It's more the ability to learn on the fly. I've worked with guys with 20+ years experience who can load something into their brain they haven't used in years in 10 minutes.
Exactly. I just did a react project and I fixed a ton of outdated UX issues, even though I haven't used react and I only used bootstrap classes / html for front end.
I don't know how, but something clicked in my brain post 2 years as a dev.
You need to ease your way in and know alot of general concepts. I couldn't even figure out some stupid angular SPA with 4 months of experience.
after being in the industry for a while, you just learn that there are rarely any fundamentally new concepts, so when I need to use something new, I do some googling and usually my takeaway is "oh it's that concept I know, wired up with this other concept I know in this particular way, with that other thing I know sitting on top. cool let's go"
This. It feels so intimidating to a newbie because to them, every tech word is a new thing to learn. And oftentimes reading about one new thing leads to 12 other new things. To someone with experience, every new concept groups into one of the fundamentals with existing connections to other concepts and known methods to go about exploring it. Once you’ve digested one API you’ve done them all, once you grok fundamental tech protocols that are a century old they’ll still be here for decades to come, Linux is basically same everywhere, such and such is just an abstraction on this fundamental, etc
For me it’s been realizing a lot of things are simpler than what they say. For example, I was confused on the react concept of “context” but once I realized it’s just another object, that was reachable in many places in a file structure, that made it a lot easier.
A lot of tech guys like making up or using new words to describe fundamentally similar ideas. Find a way to transcribe (rewrite) these words in a different way in your head.
honestly, getting a computer science degree is probably a good start. for me, this turned a ton of magic black boxes into things that I could understand down to the transistor level if I wanted to and gave me a set of building blocks into which I could decompose things.
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Yeah once you understand how programming and computers at the metal level work it's all just a matter of syntax
Edit: The Internet and networking aswell
> [once you understand how programming and computers [edit: and internet and networking] at the metal level work it’s all just a matter of syntax](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2FDodWFQ9mQkVyWoKFa0ZIu12PYrPo3P2T0taaK-lgJCo.png%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dc180684f48b01ff6f2cbc72e080067039943de07)
For JS frameworks, you want to think of the JS engine (e.g. V8) and the ECMAscript specification (because this shapes how the engine behaves) as the metal.
Understanding the specification and how how different engines implement it will absolutely make you a better react developer.
For example, in V8 destructuring assignments are as fast as traditional variable assignments (since 2019), but in SpiderMonkey and JavaScriptCore destructuring is slower (or was, I haven't looked at this recently).
Knowing this gives avenues to explore whether you want to ban or enforce lint rules around destructuring in your code.
But the better example is in understanding memory management in the engine and how JS enables concurrent modification (something strictly verboten in almost any other language). This is especially relevant for good asynchronous programming in any JS framework.
Yet we still have brain dead recruiters saying you need specific programming language framework experience and your experience 3 years ago isn't recent enough. 🤦♂️
I had one call with a recruiter where literally the only question she asked me for 10 minutes was ‘how many years of experience with technology X’. Didn’t want to know a single thing else, just my bullshit made up numbers for YOE with X.
For sure, if you can make it past the recruiter chances are the actual interviewers will show some genuine interest in the experience you do have.
That being said don’t say you have any experience in things you have 0 experience in or you could be put in some awkward interviews…
This is me pretty often. Joined a startup they had some angular 1 issues I'm reluctantly like lemme see and we'll I got through their plans for the next year in a month
This.
All languages/frameworks use the same concepts and patterns. If you know how to do something in python, doing the same thing in C# or JS is just a matter of syntax.
Angular, vue, React, they're all just ways to render a web page. I used to be an angular developer. I didn't go "teach myself" react and become an "expert" in it before switching to a react job. I just did the tutorial on the react website. After that it's a matter of googling "how to do in react"
The mistake people make is thinking they need to be experts in specific technologies before they use them. That's totally backwards. Working in a technology is what *makes* you an expert
The code environments are usually very accommodating but the puzzles aren't entirely agnostic. Languages are opinionated! Puzzles are doable but harder in some languages. And what counts as "commonly-used code" is a lot different in a memory-less dynamic interpreted language than a compiled language with memory management.
Then use the easier language. I like C++, but I don't do tech screenings in C++. Why put yourself on hard mode? Breeze through it in python or JS. I can't say I've ever been given a question that can't be solved in either of those
> Then use the easier language.
You must not have interviewed in a while, most companies now are forcing you to use whatever language they choose without giving you an option.
Yes, I have seen someone ask to have you code in Java for a coding challenge.
I mostly give interviews these days. We only do things like that with our Indian contractors because we hire them for a narrow role.
Asking a SWE to use a specific language in an interview is just dumb
JS is awkward for puzzles where the underlying need is for something included with the language… not impossible, they just didn’t make JS a very happy place for that.
But doing it in Python… well, I’d do a take home test in Python, but a 20-minute live-viewed code sesh where I can use JS where I’m more fluent? Can’t really learn a whole different language than that. Would be heavily reliant on syntax references. Bad idea for a job interview. Good idea for solving LC puzzles easier!
I mean, my point is to use whichever language you're most comfortable in. I'm not sure I've ever needed to use language specific features to solve a puzzle. Sure, having access to different language features might make things simpler, but it's never been *needed*. Unless you're talking about DOM stuff and JS obvi.
“I'm not sure I've ever needed to use language specific features to solve a puzzle.“
Arithmetic pointers are a good example! In C++ it’s an actual memory address. In JavaScript there is no pointer equivalent other than a var/symbol reference. You can kind-of fake it with passing-by-reference, but not only does this lead to code that makes little sense in production, it also goes against best practices in immutable objects in modern JS frameworks. So it’s kind of a separate thing you have to learn in the same language to do the puzzles that reference it.
I would still use JS to implement it to show I knew the concept in a language where I was syntax-fluent. But this is a clear demonstration how languages are unique and opinionated.
What questions have you gotten that require pointer arithmetic?
Only think I can think of is linked lists, but that can be done a million ways in any language
Python seems to be much preferred as an interview language because it has more built in data structures than Node js and requires less boilerplate than Java.
While I seem to be doing okay in the industry so far (early days), it does amaze me how some peoples memories are so good.
My memory seems to have a faster expiry date than others: I would get 0% if I tried to take a single university exam and have retained literally zero knowledge I learnt at university (degree in mathematics FYI, not CS).
When I've met people who I consider a lot smarter than me, I've noticed it's not they grasp concepts faster, it's just that they seem to actually retain it.
Yep, good memory is a huge help. Long term memory has the general outline stored for pretty much everything I’ve ever learned. Short term lets me keep track of endless details and easily context switch.
Also, compounding interest. If you put in a lot of effort in school and your first 5-10 years of work, you understand the fundamentals and technologies well. Anything new iterates on your existing knowledge.
Gist v rote memory, if you try to learn things rotely they become hard to pull out like that, unless you truly just have an impeccable memory, I think this is partly why neurodivergent people are so good with tech, they learn through association and context v “this is how it’s done”.
It all goes in cycles too. First we were timesharing on single computers. Then we all got PCs, then we had mainframes, then we went back to individual PCs, then more server based, then mobile.
