I thought this was going to be a humblebrag -- and boy, it sure started out that way -- but I was pleasantly surprised by the end.
It made me think about how some tools, libraries, or frameworks seem to prefer to use buzzwords or neologisms to make simple things seem complicated. As though by obfusticating the problem domain, they can make their solution seem that much more magnificent. As though the docs should make you feel stupid.
And the reason they do this is because in our industry, it works. Things often seem impressive to the degree that they seem complicated. People are "advertising" their stuff by making it seem like a special snowflake instead of a simple thing.
Far be it from me to blame people for doing something that works. But there is a bit of an echo chamber, especially in this forum, where developers -- developers, not marketers, not "suits" -- prefer to use buzzwords over plain language, and they would rather you think they did something complicated than something simple or something solid.
That is a natural problem in our industry. It requires far more skills to write simple code to solve complicated problems than to write complicated code to solve such problems. What makes it worse is once your head is fully immersed in the problem space, the line between simple and complicated becomes blurry, and what seems like simple solution at the time may seem overly complicated to someone who has not gone through the same thought process.
Sometimes it just takes many tries to get it right. One should not be afraid to rewrite old code until it is right.
The last three Perl codebases I have worked with were overly complicated when I started and had major sections that only a few people had the domain knowledge to touch. With one of those, I became the domain knowledge expert (financial accounting). But the other two I just haven't had time to do that. For example, I am not a quantitative finance guy and I would have to learn that field (and the other is even more specialized).
But what I have learned to do is be guided by a few principles:
1. I much prefer to work with people smarter than me.
2. I try to be good at the little things everyone else ignores ("is this really the right way to handle exceptions?" "Are these functions really written with testability in mind?").
A big problem of course is that codebases don't just fall from the sky, nice and sleek. They are built up over time and entropy within them slowly grows. What starts out as simple get tweaked and made a little more complicated, then again and again until it is a monster you can hardly touch safely.
Simple, beautiful code is darned hard to write and I haven't yet met anyone who succeeds at that all the time (I know I don't). But one can hope with feedback from outside eyes, and a willingness to watch and rewrite over time, that it may eventually get there.
I agree but I'd also like to add that most of the time the complexity for me using some frameworks, libraries, or tools has nothing to do with code but instead in the prerequisites for using them. The authors of some tools make certain assumptions about your knowledge of the whole ecosystem around the tool or supporting tools. Here's a few examples that have caused me pain:
Some time ago, an upgrade to Foundation framework required NodeJS and Ruby 1.9+, a version not preinstalled on my Mac. OK, at the time I knew nothing about NodeJS and have never used Ruby, how hard could it be? 5-10 minutes max?
- NodeJS installed fine, but I had to use "sudo" to install modules or I'd see errors
- Googled... many people used "nvm". I installed nvm, had some issues, but in the end all worked fine
- Next, Ruby. "rvm" is popular, I'll try that.
- rvm installation failed with a cryptic error message, Googled message...
- I need to install "command line tools" which come with Xcode
- I don't have Xcode and apparently it's several GB, after an hour or more I finished downloading it.
- I had to open Xcode, find some random preferences panel and click some button to install "command line tools"
- rvm installation still did not work, Googled.... many people use Homebrew
- installed Homebrew, ruby 2.x installed (with strange warnings) but showed 2.x in the console
- Foundation tools did not work
- Googled how to uninstall Homebrew, found some random "gist" script some guy made which does scary things on my system
- Tried installing rvm again, and for a reason unknown to me, it was successful!
- Foundation tools still did not work
- Didn't notice, last two line of rvm installation required me to copy/paste two lines into the shell.
Great, now I can use Foundation in my Grails project that has nothing to do with Ruby or NodeJS. This whole process took ~6 hours, half of the time I spent just googling error messages.
More recently, I couldn't figure out how to properly package/bundle my React app into a single minified JS file with browserify. The docs linked to a nice simple template:
The package.json has a few useful commands in the "scripts" section:
"scripts": {
"start": ...
"build": ...
