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Top comments (61)
When a fellow dev asked for my help. In their eyes at least, I wasn't a newbie.
This! When people started asking my help.
Your brain goes in this mode: "are you serious? me? are you sure you're asking the right person?" :D
The answer is always: yes, you can do it, even if you're not an expert or you don't feel like you are
For me it’s the surprise when you feel like you know exactly how to help.
yeap, this is it...
When I successfully engineered an entire system. It took months but I went from being handed the concept, a single ticket with 10 bullet points. To designing and building a very complex system that integrated with multiple applications in our ecosystem. That gave me so much confidence.
When I started rebasing like it was no big deal
For me it was when I realized that learning new languages was easier than I thought it was.
Oh that's a good one! I need to invest more time in different languages. I agree that it is not intimidating anymore, it's just quicker to reach for what I know.
But hey timely topic for me because I just started playing with elixir.
I try to, once a year, take a language that seems interesting and run through the intro learning stages. Usually the tutorials on their website, or some other place. I don't have to learn everything, just enough to get me familiar with the syntax, setting up the environment, developing some small tool, and trying to understand how the language solves problems compared to other languages.
If I like it enough, I will consider using it, if not, I will take what I learned and see how to apply it in what I use day to day. That's how I learned and stuck with python. I learned Erlang a few years ago but didn't stick with it. My latest is playing with Go and Rust. But I am not sure yet. I love them, but I also love python.
I work at a fairly small company and at the beginning, it was just me and my boss. Looking up to him and having him as the only person around I could compare myself to, I felt like such a newbie for years.
Eventually, we started to hire more people and I was fortunate enough to mentor several of them. It's weird, but I think it was when I was able to answer most of their questions, most of the time, that I realized that maybe I weren’t such a newbie anymore.
... I still feel like one, though 🤷♂️
I think we all still feel like a newb. Even years in.
It's not just you 😁
And that's a good thing.
Feeling like a newbie can motivate you to keep learning🤓.
Exactly right! When you stop feeling overwhelmed with keeping up, then you should probably retire 🤣
I'm kinda in a similar situation right now. Small startup, just me and my boss as main developers with the occasional contractor. Been working for about a year and coding for about 2. Still feel extremely newbish.
You got any tips for being in this kind of situation? Particularly in regards to not having people to compare yourself to
Sure plenty of tips.
I think it's important to realize that you don't have to compare yourself to others to stop feeling like a newbie.
For me, what helped the most, was starting to build a sense of accomplishment.
I started to keep a journal of all the things I had done that made me proud. It could be little things, like helping a colleague or finally fixing an overwhelming bug I had struggled with. It could be bigger things like finishing a client project I had taken on or finally finishing that side project I had struggled to take time out of my schedule to do.
Writing it down was key to me. On days where I feel like I'm no good or that newbie sensation starts creeping up on me again, I look in my journal, and remind myself that I can do this — and so can you! 💪
That sounds like a good idea. I keep a general for general life stuff I enjoy, never thought of keeping one for dev accomplishments. Thanks for the tip!
When I decided "Wait, we don't need a library for this" and wrote vanilla JS code to solve a problem (date picker, pop-up menu, dropdowns) in a faster, more performant way for users.
I was genuinely happy when I realized I would not have been able to do that just several months prior.
At the beginning of my career I had pretty bad soft skills because I went from solo guy working alone to being a part of the team. I'm very fortunate I had very good people around me who guided me and helped me understand the importance of soft skills.
When I managed to understand the importance of sof skills and utilize them in my day-to-day work my career started rapidly changing and I never looked back.
What I wanted to say is that I realized I weren't a newbie anymore when I learned to utilise my soft skills.
I love this answer. :) Too many people dismiss "soft skills" (I wish there was a better name for them) as skills that are easy or innate. I've also had to put a lot of time and effort into building my soft skills. I wish more people understood their value, especially in the tech industry.
When I started asking the question "why" instead of "how" and "what"?
In shorter terms, making decisions that benefit the product holistically. And always never losing the bigger picture.