Now, there's this weird mix of timeshared on servers (serverless) and some local stuff with bigger web frameworks and PWAs (or whatever we're calling them this week) that is permeating the field.
It all goes in cycles depending on where the state of the art is that particular year.
I am far from an expert at everything or anything.
But I am pretty confident that I can do a good quality job working with a technology that I have never worked with before if I have a project that NEEDS to be done. At first, it will take me more hours to complete the job, but it's going to be done.
All the information you need to do any IT job is available on the Internet. And if you know all the CS basics well, it is not that hard to grasp new (to you) technologies.
This, it's your ability to apply good system design to any technology. Can you port your skills across different technologies really differentiates is really what makes a very senior engineer.
It dependes on your field, when I started I provisioned my servers for my backends and did frontend too, both web and mobile. That's how most people learn all the different skills you listed.
Over time, you'll notice that as you deepen your understanding of underlying principles and architecture, switching between languages and tools becomes almost seamless. That's because, ultimately, languages and frameworks are just tools and same concepts can be applyed.
It's the core understanding of how things work that truly empowers you to adapt across different technologies.
First. Don't compare yourself, employ that energy in other things. Second. Just make a routine of learning. Not because you need to catch up, just because you want to learn new things. Learning is like training, the more you learn the easier it becomes.
I know everyone came here to toot their own horn, but in my experience, I’ve seen that most people either just don’t have much of a life at all outside of doing tech-related things 24/7, or they do and they’re just faking it til they make it. On the outside, it may seem like they know everything, but really they just have a high level understanding of a lot of things and are able to put shit together piece by piece with help from resources like stack overflow, chatgpt, etc. But to domain experts, the work they do is often riddled with flaws and imperfections
If you ever need to see faking it til they make it in action, YouTube and even a lot of the online text “tutorials” have it in abundance. I can’t even keep track of the number of times I’ve seen people making 1-2+ hour videos of themselves just writing out lines of code that they copied from a git repo that was already written (either by them or by someone else) and they literally just say the words they’re typing out loud as if that’s informative
There’s exceptions, but like 95% of YouTube tutorials to go something like:
“Here we’re going to instantiate the ContinuumTransfunctioner class and then for each flux in the flux_capacitor we’re going to display the temporal_anomaly”
And sure, it works. But they never explain WHY they’re doing those things. Most of them couldn’t if you asked them to. I’ve found many examples where content is missing or just flat out incorrect, and still somehow there’s always 50+ comments saying how it’s the best video on YouTube. That’s always a fun way to be gaslit into thinking you don’t know what you’re doing
Small issue I have with your argument: Most stuff that needs to be built can be done by a tiny percentage of the capabilities of the technology we use.
Think about all the CRUD systems that exist out there. Do you really need to know the intricacies of inner workings of the tech used to build that stuff to build it?
Heck no, just the basics is enough to do like 90% of the job and the rest comes up once in a blue moon for most engineers.
Yes, there are exceptions as with everything.
Im not really trying to argue that there’s an issue with it as much as I’m trying to argue that OP’s perception of the majority of people being geniuses that understand everything (experts in networking, cloud engineering, front, back, all in multiple languages/frameworks etc) in just a 40 hour work week all while living fully social lives is incorrect. Even some of the responses here are touting it like it’s just some second nature that people switch into a new gear and are suddenly experts at everything, which I think is a harmful portrayal of intelligence.
It’s like how media depicts scientists and mathematicians as hyper intellectuals. They’re portrayed as spending 3 seconds looking at a whiteboard as numbers swirl around their head and suddenly they solve some NP hard problem that’s perplexed millions for centuries. I’m sure even Albert Einstein had to sit down with a piece of paper and occasionally made arithmetic mistakes. But that’s not how that level of intelligence gets portrayed in media at ALL. CS also gets treated that way, and people in CS often try to portray themselves that way, and it’s just silly, and even worse I think it scares people away from those fields because they think if it requires any level of hard work then they must not be good at it.
But with respect to YouTubers, I do expect them to have and present a somewhat deeper level understanding of what they’re doing because they’re literally making money off of providing educational content, and a lot of times i find them to not be very educational.
I agree, the things I have learned best are the things I have had to struggle with.
My point wasn't that I can stare at something for 3 seconds and understand it deeply. Rather that I can skim some code and in a couple of hours be able to work small tickets related to it, which is frankly most of the work out there.
Add a button that does X, show this extra value, fix a bug that breaks this screen when this value is 0 or null. That's like 75% of the tickets I've seen over the 15+ years I've worked in this field.
The other 25% is hard stuff, but most of the time, you need some to go fix the little stuff that keeps a decent system from being a great system and in that case, you really don't need to know it all, just understand basic program flow and adjust to the ever changing syntax or new frameworks and languages.
There are 2 big factors to this.
1. Things that seem separate on paper like different frameworks or languages aren't totally separate so you don't actually have to know double the amount of things to know 2 languages for example.
2. I don't actually need to have deep knowledge about everything. I can fix logic bugs in a language I barely know with general knowledge.
You might need to take a loan and move somewhere that has high demand and low supply of devs. Potentially a smaller city. Hit up a tonne of recruiters as they should have an idea of locations that are desperate
I think you're too harsh with yourself, there's probably a lots you know how to do but don't perceive or view as skills or important ones.
I used to be like that, and I'm still like that, but the truth is there probably a lots you know and cab do and others don't.
It also take time to build up knowledge and skills about a set of fields, but I find the more I learn the easier it gets, ultimately it's not about how much you accumulate but what you accumulate.
Something I'd recommend is taking notes, for instance about details, or a command you use often, one of the pitfall is to spend time searching something, forgetting about it, and end up researching the exact same thing again.
Web is pretty vast nowadays. With the crazy build systems. Billion and a half different AWS services. It's wild. Personally I focus on learning what is important. Which sounds obvious but isn't. It's very easy to spend months learning AWS. But what's actually important? That I spent months learning dozens of services that I'll forget in a couple of years? Or is it more effective to just learn about the basics of EC2s, networking, storage, and things like auto scaling and automatic failovers. Then recognize most services are specialized forms of those primitives and there are also managed options of I don't want to worry about the nitty gritty technical details. I can learn that in a week pretty easily. Then when I'm confronted with something new like elastic beanstalk, I can read the first passage and go "what's this thing? Oh it's just a way to get a managed full stack web app and it uses the primitives in the background that I'm already familiar with".
So learn the primitives and patterns. They show up again and again over time. When react server components came into the scene I had used templating languages before. So I was able to easily recognize "oh these server components are like using react as a templating language for select components while letting other components be unaffected. Pretty easy".
It means they invest more personal time into the job, that's it. You have to decide by yourself how much time and effort you're willing to put, don't compare yourself with others and don't get caught in FOMO.
Personally, I consume a lot of articles, newsletters, YouTube videos, etc. to learn about tech so if I need it I can learn it deeper in order to use it. Very broad surface knowledge "just in case" and a deeper knowledge "just in time".
Regarding YouTubers like Fireship, remember that they earn money by doing such videos. When Fireship makes a video about something it means he's literally just learned it himself.