}
"npm start" works fine, so why isn't "npm build" working!?!? I posted on stackoverflow and got no answers. Ten days later I figured it out. Knowing very little about npm I had no idea "npm start" was a shortcut for "npm run-script start" and thus I needed to do "npm run-script build".
> most of the time the complexity for me using some frameworks, libraries, or tools has nothing to do with code but instead in the prerequisites for using them. The authors of some tools make certain assumptions about your knowledge of the whole ecosystem around the tool or supporting tools.
Somehow I feel better knowing there's at least one another person on the planet losing 6 hours at time for `just installing X piece of tech`.
Worst thing I had to figure out was that the node package on raspbian is originally related to some radio thing and I had to symlink node-js to node to make it work.
It just goes to show the utter most importance of good documentation. Good as in `human readable` not `logically correct sentences à la man GIT`.
I also felt better when two days later I met a buddy of mine (who is much smarter than me!) for lunch, and immediately he ranted about how he wasted an entire day getting Foundation's command line tools to work. He repeated nearly word for word the same issues I faced!
I'll chuck my hat in the ring here too... got a new MBA recently and it came with Yosemite which introduced one or two curveballs when setting up for web development.
> now I can use Foundation in my Grails project that has nothing to do with Ruby or NodeJS. This whole process took ~6 hours
You've got 3 frameworks installed, each based on a different programming language, using bits from each, whereas each framework was intended to be a "full-stack" product used standalone. If anything, the real issue is with Grails not supporting Foundation.
I'm not really sure I understand your point. The Foundation command line tools require Ruby and Node as dependencies - it has nothing to do with Grails. Are you suggesting every framework, like Grails, should reimplement Foundation's command line tools? Edit: Also, Ruby is a language - not a framework.
Oh, interesting: I've shared a personal insight and I've got downvoted. Point being the downvoter, by not bothering in discussing why she/he has a different notion on this, just penalized that sharing in this collective.
It's a side effect of inter-department competition, as far as I can tell. IT was insecure in the corporate space for a few decades (despite it being as fundamental to most companies as, say, the finance department) and many people fell into the trap of making it sound harder than it is in order to insure some job security.
The funny thing is, you don't need to make it sound harder than it is by making up confusing buzzwords, it's already pretty hard!. Especially in the enterprise space.
Imagine if the logistics department, or the aforementioned finance department decided to rebrand their standard practices every few years. It would cause ridiculous levels of confusion amongst the older workers, as they'd assume they needed complete retraining in this new thing. In reality, they probably just need, at maximum, a refresher course to bring their skills up to date with the newer procedures.
If you ever find yourself describing your latest project to a non-IT-savvy friend or relative, then you quickly realise that the buzzwords and branding are unnecessary to get the concept across. The resulting description, unfortunately, can be pretty boring. The other purpose of buzzwords is to make stuff sound much more exciting than it really is...
This article really resonates with me. Most of my coworkers seem perfectly happy to simply show up, do their work and go home and have no desire to seek to improve their craft.
Sometimes I wish I could be like them. I have this thirst for knowledge and to improve my skills, which is why I'm here reading HN. But it is really overwhelming at times trying to keep up with everything here and at times I can't help but feel inferior to others at times.
I spent several years using GWT and now I'm getting compensated very nicely to work on an multiple ExtJS products. To keep from getting left behind I've toyed with Angular, React, Mithril, mercury, Redis, etc. and my queue of things to learn keeps getting larger and larger (Docker, Vagrant, Sandstorm, most of AWS stack, ...). At this point I probably have at least 200 bookmarks tagged with a generic "Programming" label.
When I'm responsible for the architecture for real systems, I sometimes feel like a fraud. Domain driven design, TDD, CQRS, anemic vs rich domain models, functional vs OO, agile... do I really know what I'm doing? Does anyone know what they're doing?
I recently looked back at some code from some senior level architects I worked with when I was still relatively junior - guys I really respected. Some of those projects had truly awful architecture and I must admit I felt a bit better about myself after seeing that code.
The secret is to learn what you need to know when you need to know it. I recently had to use some new js framework hotness; spend a couple days reading blogs, tutorials, and the docs, learn what you need to be productive and move on. Then dump it all, and jack in the next big thing for the next project. Rinse repeat.