The first time a senior dev looked at my PR and approved it without corrections or comments, mentioning later on about the nice quality of the solution. Paired along with that, once I stoped asking others what to do next and started to delegate the next TODOs to myself.
Maybe it was when I encountered a segmentation fault in some complicated C++ code, and for the first time, I wasn't afraid, confused, baffled, or dreading it, but rather excited. I had it fixed within minutes. I don't remember the circumstances, just the thought "Wow, I'm actually good at this."
This - thanks for the trigger Jason :) In my case it was while debugging a hardware driver for an ISA bus card, that I suddenly realised I was enjoying it, although the swearing has never stopped..!
I work in webdev for 20 years.
That moment when I think I am not a newbie anymore and can do complex stuff quick, something happens and I spend next 3 days figuring out wtf is wrong with this thing and it misbehaving
Serious talk: when I can share my knowledge about some topic with some other person it they think I know a lot - that's the point I think I am not a complete newbie at this topic.
Probably that's the only confirmation that satisfies me.
Doing actual job(build complex web app or something) is not what makes me think I am not newbie.
I was mentored by the developers of Winamp.
One day, one of these mentors asked me for help on a particular system I had specialized knowledge in but he didn't.
That's when I realized they were no longer mentors, but we were all peers helping each other out in all directions.
The moment I realized I wasn't a newbie was when I was able to take what I had learned and teach it to someone else. I was working as a webdev at Netscape and I was able to talk to a new hire about web development and help her out. It was a great experience and a sense of responsibility came over me to help new folks on the web. I've been living that now for years and continue to try to be both a student and teacher every day.
started programming at 9 years old, selling games to friends at 11, arrested for hacking at 16 and I'm now 28 and I STILL feel like i'm a newbie, not in that I don't know how to program, although sometimes I'll look back on old - largely undocumented code from my teens and be like I could program that virus in pure NASM assembly, how? - but more that I am acutely aware that there is never a point you stop learning in our industry and if like I did, you leave a senior software engineer job to go and do ~1~ ended up as years of travelling the world firstly as a backpacker and then moving with my now wife to japan, and then after 3 years apparently ECMA has released their first update in 10 years and people are using javascript server side for their containerized micro-services - in docker (called docker toolbox before I went travelling i believe) and that facebook has gone and changed the License on what was your go to library, React making it now unusable if you want to ever be sucessful (I don't want to start a flame war with that, that's my view of the change, your welcome to disagree and I could well be wrong and they only added the right to take react out of your product if you became competition out of fear google might use their framework) and that angular had gone from 2 -> 6 but forgot to count a number in there somewhere and that small nice language you'd really liked, typescript, had matured. thats when I realised you will forever be a newbie at some area (its taken me almost a year of language hoppping,framework fliting - and fluttering 🙈- and now I feel like i am almost the container orchastrating devops sysadmin designer engineer manager that I need to be to go it alone in the world of businesss, just have to master advertising, financials, promotion and social media adverts allowing the best ROI - I created a bot when the API FIRST came out from facebook, all in python, which also had a CRM and took him from $10k a month to $25k+ in the first month of its launch and was given access to facebooks dev benifits program for bot creator as I was one of the first to build one - now everyone has one. oh not to mention the rise of the unikernel comming soon.
I'm not saying this is the same for everyone though, it was my own fault for taking time out of the fastest moving industry, its just even if I master brainf**k and can program WASM from octals while my virtual ipfs backed (working on it, if you have ipfs, made-by.ukjp.app will take you to the ipfs site, otherwise well, my cloud server takes a break for some weekends) I will always know theres more to learn and that there are people who know a whole lot more about those than me. my cups half full but i'm thirsty for knowledge i guess!
TLDR; probably best you didn't super boring.
For me it will be when I became an authority in a given subject. At the moment I prefer to feel it everyday, as it helps to keep me on my toes and not get to comfortable.
That said, I don't feel it when the buck stops with me and my domain knowledge is required. Lol
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