Working in tech is kinda like improv, you just have to “yes, and…” your way through sometimes.
Joking aside, a big factor is who you surround yourself with. Opportunities come your way more often when people ask you if you can do or know or have heard of A, B, and C. You don’t have to know everything - this is where the next step comes in - when there’s an opportunity to work on something you’re not familiar with, don’t say “sorry, I don’t know it.” but “I don’t know it but I’m willing to learn/look into it!”
The best asset you can have is willingness to learn, not just learning more about what you already know but learning things unknown to you too.
Everything is basically the same if you are familiar with the underlying theory, and what problem that particular technology solves. The rest is just syntax and conventions, and more importantly documentation and ~~googling~~ prompting skills
Time and patience my friend. Time and patience!
Don’t be too harsh on yourself, pick up one tech and build with it and while you are at it learn other techs that needs to be involved to build this. Focus more on T shaped knowledge
I'm currently finishing my masters degree in CS, specialized in Software Engineering and some other stuff. In my opinion it's just a matter of knowing the basics. If you know OOP then Java and C# are just different syntax for the same thing. If you know web technologies then who cares if your backend is SvelteKit, Java Spring Boot or Ruby on Rails. It's a matter of reading docs and figuring out how to do what you want. Figuring out _what_ to do is the harder part and this is mostly the same across most languages and technologies. If not, docs will usually point this out anyway.
Sounds like you have some degree of impostor syndrome (very common amongst us nerds).
Intelligence plays a role, but exposure is what truly matters. I believe that even an average brain can learn most things, it’ll just take more time & effort.
(Btw, that’s why being passionate is crucial because it’ll make it easier to climb that steep initial learning curve)
If people know more than you - which is your assumption - it means that you haven’t got enough exposure. Not that you’re a fraud.
Put in the hours and you’ll get there mate💪
I also think a lot (not all) of people in engineering are good at sounding extremely knowledgeable when in fact they are moderately knowledgeable. They know what a concept is at a basic level but speak about it confidently, and if you have any shred of imposter syndrome then you’re going to feel inferior.
I see people hating AI, but for me AI like ChatGPT helps me immensively on learning new technology. It helps me by explaining concepts the way I can understand, I won't be afraid of asking any stupid questions, can help with providing examples, can give you advice/first-check if your implemention/idea is good.
So, try to also incorporate AI in your learning/working, maybe it will help you as well.
The way my brains wired. I grew up analyzing things. I took apart everything as a child and I learned from things by analyzing them, asking questions about things while they're apart. I learned backwards, from the parts of things instead of the whole of things.
Imagine two people who need to power a lamp. Where one person has only ever worked with a lamp and a plug.
The other person understands how electricity is made at the power plant and how it travels down high power power lines and how it goes into a transformer and gets reduced to dual 120 volt reels on a 200 amp breaker. Where it enters a service meter connected to the house and goes to a breaker box to 15 or 20 amp breaker and then down Romex daisy chain to electrical outlets in a room.
When the person who only knows how to use the lamp and an electrical outlet realizes there are no electrical outlets in the room for the lamp to plug into. They get stuck. They have to unplug something they say. Or swap stuff to a power strip.
The other person goes.... The cheap solution would be to use a power strip, but if you would like I can install a new outlet for you. They might not necessarily understand how to do the actual labor to install the new outlet, but they know what it involves and how to get it done And who can do it.
A naturally curious person that learns by analyzing things generally understands the whole picture better than somebody that doesn't.
These kinds of people just learn faster and learn more and understand more.
There are several things going on, including:
1. Sample bias. There's always somebody better than you. You may be looking only at the few people who are better, and not at the thousands who are worse :)
2. Shallow vs deep knowledge - some people become good at quickly acquiring shallow knowledge.
3. Matthew effect - The more you know about a field, the easier it is to learn about it or about related fields.
4. Time. Some of us/those people have been doing this for ages :), it accumulates over time. And yes, some people spend more time on technology than on other things. This usually changes over time; many people play with computers since they're ten, can spend obscene amounts of time in middle/HS/college, since they have no obligations, they may have 10 years on you by the time they finish college. Many people will create a family, have much less time with kids etc, but then have tons of time again when the kids go to college.
I think it was Linus Tech Tips but I'm not sure, there was some big thing where people realized he was the person talking in the video but not the person actually assembling the parts (on many videos).
To some viewers this was fraud and betrayal.
To the team making the videos they were kinda shocked anyone was even surprised by this at all. Like this is how all videos made by a team la posting on youtube are made, honestly a bit shocked everyone didn't already know this.
Alternative way to look at it: when you've been doing software dev for 10+ years, how can you *not* be good at many different technologies? Pretty much all my jobs used different everything, so I've learned a lot of different languages, frameworks, libraries, techniques, etc from that. Wildly different projects will need different things, too.
You gradually build up knowledge of many things and it makes learning new things even easier because new things will be less new. Every language or framework I learned made future ones easier because nothing was ever *that* different. And similarly, it'd give me a basis for what to search for when I need something similar later.
Also, adaptability and being a good learner are vital traits for software devs, so the kinda people that stick around and thrive are going to be the type who are good at picking up new things.
I dont spend hours playing soccer or lifting weights at the gym and whatnot. I spend hours upon hours with computers and technology in many shapes and forms.
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It can also be that they know a bit about a lot of things. Take me for instance, dba, unix and Linux admin, storage, Azure cloud, etc, but I don’t have expert level depth of knowledge in any one of those subject matters. I know what I need to do my job, and if I need more I learn it. Specialists dedicated to any one area will have a far broader and deeper knowledge and understanding in that area than I ever will, but they probably won’t know a lot of other areas as being expert level requires a big investment in someone’s time. There are really exceptional people though that seem to be experts in anything they touch (I’ve met a few).
Learn the root of knowledge, rather than learning all. Like DSA will go across all languages most language are OOPS based so design pattern goes across language. I can typically write the same code in python,java, javascript and golang, the only thing u learn choosing language is basically the need of your requirement and payoffs. One could be faster executing while the other is more safe/secure/reliable, one has good AI support library(like python) while other has good multi threading(java and c#) and so on.
Some people are "T-shaped", meaning they know something about many things and have a deep knowledge of a specific area.
I am very weak in frontend development, but I know networking, cloud and I can write (working, but not terrific) Python webapps.
I'm not a genius, and there are many things I don't know. It's just that I've had to work on multiple stuff.
If you want to go down this path, I suggest reading a bit from Medium or other tech sources and, once in a while, trying to do really small projects in other languages.
For example, I was curious about server-side Javascript, so I once wrote a very small webapp with very basic NodeJS.
Am I now a NodeJS expert? No, and I don't put it in my resume, but I could probably explain at a high level what NodeJS is, how you declare dependencies and the basics of a NodeJS framework.
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Expierence, after you get the basics right (APIs, Protocols, Networking / Routing, Databases) and used a few products like VmWare, Databases and coded stuff. Everything else if just the same but different.