No one knows it all, no one expects you too. You are expected to learn, get up to speed, semi independently and with little direction. It gets easier after you've done it a few times, then it get really old.
This article felt very validating for me. I've always done well at school (4.0 in college), on various tests and at work, but it never registered and I've always felt like a bit of an impostor. When I was an engineer at Google I particularly had this feeling because I couldn't really build anything. Well, strictly speaking that wasn't true; what I mean was that my job was so pigeon holed that I only knew how to do specific things really well. I couldn't, for example, setup a basic web business with a database backend (horror!). After I joined YC I had to go through the process of learning about all the tools that were available that would help me piece together a product without having Google's giant infrastructure behind me, and without the help of internal technical mailing lists where any question could be quickly and expertly answered. This was quite daunting, but also enormously gratifying. I finally learned that I can build entire products on my own and have a sense for a full development stack and how to e.g., inter-operate a crawler and an indexer and a frontend, and how to host the whole thing. But even after doing this, I still feel like an impostor! I think this feeling will probably never leave me, but as the author says it can be beneficial. But I think I (and others who suffer from this) need to be mindful of the downsides of this syndrome: the reluctance to ask questions for fear of seeming incompetent. The difficulty in approaching new problems for fear the new knowledge involved might be insurmountable. And of course the general sense of self doubt that afflicts those with impostor syndrome.
I finally learned that I can build entire products on my own and have a sense for a full development stack and how to e.g., inter-operate a crawler and an indexer and a frontend, and how to host the whole thing.
I've done that. Now all the technologies I'm using are obsolete. I have Python 2.7 code using FCGI and a MySQL database running on dedicated servers, pushed to the server with Dreamweaver.
Works fine. Needs very little attention. But it's totally obsolete. I need to learn a bunch of new technologies to do the same thing. And they're boring.
It's a lot easier to handle feeling like a fraud when you receive no negative feedback with overwhelming positive feedback, and are very confident regarding a certain domain. If someone feels like a fraud even in their "core competency", that can create a lot of unneeded stress and anxiety in their life.
But I agree that intellectual humility is very important to self-growth.
Honestly - this is part of why looking for jobs is so very hard, which is what the author mentions right at the beginning. There are lists of requirements you know you don't meet, and often times you apply, and for reasons that may have nothing to do with how skilled you are, you don't get the job. Maybe you have a few rounds of interviews that seem to go great, but there's no offer.
You start to wonder if your language/skillset is over the hill, if you really aren't so good at code, heck, maybe YOU are too old in SV years.
Something about the job search process really amplifies this feeling. You never know why they think it isn't a fit - but it's only in searching for a job that you are actually getting some external feedback.
And it's tough.
Even if your skillset is in demand and recruiters are crawling all over each other to make you offers, if the companies you really love aren't among them, it makes you wonder.
It's tough. And it's easier to play the games and engage the behavior the author talks about to get "likes", hacker news upvotes, reddit upvotes, whatever, to let you know your views, your languages, your skills are valid.
I've recently tried to get some projects. The required skills are almost always ridiculously specific. It's not unusual that the projects descriptions want you to be an expert in the whole software stack and the project domain. This is a grave problem because people who feel like impostors lose projects to intentional impostors. There are some ways to tackle this problem, but I think it hurts companies and honest developers more than it needs to.
I think the author might have conveyed their point more accurately using the word impostor, rather than fraud. It would also better fit the documented phenomena: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
I've seen third-hand quite a few instances where people are publicly challenged, even harassed, for their not performing their core competency to someone else's (or even everyone's) standards. Recently one public figure announced they were now seeing a therapist, presumably due in part to that overwhelming negative feedback.
The article touches some of the core things I ponder when trying to keep on top of the latest and greatest in the tech world and deciding how to distribute my finite time and energy, and many issues resonated with my feelings on some of the high tech trends.
I disagree however that feeling like a fraud is a good thing (unless you are one) and strongly believe there are much better motivators for studying and being great at something than the fear of others being better than you. I think it is exactly this fear which is at the heart of what enables the emperor's new clothes syndrome to flourish.
