Ask HN: I've realized I'm a bad software engineer and I'm over 30, what's next?

It's not clear from your post (and you don't have to make it clear, of course) whether you're getting fired from your current company or not.

Merely failing one task won't get you fired and if you have the self-awareness demonstrated above to realize that you haven't yet learned what you need to become senior, gives you a clear path (and one that won't even be that hard if you've been selling and making software for 10 years).

Making software in a team is a somewhat different skill and you just need to learn it.

I contrast your case (understanding the issues) with a code review I did around 20 years ago where someone had hardcoded the value 17 in a bunch of places in a mixed c / c++ codebase. I suggested he use a #define for the magic/hardcoded values.

I kid you not, his resubmission contained:

  #define SEVENTEEN 17

and the points of use all now said SEVENTEEN. (At least the instances of 34 were replaced with SEVENTEEN * 2.)

That programmer wasn't going to make senior. You will. If you're getting code reviews that are pointing out these issues at your current place, stay there and learn. 6 months from now, you'll look back at your thread here and realize just how much you've progressed with the live mentoring in a team and the spaced-repetition of go away and code, get review, improve it, get review, etc.

Don't become a project manager.

If anything become a product manager. It is a desperate need to have product managers that have some inkling of what it's like to develop software. In some places this might be a semantic difference, but project managers seem more about people and scheduling than understanding a software product. Your background will be more useful a bit closer to the code.

If you are interested in continuing to build software: everybody sucks.

Difference is: some realize it and some don't. You are a rare person that made the jump over the chasm.

We all take shortcuts. We all compromise. And none of us knows enough to have the perfect solution pouring from our fingertips at any given time.

Guess what? Those things you've identified? Yeah. Bad. But even after you fix all of those, there are hundreds, maybe thousands more waiting for you to identify them and fix them.

And when you fix enough of them you'll realize that striving to code perfectly is, itself, a code smell.

And you'll start doing some things 'wrong' on purpose. Why? Because it's all a trade off. And you're not coding to code, you're coding to solve a problem. And sometimes that problem doesn't need perfect code to be solved.

All of that 'bad' code you've created? It solved a problem. It's probably not as bad as you think, given the parameters of the problems you were solving.

By all means, fix the problems you see. Try to do better. Learn from others. Rinse and repeat.

You have to enjoy that journey because it should last a lifetime.

And if you don't, there's always product management.

> A third option would be to take a break from work and try to learn to write good code

I would say that learing to write good code takes practice and feedback, so if you want to stay in software engineering stay in your job.

Maybe switching to a field where basic coding skills come in handy, e.g. data science, would be an option.

I don't think you are a bad software engineer, most probably you are just not used to work in a big team. You are new in this middle size company and you are given the very badly written code which you are not familiar with at all. Most probably this code is big and exists for the long time and was modified chaotically to satisfy the urgent needs of customers. It is almost impossible to become efficient with this code immediately. May be I am wrong, but it seems you tried to work on your task without getting enough help from another people how know that code much better. The fact that your role is senior doesn't mean that you need to know everything and need to solve your problems alone. I work in a big company as a software developer and the interaction with people is the most important thing here.

Your real problem is that you've had no mentors and that's not your fault. Software people need good mentors. Always being at a place with few or none programmers never gave you the opportunity to learn by example and that 10 years wasn't very valuable. You have probably grown some bad habits and lack the understanding to recognize them.

If the people you are working with now are nice then you should take this as an opportunity to become the senior engineer you thought you were. Hiring people is annoying and if you are personable, humble, and eager to learn more often than not they would rather train you up than get rid of you. You did the fake it part, now do the make it part.