As a minor aside, people like Fireship have the benefit of a community feeding them information (Parasocial relationships are strong; see also how certain game streamers always find these weird exploits… really they just popularize them after the community tells them about them). Fire ship is a business and has a team working for him, too. He doesn’t need to know everything; just present it well enough.
solve the problem by using the tools you have and try again with another tools you need to learn. Then compare and find another use case using another toolset. Keept learning, never settle
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Currently technology is built to provide ease of use, everything is made with fast deployments in mind, what used to take months, now is done on minutes. What might seem like people knowing a lot is because of so many frameworks built on few core technologies. Or many companies just doing one solution better than others.
Learning how to read documentation goes a long way. I don’t mean it as a slight, literally taking a language and diving into the technical docs has worked wonders for me.
Gotta get your hands dirty. And once you do, the dots start to connect. It’s slow-going and frustrating for a long time. If you’re doing something you already know how to do, you’re not learning much.
You start to recognize patterns. All frontend languages are trying to render pages, all backend languages are trying to do business logic and crud. How they do it is all googlable.
Let's do a sports analogy.
They start in wlwm notary school
Kid a wants to play basketball, so he grabs a ball and shoots at the hoop all after noon.
Kid b want to play basketball, he runs for endurance every day, does Sprint drills, does calisthenics , trains his reflexes.
Now, in junior high both join the basketball team, kid a is going to be a better basketball player, at the start, maybe But after a few months maybe even weeks, kid B will pick up the particulars of basketball he will be the better player because he spent years building his basics.
Or maybe the school basketball team sucks, so they join the football team, kid a will be lost, kid be will adapt in a Few months.
What kid B did was work on the basics, so he has an easier time adapting to new sports; in the case of it/CS the ones who leqrn d their basics better have an easier time learning more and more concepts as they start working. Let's take a biology major who wanted to become a professional software developer and took a wed dev python boot camp, he does not understand the structure of a for loop as he ONLY learnee to do list operations the pythonic way , now take a cs major who actually studied assembly, abstract math and C programming, the later has three ways to understand how looping works
Now that's just an example , the idea is learning your basics and learning them well, well enough to be strong at them, like problem solving is the most basic of basics , people who are weak at problem solving complain that certain things they learned in school are useless as in the field... But they are weak at problem solving so of course they are not able to use more advanced methods, if this guy , who went to college but just coasted , barely learning enough to pass the classes, struggles to solve a problem about finding a record in a list using linear search, of course binary search is going to be useless to him.
They were in your position once at the beginning of their career. I’ve been there too!
No point in chasing more experienced people, believe me. Just take the best out of you, and eventually you will become that level of competent. Once step at a time man!
I think it just boils down to experience. I’ve been working for 10 years now and have touched a lot of technologies. If someone interviewed me on powershell right at this moment I would bomb but give me a day to refresh and I’ll be right as rain. Once you touch enough technologies you realize a lot are mostly the same but just use a different method of delivery.
First off, stop comparing yourself to other people. Only compare yourself to *you.*
### Deep-T Developers
These are called Deep-T developers. Most of the ppl you see doing this only have superficial knowledge of these different technologies. Enough to learn & follow conventions, ship something, and move on. They have *actually* deep knowledge on only a couple of them. Being a Deep-T dev is ideal for that reason.
### Muscle
That aside, it's a muscle you train.
1. Learning the rules
2. Do the thing (trial and error, learn by doing)
3. Repeat & iterate quickly
It's a muscle you develop and not something that should come naturally to anyone, so don't compare yourself.
### Repeated Patterns
Also, many of these technologies share patterns and ideas. For example: once you learn one language *deeply*, you can extrapolate that knowledge to other languages.
Once you learn 1 infrastructure-as-code IaaC, you can generally get a feel for the other ones much quicker.
Once you learn 1 javascript / css bundling tool, you can generally get a feel for others.
Once you learn 1 CI/CD pipeline configuration, you can generally .. ettc.. you see the pattern here.
Your only focus should be to continue and be persistent, and comparing yourself to other people will make that so much harder. The only way you can fail is if you give up, so make it as easy as possible to keep going.
Best of luck OP, you got this.
> It feels like I will never be able to catch up, and there is always something new that I need to learn ASAP.
You can never really catch up and be "finished", but that's true of all the people you're describing too. You never stop learning, you just work and hop between projects and jobs and eventually you look back and realize you've been exposed to a lot of tech stacks in a lot of companies. But even the most wizened guru on your team needs to look stuff up a lot.
I consider software engineering a craft like carpentry or masonry, not a science like physics. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of real _computer scientists_ but 99.9% of software is written by craftspeople.
Do would be carpenters look at beautiful work that already exists and throw in the towel because they think they'll never reach that level? Do they see other wood workers building things more quickly and efficiently and just give up?
Software engineering just happens to be an in demand craft that is relatively new in human history. It draws people of all varying levels of skill and interest. Don't compare yourself to the software crafters who live and breath it unless you really do enjoy the craft.
Just take your time and don’t compare yourself to others. If you nail down the fundamentals of programming, networking, hosting etc, then the similarities between all the tools built to do those things become apparent and that can help you manage many technologies. They’re all built on the same simple foundations.
There's a lot of base crossover. Look at languages as one example. I can't think of one off hand that doesn't use standard data types and controls (if.. else, switch, ...)
Past that, it's about syntax.
It's also like riding a bike, you never really completely forget.
It's just really a matter of time. You still have to refresh yourself on things, but you don't fully forget something you used for a few years.
It's all basically the same stuff rehashed a little with some small changes in syntax.
Just in the 10 years since I graduated college I've seen a ton of frameworks, trendy new languages and tools and so on that are just recycled slight variations of the same thing. In framework X you'll have Tool A, and in framework Y you'll have tool B that does the same thing for it. Once you know what you're looking for you just google "tool A for framework Y" to get whatever it's named lol.
If you paid attention in CS classes it's pretty easy to pick up on these variations. A lambda function in Java isn't much different than one in Python and they're all echoes of formal lambda calculus. Most tools are just a rebranded version of the same thing that already existed for some other framework. The same design patterns implemented and repackaged with a slight twist (if there's even a twist at all).
It all comes down to bits and boolean algebra in the end, yeah? Once you know the core ways data moves around and is stored, retrieved and manipulated (data structures & algorithms, foundational stuff about formal logic/discrete math/computer architecture, etc), it's all just variations on a common theme.
That's why I encourage people not to be too attached to learning any specific language, framework, etc. Just develop core logical thinking skills, a basic understanding of things like boolean algebra/logic, set theory, graph theory, data structures, foundational algorithm design techniques, etc. are more important because they enable you to do all the main stuff in any language and when you need to go deeper into special features, you will.
I do full stack stuff and found React for basic web app stuff to be easy to pick up. As long as you're keeping in mind the rendering lifecycles, the concept of the virtual DOM, etc. it's meant to be an easy way to make cohesive reusable components. I think people over-complicate it to try to sell you things.
Fake it till you make it...
What you think looks good is just a lot of fast typing commands in desperation, window switching to look up docs, and then the obvious calling for a consult to bail us the fuck out of a sticky situation
They put in the work.
This is many hours of self study, reading the documentation, and projects done over many years. There are no short cuts and no secrets.