Of course, in addition to the hype and buzz there are also a growing amount of authentic great new technologies, but you can't hope to learn them all. The best you can do is know about them so that you'll be able to retrieve them and dive deeper if and when they become relevant to something you need to implement.
I've been following Chris' work for years, and I think he articulates this 'trying too hard' nonsense you see everywhere on Github. Like we can make a 3D cube in HTML and make it spin, but people can't buy a ticket to fly to another country without what feels like a case study in dark patterns, usability issues, and horrific a11y issues.
All code is energy, and if it's squandered in the wrong places, you get an imbalance. The net effect of engineers getting carried away in a lab is ― you get kids learning how to make their first website thinking that code is some dark art, and some black magic. It's not.
<b>Look ma, no GruntJS</b>
It's rather simple stuff. That said, any time I read the words "Impostor Syndrome", I think of agony aunt sections in newspapers, and open teen diaries, not learning how to style a bullet point with CSS, or improving my craft.
I’m in the exact opposite spot. For me it’s becoming a bad thing.
• Lack of confidence
• Lack of self-esteem
• Lack of aggressiveness
• Lack of fearlessness
I’m much too humble and too honest. Although these are great personal qualities, and can help when working in groups, in the end they do not get you very far, nor quickly, in business.
>Feeling like a fraud keeps you humble, it keeps you sane, it keeps you on your toes.
Or it just erodes your self confidence until you're committing fixes that miss obvious details which then goes to production and breaks things. Now I'm just stuck in a positive feedback loop and frankly I don't think I'll be able to justify my pay in 6 months.
"Or it just erodes your self confidence until you're committing fixes that miss obvious details which then goes to production and breaks things"
I read your statement earlier and I wanted to get to a keyboard before I responded to it. Dude, whenever a bug makes it into production, it's not just a mistake on your part. It's a mistake on everyone's part. You've been in this company, from what I've gathered, for 6 months. That's not a long time at all. You're still wet behind the ears there; but there's something you need to know about bugs making it to production.
They're not exclusively your failing. Yeah, you wrote the code, and so I get how you feel responsible, but let's just think of all the steps that it had to go through, all the eyes that saw it that didn't see your mistake, remembering that you've only been there 6 months.
1) your code reviewer didn't catch it
2) the QA person didn't catch it when it was tested
If there wasn't a code reviewer, that was a weakness in the process that permitted the mistake to make it there. If there wasn't QA, then that's all the more reason for people to have a close eye on details.
But those people didn't see it either, because the bug made it to production. And if they saw it and didn't say anything, then it's their failing for not letting you know about a potential weakness.
You're going to make mistakes, that's why code reviews happen. That's why people test code. We make mistakes, even really dumb ones. They happen all the time.
Don't beat yourself up, man. Just live and learn. You'll still make mistakes, but as you get experience screwing up, you'll make fewer of that particular kind of mistake.
Keep at the craft. We all screw up pretty hard from time to time, that's why we need each other and help each other :)
It depends. I got caught in crunch time at my current company and needed a vacation bad after 3 months. It ended up coming a little later, but I got copious vacation in order to get back to normal (~3 weeks).
> What you do is compare your secret blooper reel with the post-production highlight reel of other people. You know more about yourself than anyone else.
That's the human side of "meet the new technology, same as the old technology". There are a vast number of levels of cruft to master to do anything now. They're constantly changing. This used to be the issue with GUI toolkits, most of which do roughly the same thing. Now it's more server-side. Lately, it seems that the complexity is not in the code that actually does the work, but in the packaging systems. The amount of packaging seems to increase over time.
This is for a language that is deployed as source code. What's wrong with this picture?
There's lots of new, exciting stuff that actually does something, like machine learning or vision processing. That's worth learning. Having to learn another build and deployment system, or worse, being expected to know it to get a job, is just wearing.
