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Healthy Self-Doubt

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Re: Healthy Self-Doubt

#111

Post by martindbp »

pnutjam wrote: post #76
martindbp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually don't think you need to track expenses much, at least I don't. I did at first at 18 just to make sure I could survive on the $1000 I got in loans and subsidies by the government at the time. What I recommend is to focus on the big expenses, those are what gets you. That is, housing, transportation, medical (if you live in the US, but there's maybe not much you can do here). Don't go for the most expensive…

I'm on the Midwest, it's not as easy over here as you think. The salary of your first job can hold down your income for a decade, you might not even realize how underpaid you are.

The median salary in the US midwest is probably equal to my country, and cost of living definitely lower. I don't know your personal situation, but if you're interested and not already familiar with it, you should check out some of the financial independence bloggers such as Mr Money Mustache. There are people with median or below incomes saving 50% or more, although it's of course more difficult than if you have a cushy tech salary.

Re: Healthy Self-Doubt

#112

Post by pnutjam »

martindbp wrote: post #111
pnutjam wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on the Midwest, it's not as easy over here as you think. The salary of your first job can hold down your income for a decade, you might not even realize how underpaid you are.

The median salary in the US midwest is probably equal to my country, and cost of living definitely lower. I don't know your personal situation, but if you're interested and not already familiar with it, you should check out some of the financial independence bloggers such as Mr Money Mustache. There are people with median or below incomes saving 50% or more, although it's of course more difficult than if you have a c…

I do ok, considering I have 6 kids and just broke 2x the poverty level a couple years ago (based on family of 8).

Re: Healthy Self-Doubt

#113

Post by jlokier »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #58
sokoloff wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t care if someone can bang out working binary tree on a whiteboard with the fluidity of Bob Ross, but I do care that people know that data structure and associated algorithms exist and could implement them given a dev environment, google, stack overflow, and a day or so.

> data structure and associated algorithms That's the thing. 99% of programming is Big Data (and windows, thereof), so everyone is on about that. I tend to write stuff that is on a much more humble scale, like device control software, or systems that are used by thousands (not millions) of people. I guess that I could say that "Any programmer should know about ring buffers," as that was a staple of my device driver s…

> In point of fact, only low-level drivers need concern themselves with ring buffers.

As a side point, ring buffers are also useful in some high-level, high-performance code that is multi-threaded or using multi-processors.

io_uring is an example of this used to speed up Linux kernel-userspace communication (although it's not a great example for illustrating the general principle because it's so specialised).

DSPs use ring buffers extensively. Mainly for signal data, but sometimes for communicating tasks and messages between coprocessors.

Re: Healthy Self-Doubt

#114

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

jlokier wrote: post #113
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> data structure and associated algorithms That's the thing. 99% of programming is Big Data (and windows, thereof), so everyone is on about that. I tend to write stuff that is on a much more humble scale, like device control software, or systems that are used by thousands (not millions) of people. I guess that I could say that "Any programmer should know about ring buffers," as that was a staple of my device driver s…

> In point of fact, only low-level drivers need concern themselves with ring buffers. As a side point, ring buffers are also useful in some high-level, high-performance code that is multi-threaded or using multi-processors. io_uring is an example of this used to speed up Linux kernel-userspace communication (although it's not a great example for illustrating the general principle because it's so specialised). DSPs us…

Cool! I did not know that, but it makes sense, as ring buffers were developed specifically to handoff between thread/clock contexts.

I haven't played that low in the dirt for many years. I suspect it's a very different world from the one I once knew.

I'm grateful for the abstraction. Low-level comms stuff is pretty damn hairy.

Re: Healthy Self-Doubt

#115

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

kubanczyk wrote: post #61
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always equate "impostor syndrome" to being insecure. There's a ton of stuff I don't know, and that's fine. I'm not afraid to ask "stupid" questions, and let folks know that I don't know something. Sometimes, I have no interest in knowing it, so I don't ask questions about it, and don't pretend that I know anything about it. But there's also a lot of stuff I do know. At one time, I didn't know it, and asked a questi…

Well, knowing something is not arrogance. Stating that you know something is arrogance, unless you take precautions. I'm not saying it's bad, I'm saying the situation perfectly matches the dictionary definition of the word "arrogance". Everyone around here surely knows that it's often sufficient to prefix the opinion with "everyone here surely knows that ". Because if you say raw "X" very confidently, people immediat…

I'm a fairly literal person ("on the spectrum"). If I know something, I say "I know this." If I don't know something, I say "I don't know this." If I think I have insight into something, I say "This looks like..."

My experience, here, and in many other places, is that people seem to have a deep-seated need to "put down" other people. We jump on openings from others with an almost fanatic zeal.