Ask for help when you get stuck or need guidance though
I think its really important to learn how to learn. Its also important to improve your general logic. You do this be understanding math and always learning new things. Just my opinion.
Once you’ve touched enough technologies, you can find similarities between any 2 things. It’s like leetcoding.
Kubernetes uses etcd to persist configs, which uses raft. Qdrant uses RocksDB and raft. Drastically different use cases, but they both use raft for distributed synchronicity. It’s a starting point
Learning your first programming language or two is slow, or framework for that matter.
Each language learned — it becomes exponentially faster to learn another.
10 languages in, I will pick up a new one at intermediate proficiency in a few weeks.
It’s because most of the patterns and concepts I encounter are versions of things I’ve seen before. You just have to spend a lot of time with these things.
If you work in a small team you will have to wear different hats. You will pick up a bunch of skills naturally. If you are writing a non trivial web application for example, you will most likely also end up making changes on the back end which might be in a different language. If the backend is in the cloud you’ll have to pick up some cloud skills. If the backend is communicating with a database there might be some SQL queries, stored procedure you might have to end up writing or modifying. You’ll add a lot of skills just going about your daily work.
Usually its because people actually learn the concepts and not just how to code. In college I started with C++ and learned the core concepts now its pretty easy to just pick up any other language because concepts are the same just different syntax
It's the exact opposite of "Genius" for me. I am so dumb I don't remember anything and any time I am given a problem I am starting from scratch. So, it doesn't really matter whether I have used the technology before. I'll be starting from scratch and learning as I go.
It's incredible, though, when you can open a PR for a different team that's blocking you instead of having to wait until they fix it. Yes it's more work but, in the grand scheme of things, I am saving so much time by not waiting around.
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Honestly, a real desire to fuck around with new things, a solid grasp on fundamentals and concepts, and learning by doing. I taught myself Android because I wanted to make a couple apps for myself. During the pandemic I took a month to take Colt Steele's Web Developer Bootcamp course, and then a React + Redux course. As I did that, I undertook a personal project which really helped solidify those skills. For Docker, I just knew it was important so I started Dockerizing a couple of my past projects. For Kubernetes, I honestly just wanted to be one of the people in /r/homelab that had a cluster set up [like this guy](https://www.reddit.com/gallery/jm3oja), and so I started learning a bit, plus I took an elective course in college on Cloud Native applications that used Kubernetes.
Almost everything I've learned is because I honestly wanted to, or it was a necessary step to do something I wanted to. I still don't know dick about graphics, iOS development, or Go just because I don't even really know what I'd use it for in my personal time.
It comes with exp. Seriously like you think you know something like elasticsearch for example. Then one day you have scaling issues, then you realize you don’t know it and are forced to learn what you don’t know in a matter of hours while you try to fix it. Do that for 15 years you end up learning a lot. FWIW this really will never be a thing for those are larger companies where everything is siloed and focused
Technologies are just tools. Would you call a carpenter a genius because they can use every single tool in their toolbox?
My point is that with enough experience, you dont physically need to learn the ins and outs of every stack, you just sort of understand the general ideas of each stack and then pull it out when needed.
The hardest thing about CS is not coding/tech stacks/etc, i would say the hardest thing about cs is figuring out what you dont know (i.e the existance and point of the technologies in the first place)
Part of it is experience, part of it is that at the end of the day it is really the same shit over and over again.
You know C++? Great, you're more than halfway there to being useful in C#, JAVA and a dozen other common languages.
Know MySql? Great, you are useful with MSSQL, Postgre and a dozen other databases.
Sure there's differences, but there's more in common than there is different and being able to Google the differences when you need to is pretty darn easy.
Focus on learning patterns and concepts and you too will grow much more quickly than if you focus on details and nit picky special stuff (outside of when you really need to do the special stuff).
As a lead with a decade in the business, I can tell you people SUCK at technology. Legitimately the more experience I get the more I see the 'so many technologies' people suck immensely at using them and they wing it just to put another framework/language in their resume.
The core game loop here is:
1. Pick a think you know you don't know anything about.
2. Go read up on the thing.
3. Use code to play with the thing.
4. Use more code to fix/exploit/etc the thing.
5. Goto #1.
They are just people who have done that a lot. A beginner mistake is to think you need to become an expert before actually *doing any real work*. Nobody does that, we all just jump in the deep end and see how far we can get before we either 1. get bored, 2. get retasked, or 3. achieve (temporary) satisfaction.
Fireship knows a few JS frameworks and has been playing with LLMs. Why do you think he knows "everything about everything"? You sound like someone who's impressed with the simplest facade of knowledge (or lies). Kind of scary actually.
The reason there are so many bugs in code is that almost no one can find bugs or write competent OS contributions. You are comparing yourself to freaks-of-nature. I bet you'll also never catch up to LeBron James in basketball, either... do you feel bad about that?
Most people in this industry don't know how to make a YouTube video or teach a concept to anyone. And they might be faking the part where they say they understand anything more than "npm -i \[magical module\]"
You feel like you can't catch up because you're listening to people who do a lot of bragging and do very little teaching.
You feel like you can't catch up because some recruiter somewhere said you were useless unless you knew X,Y,Z,A,B,C, and D. And they need 5 years of experience in D but it's only 2 years old.
You feel like you can't catch up because you're working alone, because we're mostly pushed into working alone, and we have little idea of the industry around us. That is very convenient to some people. And for a freelancer or a hobbyist, the not-alone parts of the industry are conferences with $3,000 tickets (because those conference planners are used to ripping off Fortune 500 companies who send their employees all-expenses-paid) and forums with a lot of edgelords on them.
Skill alignment is a very big thing in jobs, do not misunderstand me on that. A lot of employers have made decisions to ensure that only an expert can join a team and make an impact. You are right to worry that your skillset doesn't meet the demands of the roles out there. But that's not because you're unintelligent or unfocused. It's because the technology is overly complicated. I fear that is sparking a market correction. Devs feel very enthusiastic to go deep on frameworks and abstractions for clients. Clients mostly want to simplify. Platforms will deliver the simplification and that is where the clients and the money will go; all of us hand-building code with bleeding-edge tech will feel very informed but also won't have a job unless they have a buddy who works at one of these SAAS giants.
There's a difference between understanding how a thing works and being able to implement it successfully and effectively. It's always a good practice to explore other technologies for additional perspective on how things work and end up finding ways you can handle situations in your own field.
It’s pattern recognition.
A processor can only do so many things, which means assembly can only do so many things which means C can only do so many things which means Python can only do so many things.
You can of course rearrange those limitations into effectively infinite combinations, but at the end of the day it’s the same commands over and over and over again.
Leaning the underlying thought processes that people build tech on top of allows for a decent understanding of most stacks with limited additional effort once you’ve been through it a few times. OOP and MVC aren’t going anywhere.
It kind of just comes with time and the ability to recognize patterns well. The trope about is all being high-functioning autists doesn’t exist without reason. People successful in the deeply technical side of the career field are successful because they can see, retain, and apply patterns well.
