Too often I would jump on Medium, Quora read someone else's experience on what it was like to be an early-start programmer and too often would I be disappointed with stupid clickbait titles with a shitty generic thumbnail. There was always nonsense from some flog saying something like 'Here are 5 tips if you wanna be a top notch FAANG dev' or some other load of shit to lure you into reading their page, only to realise that they haven't even finished dev school and they'd just learned the definition of REST.
It's so demotivating to come across devs who like to preach about their experiences as though there was no other way to becoming an employed developer unless you follow their sagely advice. Or that you couldn't have possibly resolved a bug, feature or anything code-based without their explicit instructions. I keep coming across arrogant programmers who tend to forget that their beginnings weren't so bright and that not everyone has 'the gift' which - mind you - is just a means of flexing your knowledge after you've gone through the ordeal of grokking whatever it is the subject matter is regarding. People tend to hide away(fuck... even I'm guilty of this) and study like mad and come back with knowledge and assert it as though they've been imbued with all this usually hard material through sheer osmosis. It's annoying. It gets cringy when guys do it to girls, or individuals they view as less than.
Get to the Point - What's Your Rant About?
Here's where all this whining comes into play. Why have I decided to write about these experiences? Because I'm over having people 'show me the way'. There is no single way. I've been posting blogs about typical problems that programmers tend to run into not so that people follow my simple rules on how to fix their shit, but rather to read about an experience that I've shared and iterate on it. There are no golden rules to becoming some genius programmer. I'm far from being that genius. The more I learn, the more I realise that it's just an endless bucket of learning the same shit, only differently. All that code you learned in some JS framework is thrown out the next week. All that stuff you learned during your game dev degree, down the toilet it goes as the next update to a game engine automates that segment and does it better than you ever could. Much like learning maths or music - you learn the basic fundamentals and that'll take you super far, that'll be with you the whole way, but there's fuck all outside of that knowledge that sits still in the tech world.
Ironically this is advice that I'm wanting to put out there for anyone that wants to get into tech: there's never a set standard and it doesn't matter if you're at the top of the corporate chain, some start-up or just freelancing. Everything's a shit storm, it's just a matter of being able to embrace change and being as malleable as humanly possible.
I write like I do so that you - the reader - infers things as opposed to following things and subscribing to a particular belief system that some dingus on the web preaches as truth. If I were to give anyone advice - it would be that nothing is stable in the tech world(you can take that with you to any field really) and that you should be ready to throw your code out the window at a moment's notice.
I agree completely. One's knowledge of theoretical computer science or most obscure syntactic sugar means little if you aren't able to find a solution to whatever problem you run into. More times it is the willingness to fail through trial and error and the ability to adapt around the limit knowledge one has that separates the good developers from the bad ones.
At the end of the day if you can figure out a way to solve the problem given the constraints you have to work within, that's always going to be good enough. It doesn't matter that you know, but can find ways to eventually unlocking that knowledge at the right place at the right time.
Great summary on that front! It is definitely about coming up with a solution on iterating on said solution instead of making an attempt at being intellectually peculiar in your approach. Most times a solution is just that - a solution.
Thanks for your input!
Congratulations @koalazub! You have completed the following achievement on the Steem blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
You can view your badges on your Steem Board and compare to others on the Steem Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOP