution, in my opinion, is to inflate instead of deflate what you've done. Even if you yourself don't believe it amounted to much: having 'built a custom cms' on your cv will, if phrased the right way, sound like 'experience' to potential employers. You're not lying when you do this. You _have_ built that CMS, and even if it seemed simple it still counts for something.

I can honestly say that I've written accounting software for the marketing department of a certain company. On my cv this sounds impressive, and I've actually done it. In reality it came down to 500 lines of (very ugly)VBAv6 code in excel. Do I think it's the best work I've ever done? No, but I did do it.

Next, perhaps you don't realize this, but after a certain point the language you program in matters less and less. You see what's important in programming is not the languages that you know but the paradigms that you've mastered and the intuition you develop for doing things in a certain way. In C# you've learned object oriented programming. This experience is much more valualbe to you than knowledge of C# itself. With you having played around in Java, C#, Phyton it sounds to me that you've sampled allot of different ways of getting stuff done with programming.

And you do _know_ this, even if it seems so simple to you, putting on your cv 'two years experience with OOP' is true and a valid way of advertising yourself. Allow yourself to advertise the 'generic' programming skills you've learned with C# when applying for openings that require Java. You're not lying, and you'll see that you can live up to the challenges your future employer has in store for you.

When I wrote that VBA application I hadn't written a single line of VBA in my entire life, and while the source is a mess (I don't envy the person who needs to fix something in the future...) the program does work.

You _must_ trust yourself to be able to tackle the problems that could be thrown your way by your employer. That way you won't feel guilty when applying for a job and you can say that you are, in fact, experienced, which you are.

There are several purposes:

1) Building a lot of things will hopefully help you uncover different problems that you will have to struggle to solve. Hopefully after struggling to solve them, you will gain understanding. Just following hello worlds doesn't really help much. But when you're trying to figure out how to implement a "real-world" product problem, you'll have to figure out how to develop features that don't come for free with whatever framework you are using.

2) Also, don't write everything from scratch. Research what frameworks or libraries might help accelerate your development. Understand the pros and cons of using them.

3) Hopefully as you build more things, they will get better. And then you will have something to showcase to prospective employers. You'll have real code you can share with them. Be humble, get pointers on how you can improve. Bonus points if you have tests too.

4) It shows initiative and interest. I'd imagine these are important intangibles. I'd be very reluctant to hire an engineer who didn't tinker with things at night. (not necessarily all night, every night.)

5) Additionally, taking vague concepts and requirements and turning them into products does take some discipline. Which features will you keep, which features will you cut. How can you change your requirements and still get what you want. It shows that you can do things without being told exactly what to do, or how to do it.

Hope this helps.