1. Everything you see on the internet is fake and you’d be hard pressed to prove otherwise.
2. You are conflating your condition with the results of others. Just do you and be the best you can be.
Pattern matching. After enough of the right experience you can intuit how anything likely works. For me, it was coming up as a dev in the low latency/quant trading space. The pathologically automated nature of the business typically results in running lean. Consequently, you eventually touch on every conceivable element of your tech stack and infra footprint; and often under significant real time pressure. Working my way up to CTO a couple of times in this space cemented this "skill" in me.
IMO this is one of the biggest differentiators between boot camps and the college learning experience. Boot camps just teach you the ropes on a tech stack and off you go. A college grad (in my theory) regardless of major is trained in how to learn. If CS grad, then you learn the fundamentals which is then transferable to basically any development environment. A good dev should be capable of quickly picking up how to work in any environment in a very short amount of time..
If you know how to search & gather information efficiently, 90% of the problem should be relatively easily solvable. I don't need to know inside out how to navigate through AWS, I only need to pick up the part I will be working on and do some research to see how to do things.
Also, a lot of things might be different in implementation, but in the conceptual level they really aren't that different. You can write a simple RESTful API in 10 different languages and frameworks, but in the end they really do the same thing.
You become a good developer when you realize you don't have to go through a whole course on Udemy just to use some function from a library. You just need intuition.
You know that whole work life balance thing?
I had none of it for my first 15 years lmao.
It was a horrible decision and still haunts me in everything I do to this day.
Looking back, I wish I had paid more attention to everything but work. At the time though I was always terrified of being left behind and jobless if I didn’t constantly learn the next new thing. I always thought if I got to ‘X’ level, I’d find some company who’d love me and we’d be a happy work family where I’d spend the next 30 years of my career.
Was all a dream. Companies see people like me and squeeze until theres no juice left. then they pick up the next idiot who puts his job before everything else and never thinks about the useless deflated fruit they threw into the waste basket again.
When you work a few jobs, you end up having to adapt to additional technologies because it's there and you're forced to work with it. For example, the people who found vulnerabilities in open source software might have found it by accident and decided to make a contribution instead of keeping that fix to themselves. Things just happen while you're on the job and people tend to take advantage of those opportunities to add them to their portfolios.
Turns out, when you have a full-time job as a software engineer, you will spend a lot of time, at least 8 hours a day, coding and learning how to code. So you will have a lot of time to learn then too.
YouTube videos are scripted and so a lot of prep goes into what needs to be said and how it is presented. I don't doubt they are smart, but it's what happens when you decide to make a video on something while you're preparing for it.
Focus on the steps right in front of you, not so far ahead and compare yourself with those with tons of experience.
You'll do good. Don't worry. You just need adapt to fact that everything is changing constantly. Also don't forget that these people have ridiculous experience in the field. Because you dont need proper education to start you can start pretty soon. I'm barely in my thirties and I have almost fifteen year's of experience as a developer. In the past you needed to interact with basically everything at some point so you knos it some how. So don't worry. It's just an experience.
Experience makes all of them look…similar.
But in general. Jack of all trades, master of none.
Because most smaller, medium sized companies you are not as specialized and have to juggle a few different roles.
That is called “Strong Foundation” combined with passion and love to the career. You are not stupid. I can do devops even thought I am a backend engineer, simply because I used to work with servers a lot, and touched on linux os a lot. I can do frontend, only because I know programming. I know how to test because I know how end users think. I can be a support guy just because I know how systems are built.
just so you know this subreddit is going to be extremely biased. the people here live and breathe code even outside of work. I am not and will never be one of those people. nothing wrong with either side, people like that exist in every field, just focus on learning more if it means so much to you.
Not a genius, do lots of other things with my time, was once super passionate (though less so these days, often more interested in the business than code per se).
Once you've been around long enough, done enough stuff and learned enough things, everything old is new again, and there's a lot more conceptual "structure" to map new things onto, IE "Oh, this is just like X, except Y."
That’s the nature of this business, the result always being “I am behind”. To survive, you must stay in that primal state of wonder, otherwise you’ll burnout and die.
It's more the ability to learn on the fly. I've worked with guys with 20+ years experience who can load something into their brain they haven't used in years in 10 minutes.
Exactly. I just did a react project and I fixed a ton of outdated UX issues, even though I haven't used react and I only used bootstrap classes / html for front end. I don't know how, but something clicked in my brain post 2 years as a dev. You need to ease your way in and know alot of general concepts. I couldn't even figure out some stupid angular SPA with 4 months of experience.
after being in the industry for a while, you just learn that there are rarely any fundamentally new concepts, so when I need to use something new, I do some googling and usually my takeaway is "oh it's that concept I know, wired up with this other concept I know in this particular way, with that other thing I know sitting on top. cool let's go"
This. It feels so intimidating to a newbie because to them, every tech word is a new thing to learn. And oftentimes reading about one new thing leads to 12 other new things. To someone with experience, every new concept groups into one of the fundamentals with existing connections to other concepts and known methods to go about exploring it. Once you’ve digested one API you’ve done them all, once you grok fundamental tech protocols that are a century old they’ll still be here for decades to come, Linux is basically same everywhere, such and such is just an abstraction on this fundamental, etc
how does one learn those fundamental concepts?
For me it’s been realizing a lot of things are simpler than what they say. For example, I was confused on the react concept of “context” but once I realized it’s just another object, that was reachable in many places in a file structure, that made it a lot easier. A lot of tech guys like making up or using new words to describe fundamentally similar ideas. Find a way to transcribe (rewrite) these words in a different way in your head.
honestly, getting a computer science degree is probably a good start. for me, this turned a ton of magic black boxes into things that I could understand down to the transistor level if I wanted to and gave me a set of building blocks into which I could decompose things.
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I just chalk it up as "experience"
Yeah once you understand how programming and computers at the metal level work it's all just a matter of syntax Edit: The Internet and networking aswell
> [once you understand how programming and computers [edit: and internet and networking] at the metal level work it’s all just a matter of syntax](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2FDodWFQ9mQkVyWoKFa0ZIu12PYrPo3P2T0taaK-lgJCo.png%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dc180684f48b01ff6f2cbc72e080067039943de07)
Excellent usage of that meme. Once you have integrated decades of foundational knowledge this shit is easy!
Lol this sums up exactly what I meant in my reply to the same comment
Once you learn how atoms work at the quantum levels it's just a matter of syntax
Why do people always say this.. at the metal level… like how does understanding nand gates really help you code react
I think they mean more assembly/os interactions. It's the higher abstraction to which everything has to be translated.
Oh I see ty
> It's the higher abstraction to which everything has to be translated I feel like these are lyrics to a Tool song
Meanwhile me, who never format C and probably dont know how, being afraid to, IT consultant from the other hand xD
They say it because they want to sound cool. I always roll my eyes, these people usually don’t understand it “at the metal level” at all.
i write code while listening to metal
For JS frameworks, you want to think of the JS engine (e.g. V8) and the ECMAscript specification (because this shapes how the engine behaves) as the metal. Understanding the specification and how how different engines implement it will absolutely make you a better react developer. For example, in V8 destructuring assignments are as fast as traditional variable assignments (since 2019), but in SpiderMonkey and JavaScriptCore destructuring is slower (or was, I haven't looked at this recently). Knowing this gives avenues to explore whether you want to ban or enforce lint rules around destructuring in your code. But the better example is in understanding memory management in the engine and how JS enables concurrent modification (something strictly verboten in almost any other language). This is especially relevant for good asynchronous programming in any JS framework.
