I’m a few years into my career as a SWE and I wanted to share my experience with SWE anxiety to the juniors or even experienced SWEs who still have anxiety when it comes to this career. I started my career off with a lot of technical and development related anxiety (learning to code, impostor syndrome, feeling inferior to peers). So you’re a junior developer and you’re assigned a task but the codebase is huge, you don’t want to ask a lot of questions because you don’t want to seem dumb, or maybe you’re anxious about how you’re going to write code. What if your solution isn’t the best? What if you look dumb to other devs. You start going through tutorials, you scour stackoverflow. What if in the end you produce nothing? You’re not alone, I faced that problem every single day at my first job. What I found is the pivotal philosophy of programming: iteration. Programming is iterative. When you ask your first dumb question, you’ll know that it’s dumb. With anything programming related, it’s not about how much you know, but it’s about how often you’ve done the task. For example, the first time you wanted write an iterative for-loop, you’ve probably had to copy paste it several times. Over time you remember the syntax and you know the key components of a loop to replicate it on your own and suit your needs, it becomes second nature. Similarly, these bigger problems like handling tasks at work, or building your first project from scratch, or starting to contribute to open source. You should look dumb. Because if you’re not feeling dumb 90% of the time, you’re not growing. Don’t worry about how anything makes you look (a dumb question, bad code) and don’t focus too much on devs on Blind, LinkedIn touting their intelligence and accomplishments. Focus on solving the problem and how you’re going to solve the next one even better. That’s all programming is. It’s a bunch of small, concentrated iterations on improving your code and the way you think. #engineering #software #swe TC: 225K
TC? Come on dude this is Blind. What would you say is your quick problem solving approach? This skill will help me in my job. My mind wanders too much with different things and end up producing very little within a short timeframe. My job is not related to SWE but that would still apply. TC: 65k
1. Understand the problem 2. Identify constraints 3. Generate 2-3 solutions 4. Decide on a solution 5. Test your solution against your own data or understanding of the problem 6. Deliver the solution or reiterate. You’ll get better at each of these the more you challenge yourself with problems.
This is really good advice 👍 (unless your team is toxic)
Tldr?
The last paragraph