You won't find much (if any) of that stuff in my postings; here, or anywhere else I participate.

It's just not important for me to be "better" than anyone else (see "on the spectrum," above -I seem to have different motivational drivers from many folks). It's my experience that I can learn from just about anyone, and that I can sometimes find that what I thought was right, was actually wrong.

I'm pretty much self-taught in software development. It has served me very well. I've been delivering software for decades, but it has also sometimes handicapped me in other ways, by maybe missing something that CS majors get (I was an EE), or by not knowing the current vocabulary for something.

I remember once, in the 1990s, asking someone "What's 'AJAX'?" They all laughed at me, but explained it. I ate my crow, didn't react, and went home, realizing that it was just HTTPRequest.

Within a week, I had written a very powerful AJAX driver.

Sometimes, the people that laugh at me are doing me a favor. It doesn't really help things if I kick back. I've learned that I should keep my mouth shut, and learn from them.

Re: Healthy Self-Doubt

#116

Post by [deleted] »

martindbp wrote: post #110
hnarn wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1.3B Chinese can maintain an average savings rate of 30% This is a good example of a statistic where the average is meaningless if you don't also know the median. Also, which specific statistic are you referring to?

For example: https://data.oecd.org/natincome/saving-rate.htm I was wrong, it was 46% in 2015. I don't know what the median is, but it's probably much higher as well. Having Chinese in the family, I also know from experience that they are more frugal and save much more diligently. Now there's a reason the savings rate is high in China: there is practically no social safety net, and borrowing for school or housing is n…

[deleted]

Re: Healthy Self-Doubt

#117

Post by ravitation »

This is a bit of a weird take, the weird part is primarily...

> My point is this: if we expect everybody who is a little bit different to think of themselves as an impostor, we’ve totally lost the plot on this whole inclusion thing.

I'm wondering why when "especially [...] younger women" refer to "[their] Imposter Syndrome" it's assumed to be related to them being "women" and not to them being "younger?" Many young men and women feel some level of self-doubt early in their careers (and this is often labeled as "Imposter Syndrome"), which is why I'd imagine it'd be expected. I certainly did - self-doubt being simply a difference in internal vs. external "value" or "ability."

I certainly wouldn't expect a woman (or man) who has been in largely the same software space for ~20 years to feel Imposter Syndrome.

Other than that, which is a large portion of the article, I agree with the other general premise - that some level of humility in what you know is good (I probably would not call it "self-doubt" though, because nothing she described sounds like "self-doubt" healthy or otherwise).

Re: Healthy Self-Doubt

#118

Post by MaxBarraclough »

hnarn wrote: post #92
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imposter syndrome such a popular thing to belive in because actually most people really do suck at their jobs. The question then is whether there's a correlation between professional confidence and job performance.

Both "professional confidence" and "job performance" are hard, if not impossible, to quantify, so I'm not sure how one would even begin to answer that question.

Professional confidence isn't hard to quantify. Give a quiz with scoring from 1 to 10.

Job performance may be easy to quantify depending on the job role. For students, it's trivial.

Re: Healthy Self-Doubt

#119

Post by crispyambulance »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #29
TopHand wrote: post #23

For most of my career I worked with a small group (20 to 30) group of highly educated and mostly brilliant people. I barely graduated high school. As the years passed and we all began to age, I realized that the amount of knowledge we all had obtained during our tenure was an irreplaceable resource for the company. In order to help the younger incoming people bypass this learning curve I set up a wiki where group mem…

> never be afraid to ask a question, even if it sounded ignorant On the mentoring side, never make fun of someone asking a legitimate question. I give my team shit if they should know better about something but legitimate questions are taken as seriously as possible.

> I give my team shit if they should know better about something but legitimate questions are taken as seriously as possible.

The thing is everyone has gaps in their knowledge and is missing stuff "they should know" or perhaps have forgotten about. Getting "shit" for asking a question will lead to team members clamming up and pretending they're on top of something when instead they need a hand and some review.

Re: Healthy Self-Doubt

#120

Post by x87678r »

the_af wrote: post #67
x87678r wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I discovered was that most of these brilliant people would not share a lot of their knowledge I'm someone who has spent a lot of time training up juniors. TBH I dont have a lot of show for it. I really wish I spent my time trying to learn things myself, many of the people I've trained have much better careers than I do. I'm guessing your group of successful smart people are that way because they don't waste ti…

I hear what you're saying. Though the feeling of helping someone else is wonderful (regardless of whether you later end up with "something to show for it", job wise). Don't you think that trying to teach someone something ends up helping you solidify your understanding, maybe even making you question what you took for granted?

You are right, do you do learn when you have to teach something. Often though you're teaching how a internal system or codebase works, so you're learning/teaching stuff that isn't useful for you anywhere else.
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