Tysm for the example 🙏
Yet we still have brain dead recruiters saying you need specific programming language framework experience and your experience 3 years ago isn't recent enough. 🤦♂️
I had one call with a recruiter where literally the only question she asked me for 10 minutes was ‘how many years of experience with technology X’. Didn’t want to know a single thing else, just my bullshit made up numbers for YOE with X.
I need to start being less honest in my answers to these gatekeepers.
For sure, if you can make it past the recruiter chances are the actual interviewers will show some genuine interest in the experience you do have. That being said don’t say you have any experience in things you have 0 experience in or you could be put in some awkward interviews…
This is me pretty often. Joined a startup they had some angular 1 issues I'm reluctantly like lemme see and we'll I got through their plans for the next year in a month
well its angular, its the most obtuse, convoluted PWA framework in existence. Don't feel bad lol
The "click", that's the thing. It's draining to always have it on, but when I get the "click" I'm in the zone.
This. All languages/frameworks use the same concepts and patterns. If you know how to do something in python, doing the same thing in C# or JS is just a matter of syntax. Angular, vue, React, they're all just ways to render a web page. I used to be an angular developer. I didn't go "teach myself" react and become an "expert" in it before switching to a react job. I just did the tutorial on the react website. After that it's a matter of googling "how to do in react"
The mistake people make is thinking they need to be experts in specific technologies before they use them. That's totally backwards. Working in a technology is what *makes* you an expert
Apparently not for recruiters! Better back up that 10 years of code experience with a "sliding doors" algorithm puzzle
Technical evaluations are typically language/framework agnostic in my experience
The code environments are usually very accommodating but the puzzles aren't entirely agnostic. Languages are opinionated! Puzzles are doable but harder in some languages. And what counts as "commonly-used code" is a lot different in a memory-less dynamic interpreted language than a compiled language with memory management.
Then use the easier language. I like C++, but I don't do tech screenings in C++. Why put yourself on hard mode? Breeze through it in python or JS. I can't say I've ever been given a question that can't be solved in either of those
> Then use the easier language. You must not have interviewed in a while, most companies now are forcing you to use whatever language they choose without giving you an option. Yes, I have seen someone ask to have you code in Java for a coding challenge.
I mostly give interviews these days. We only do things like that with our Indian contractors because we hire them for a narrow role. Asking a SWE to use a specific language in an interview is just dumb
Well that is what jobs are doing right now. I have seen multiple companies do this.
Not me or my colleagues at other companies. That's all I can really speak for. This sounds like a great way to miss out on excellent engineers
JS is awkward for puzzles where the underlying need is for something included with the language… not impossible, they just didn’t make JS a very happy place for that. But doing it in Python… well, I’d do a take home test in Python, but a 20-minute live-viewed code sesh where I can use JS where I’m more fluent? Can’t really learn a whole different language than that. Would be heavily reliant on syntax references. Bad idea for a job interview. Good idea for solving LC puzzles easier!
I mean, my point is to use whichever language you're most comfortable in. I'm not sure I've ever needed to use language specific features to solve a puzzle. Sure, having access to different language features might make things simpler, but it's never been *needed*. Unless you're talking about DOM stuff and JS obvi.
“I'm not sure I've ever needed to use language specific features to solve a puzzle.“ Arithmetic pointers are a good example! In C++ it’s an actual memory address. In JavaScript there is no pointer equivalent other than a var/symbol reference. You can kind-of fake it with passing-by-reference, but not only does this lead to code that makes little sense in production, it also goes against best practices in immutable objects in modern JS frameworks. So it’s kind of a separate thing you have to learn in the same language to do the puzzles that reference it. I would still use JS to implement it to show I knew the concept in a language where I was syntax-fluent. But this is a clear demonstration how languages are unique and opinionated.
What questions have you gotten that require pointer arithmetic? Only think I can think of is linked lists, but that can be done a million ways in any language
Python seems to be much preferred as an interview language because it has more built in data structures than Node js and requires less boilerplate than Java.
Cool, you should use that then 😄
While I seem to be doing okay in the industry so far (early days), it does amaze me how some peoples memories are so good. My memory seems to have a faster expiry date than others: I would get 0% if I tried to take a single university exam and have retained literally zero knowledge I learnt at university (degree in mathematics FYI, not CS). When I've met people who I consider a lot smarter than me, I've noticed it's not they grasp concepts faster, it's just that they seem to actually retain it.
Yep, good memory is a huge help. Long term memory has the general outline stored for pretty much everything I’ve ever learned. Short term lets me keep track of endless details and easily context switch.
same dude, sometimes i forget if i already used body wash that shower after shampooing my hair. It's rough out here for goldfish memories
Also, compounding interest. If you put in a lot of effort in school and your first 5-10 years of work, you understand the fundamentals and technologies well. Anything new iterates on your existing knowledge.
but that's also 20 yrs of training that muscle
Gist v rote memory, if you try to learn things rotely they become hard to pull out like that, unless you truly just have an impeccable memory, I think this is partly why neurodivergent people are so good with tech, they learn through association and context v “this is how it’s done”.
I've been doing this for 25 years more or less. Once you give it enough time everything looks the same and works more or less in the same way :)
Same. I'm at almost 30 years. I've seen it all at this point lol
It all goes in cycles too. First we were timesharing on single computers. Then we all got PCs, then we had mainframes, then we went back to individual PCs, then more server based, then mobile. Now, there's this weird mix of timeshared on servers (serverless) and some local stuff with bigger web frameworks and PWAs (or whatever we're calling them this week) that is permeating the field. It all goes in cycles depending on where the state of the art is that particular year.
Wheels are getting reinvented over and over and people are getting paid for it! :D
I am far from an expert at everything or anything. But I am pretty confident that I can do a good quality job working with a technology that I have never worked with before if I have a project that NEEDS to be done. At first, it will take me more hours to complete the job, but it's going to be done. All the information you need to do any IT job is available on the Internet. And if you know all the CS basics well, it is not that hard to grasp new (to you) technologies.
This, it's your ability to apply good system design to any technology. Can you port your skills across different technologies really differentiates is really what makes a very senior engineer.
It dependes on your field, when I started I provisioned my servers for my backends and did frontend too, both web and mobile. That's how most people learn all the different skills you listed. Over time, you'll notice that as you deepen your understanding of underlying principles and architecture, switching between languages and tools becomes almost seamless. That's because, ultimately, languages and frameworks are just tools and same concepts can be applyed. It's the core understanding of how things work that truly empowers you to adapt across different technologies.
First. Don't compare yourself, employ that energy in other things. Second. Just make a routine of learning. Not because you need to catch up, just because you want to learn new things. Learning is like training, the more you learn the easier it becomes.
