The Big Programming Thread - Page 469

I graduated from Software Engineering 2 years ago. Why do I sound so noob? Lack of confidence in anything I do. Unemployed for so long, probably only person in my graduating class not working. Lack of self confidence pushed into a downward spiral. Finally managed to start my climb back up, need a place to improve my skillset. Didn't have much experience in development via co-op in school as other people in my class. I just judge myself so hard. My class full of people working at Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Mozilla, Facebook, Twitter...and then there's me.

Just trying to improve my skillset and experience, so I can finally get a job =\ It's been too long....

http://www.amazon.com/Before-Happiness-Achieving-Spreading-Sustaining/product-reviews/0770436730/ref=cm_cr_pr_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterBy=addOneStar&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending

The idea I want to point out is that you seem to be spending more time thinking about what could go wrong and placing mental blocks on doing things rather than thinking about what could go right and what you can do.

Yes, you're going to be underqualified for a lot of things, but so will a huge number of people. So why get so hung up over it? You've graduated an arguably extremely difficult degree and acquired at least some set of skills that allowed you to overcome challenges in school. Deep diving into huge projects should not be a problem for you, and should not be scary. How hard could it be compared to a 15 hour algorithms assignment?

You also seem to like finding ways that prevent you from actually doing work - it's too hard to setup, it's too complex, I need to start small. This is a self-defeating attitude that doesn't help if you keep dwelling on it. If you're interested in it, who cares whether it's hard or not? If it takes 3 hours to setup then so it takes 3 hours to setup. I've spent days troubleshooting stupid things gone wrong with my laptop, and days troubleshooting silly errors that completely kill a feature I'm working on, banging my head until something works. If there's a tutorial or guide about setting up something you're interested in, there's absolutely no reason why you can't spend some time figuring out how to get it to work, because that's a huge leg up already on googling everything you need to do yourself. Think about it this way, if you give up so easily on something as little as even setting up a project or deep diving into it, why would a large software engineering company want someone like that? And if someone 20 years ago could do something as complex as Linux without the benefit of Google, why make excuses about things being too hard? Have a goal and go for it. Set your role model as someone who does do those things. People don't get good at them overnight. They work at it and it becomes second nature. And they still learn new things all the time.


Yes, you definitely lack experience compared to your friends with software jobs, but you have your own inherent advantages as well. You have a degree, and you've suffered through however many years of school, something that I'm not even done with yet. You have the opportunity to jump and learn and become a master at what you enjoy whereas people in school or still at work are not going to have the amount of time or energy to pursue any extraneous hobbies as much as you will have. I tried to advocate to a lot of younger years that there is absolutely nothing separating them from being a good programmer other than themselves, and nothing separating them from being as good as some really good programmers other than time, commitment and attitude. And the entire time I'm in awe of a lot of them who do have a lot more experience and years of programming under their belt than me. But even so I know that by the end of the day, not only are we all equals, we all have inherent advantages and disadvantages and skills based on our own upbringing that makes it so it doesn't really matter whether anyone has more experience. It's about what you use your experience for.

You have to learn to not only not compare yourselves to others, but to accept the reality of your situation, and look for what positive changes you can do now. There's no point in dwelling on what you could have done. I really wish I started programming 7 years ago like some of my classmates. I only started 2 years ago instead, but I'm doing fine I guess.


As for the having a goal part, there's two options. You might have something you really love or ideas about what you want to do. So I assume you love gaming. Go make a game! There are a lot of things such as 1 HTML5 game a day for 100 days or game engines like Unity or you can do something in Lua's LOVE or hundreds of other things. Go read people's blogs, go Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo for a couple hours just absorbing the huge amount of content that is available to consume (Googling skills required). Or you have no clue. Then ask friends. It's almost impossible to graduate without making at least a couple friends, maybe some good. Swallow your pride and ask them for help, for inspiration, if they have anything that they wanted to make but don't have time but could offload to you to make for them, if your family wants a website made. And then do it and use their expectation of you doing it to fire yourself up to completely the task and overcoming hurdles like, the build system is too complex. Stop putting up barriers between yourself and the task you want to get done. Break it down into chunks, compartmentalize, and work hard at it. Nothing good comes easy.