I think the sphere of technology where he's focused (frontend) is particularly fast moving right now. It is extremely humbling to read about somebody like this feeling this way. I know many developers, myself included, experience these pangs of inadequacy on a frequent basis. It would be hard not to, things move fast and everyone around us is talented and smart. But, just like anyone else, I think this article reminds us that we're all human, no matter how talented, and open to feeling inadequate. There's always more to know, more to achieve. But its good to pause and focus on the skills we have sometimes to be grateful for what we've done.
I am fortunate to have already experienced the "Do I belong here?" feeling from graduate school. The thing to remember is this - there are always people who are going to be ahead of you just by virtue of having more experience. How you carry yourself is the most important thing though.
In this context, if you see someone who is better than you at the moment, do some work trying to improve yourself and your abilities. The best don't become the best instantaneously - they do it through hard work & maybe a little talent.
My own experience probably has helped me take on the correct perspective in my own career as a developer - I do things purely because I want to do it or improve myself. I don't care about being the most popular/well-known developer or anything like that - it is a job that I happen to like is all. Stars/likes/etc. on GitHub, those don't matter. I create stuff for fun, and if it becomes popular, so be it - I work on open source stuff in the hopes it helps people and to improve my own abilities.
I remember that feeling in my upper-division math classes in college -- PDEs, abstract algebra, etc. It seemed to me like I was struggling (which was a new experience for me in math class) and to make it worse, I sat next to this guy who always seemed to know it cold. I would score in the 80s on almost everything, and I would look over there and this guy would have perfect scores all the time. It definitely bothered me.
About halfway through the semester I ended up spending more time with this guy and I realized that he really lived and breathed mathematics. I mean, he did all the exercises in every chapter. (Who does that?) He would study for hours and hours before tests. Anyway, it kind of taught me a lesson. If you want to belong, you have to work for it. Nobody's just going to move over to make a space for you. You have to carve a space for yourself.
Ironically, one of the projects I created with what would seem like the least amount of practical use also got the most positive feedback. Sometimes when you just do what you want for fun and self-edification, it results in a project that shows more passion and finesse than something banged out for more cynical purposes.
It's one of the things I struggle most with, besides the relentless self-consciousness that comes from being a 33-yo trying to retrain in a technical profession, is feeling like all that stuff I love has rather minimal crossover with the stuff that might pay the bills ...
Another self promoting "evangelist". Please save us from their spam. The way to get your stuff noticed (and hence the approval of your manager) should be posting stuff with actual valuable content. Not tabloid meta teasers like this one.
FWIW to the author of this piece: I don't know who you are and googling did not turn up a Wikipedia page. So that makes me think you aren't really FAMOUS, no matter how many people online or in tech might know of you.
The song "Thank you" by Alanis Morissette comes to mind. She hit it big at a young age. She wisely did not want to suffer the fate that stars like Meatloaf suffered when he hit it big young and then crashed and burned. Overwhelmed by her fame and success, she took a sabbatical and stopped singing. She found her voice again while visiting India, where she was surrounded by throngs of people, none of whom knew here. It was a good antidote to the ills of fame.
I apologize, but I cannot parse that. Are you saying that the links validate my point of view? Or validates your opinion that I am in error? I just can't make heads nor tails of what that phrasing is supposed to convey.
No, I don't think so. I am talking about human psychology and having perspective. This seems to be a common theme on HN: People here have tunnel vision. There is a lot more to the world than Hacker News and folks in tech and so on.
I participate here regularly and I spend a lot of time online. Yet, I did not know this person's name. I am not inner circle enough for his name to have caught my attention before.
Also, Alanis Morissette's fame was not undeserved. Neither was Meatloaf's.
It made me think about how some tools, libraries, or frameworks seem to prefer to use buzzwords or neologisms to make simple things seem complicated. As though by obfusticating the problem domain, they can make their solution seem that much more magnificent. As though the docs should make you feel stupid.
And the reason they do this is because in our industry, it works. Things often seem impressive to the degree that they seem complicated. People are "advertising" their stuff by making it seem like a special snowflake instead of a simple thing.
Far be it from me to blame people for doing something that works. But there is a bit of an echo chamber, especially in this forum, where developers -- developers, not marketers, not "suits" -- prefer to use buzzwords over plain language, and they would rather you think they did something complicated than something simple or something solid.