Anyone else out there feel useless as a programmer? By that I mean you have always struggled to solve problems quickly and effectively. Or to fully understand the language and typical patterns and algorithms. Or to retain in memory all the things you need to “just know” on a daily basis to avoid having to look them up regularly and look foolish or incompetent? It seems I can’t keep my mind focused on learning, whether by tutorials or hands-on practice. I should probably just switch careers, but I’m so close to retirement that it seems stupid to attempt such a thing. Am I alone?

Nah, I’ve come to accept that as the reality of being a developer. There’s so much to know it’s unreasonable to expect anyone to remember half of it. I end up on lang or tool documentations and W3School on a daily basis looking up things I probably last looked up a few weeks ago…

You don’t look foolish or incompetent if you use the resources at your disposal - only if you don’t. If you get the job done in the end with decent code, you’re fine.

My fav motto is: Lemme think about that.

I'm the annoying guy that presses the pause button whenever I feel that things are rushed, which is nowadays quite often the the case.

Just press the pause button. When others feel they need to run with 300 km/h in the wrong direction, don't stop them. Wait till they are out of breath because they had to redo the crap 3 times, then ask if they need help - you had a long time to think about it by then.

Probably in the same boat.

Typical day:

In the morning, I need to fix something caused by legacy code (like an old undocumented/not-commented VB:ASP site); afternoon there is an emergency with the SSL certificates in a Docker instance I need to fix (all the stack is undocumented of course). And told that tomorrow I will need to learn how Rust is working to get start with the development of a new application. But also during tomorrow afternoon I need to debug a problem caused by a Java application running in our Tomcat webserver.

Of course, I was never trained or had any direct experience prior with any of those technologies before being told I need to do it or fix it.

Now - I understand it is normal that it takes time. But I can't help feeling useless sometime too. Then I think: what would someone else do? No one can do all of this at once AND fast.

@flax Thanks. That sounds a lot like what I’m going through. My anxiety also stems from having been trained by a much younger employee fresh out of college classes, boot camps and lots of on-the-job exposure to the issues and he also built a lot of this stuff. Also, he no longer works here. Even though there’s some documentation, it’s not quite enough. I’m figuring out all the stuff he left behind. There’s just so MUCH of it. I’m thoroughly exhausted by the end of the day and all I accomplished was stuff like making a div overlay change color on hover or adding a form field through some roundabout way he had devised through an OOP design pattern.

@kiki Thanks. That blog post helps me get a little more perspective. My anxiety also stems from “straight A syndrome” in that I was doing this web stuff when my recent job trainer was still in diapers. Part of it is my ego telling me I should know more and/or be training him. But that’s a fantasy in a world where everything changes not just daily, but _hourly_.

Feeing like a spare part in this job.
This is week 5 and I wrote some code yesterday afternoon, not done any on any other day.
We are constantly on this mobbing session and the code is some of the shittiest I’ve ever seen but no one wants to change it.

a professor once said the average number of lines devs code in a day is 10. it's not a very productive job, that's why it's expensive and why there's so much demand. it's for that reason there's always a new, easier to learn language, to see if we code faster (they don't help that much tbh). none of this is productive, but if you don't like it... that's a different story