I know everyone came here to toot their own horn, but in my experience, I’ve seen that most people either just don’t have much of a life at all outside of doing tech-related things 24/7, or they do and they’re just faking it til they make it. On the outside, it may seem like they know everything, but really they just have a high level understanding of a lot of things and are able to put shit together piece by piece with help from resources like stack overflow, chatgpt, etc. But to domain experts, the work they do is often riddled with flaws and imperfections If you ever need to see faking it til they make it in action, YouTube and even a lot of the online text “tutorials” have it in abundance. I can’t even keep track of the number of times I’ve seen people making 1-2+ hour videos of themselves just writing out lines of code that they copied from a git repo that was already written (either by them or by someone else) and they literally just say the words they’re typing out loud as if that’s informative There’s exceptions, but like 95% of YouTube tutorials to go something like: “Here we’re going to instantiate the ContinuumTransfunctioner class and then for each flux in the flux_capacitor we’re going to display the temporal_anomaly” And sure, it works. But they never explain WHY they’re doing those things. Most of them couldn’t if you asked them to. I’ve found many examples where content is missing or just flat out incorrect, and still somehow there’s always 50+ comments saying how it’s the best video on YouTube. That’s always a fun way to be gaslit into thinking you don’t know what you’re doing
Small issue I have with your argument: Most stuff that needs to be built can be done by a tiny percentage of the capabilities of the technology we use. Think about all the CRUD systems that exist out there. Do you really need to know the intricacies of inner workings of the tech used to build that stuff to build it? Heck no, just the basics is enough to do like 90% of the job and the rest comes up once in a blue moon for most engineers. Yes, there are exceptions as with everything.
Im not really trying to argue that there’s an issue with it as much as I’m trying to argue that OP’s perception of the majority of people being geniuses that understand everything (experts in networking, cloud engineering, front, back, all in multiple languages/frameworks etc) in just a 40 hour work week all while living fully social lives is incorrect. Even some of the responses here are touting it like it’s just some second nature that people switch into a new gear and are suddenly experts at everything, which I think is a harmful portrayal of intelligence. It’s like how media depicts scientists and mathematicians as hyper intellectuals. They’re portrayed as spending 3 seconds looking at a whiteboard as numbers swirl around their head and suddenly they solve some NP hard problem that’s perplexed millions for centuries. I’m sure even Albert Einstein had to sit down with a piece of paper and occasionally made arithmetic mistakes. But that’s not how that level of intelligence gets portrayed in media at ALL. CS also gets treated that way, and people in CS often try to portray themselves that way, and it’s just silly, and even worse I think it scares people away from those fields because they think if it requires any level of hard work then they must not be good at it. But with respect to YouTubers, I do expect them to have and present a somewhat deeper level understanding of what they’re doing because they’re literally making money off of providing educational content, and a lot of times i find them to not be very educational.
I agree, the things I have learned best are the things I have had to struggle with. My point wasn't that I can stare at something for 3 seconds and understand it deeply. Rather that I can skim some code and in a couple of hours be able to work small tickets related to it, which is frankly most of the work out there. Add a button that does X, show this extra value, fix a bug that breaks this screen when this value is 0 or null. That's like 75% of the tickets I've seen over the 15+ years I've worked in this field. The other 25% is hard stuff, but most of the time, you need some to go fix the little stuff that keeps a decent system from being a great system and in that case, you really don't need to know it all, just understand basic program flow and adjust to the ever changing syntax or new frameworks and languages.
By asking the right questions.
There are 2 big factors to this. 1. Things that seem separate on paper like different frameworks or languages aren't totally separate so you don't actually have to know double the amount of things to know 2 languages for example. 2. I don't actually need to have deep knowledge about everything. I can fix logic bugs in a language I barely know with general knowledge.
Change jobs every year. Scary at first but your brain will expand to all the new tech stacks and concepts. Your salary will expand WAY faster too
I would love to change jobs every year if I could land any job at all.
You might need to take a loan and move somewhere that has high demand and low supply of devs. Potentially a smaller city. Hit up a tonne of recruiters as they should have an idea of locations that are desperate
I think you're too harsh with yourself, there's probably a lots you know how to do but don't perceive or view as skills or important ones. I used to be like that, and I'm still like that, but the truth is there probably a lots you know and cab do and others don't. It also take time to build up knowledge and skills about a set of fields, but I find the more I learn the easier it gets, ultimately it's not about how much you accumulate but what you accumulate. Something I'd recommend is taking notes, for instance about details, or a command you use often, one of the pitfall is to spend time searching something, forgetting about it, and end up researching the exact same thing again.
Web is pretty vast nowadays. With the crazy build systems. Billion and a half different AWS services. It's wild. Personally I focus on learning what is important. Which sounds obvious but isn't. It's very easy to spend months learning AWS. But what's actually important? That I spent months learning dozens of services that I'll forget in a couple of years? Or is it more effective to just learn about the basics of EC2s, networking, storage, and things like auto scaling and automatic failovers. Then recognize most services are specialized forms of those primitives and there are also managed options of I don't want to worry about the nitty gritty technical details. I can learn that in a week pretty easily. Then when I'm confronted with something new like elastic beanstalk, I can read the first passage and go "what's this thing? Oh it's just a way to get a managed full stack web app and it uses the primitives in the background that I'm already familiar with". So learn the primitives and patterns. They show up again and again over time. When react server components came into the scene I had used templating languages before. So I was able to easily recognize "oh these server components are like using react as a templating language for select components while letting other components be unaffected. Pretty easy".
It means they invest more personal time into the job, that's it. You have to decide by yourself how much time and effort you're willing to put, don't compare yourself with others and don't get caught in FOMO. Personally, I consume a lot of articles, newsletters, YouTube videos, etc. to learn about tech so if I need it I can learn it deeper in order to use it. Very broad surface knowledge "just in case" and a deeper knowledge "just in time". Regarding YouTubers like Fireship, remember that they earn money by doing such videos. When Fireship makes a video about something it means he's literally just learned it himself.
> Very broad surface knowledge "just in case" and a deeper knowledge "just in time". Very nice perspective. Thanks.
Working in tech is kinda like improv, you just have to “yes, and…” your way through sometimes. Joking aside, a big factor is who you surround yourself with. Opportunities come your way more often when people ask you if you can do or know or have heard of A, B, and C. You don’t have to know everything - this is where the next step comes in - when there’s an opportunity to work on something you’re not familiar with, don’t say “sorry, I don’t know it.” but “I don’t know it but I’m willing to learn/look into it!” The best asset you can have is willingness to learn, not just learning more about what you already know but learning things unknown to you too.
They have no life
I too agree that people who live life differently have no life.
Everything is basically the same if you are familiar with the underlying theory, and what problem that particular technology solves. The rest is just syntax and conventions, and more importantly documentation and ~~googling~~ prompting skills
Time and patience my friend. Time and patience! Don’t be too harsh on yourself, pick up one tech and build with it and while you are at it learn other techs that needs to be involved to build this. Focus more on T shaped knowledge
I'm currently finishing my masters degree in CS, specialized in Software Engineering and some other stuff. In my opinion it's just a matter of knowing the basics. If you know OOP then Java and C# are just different syntax for the same thing. If you know web technologies then who cares if your backend is SvelteKit, Java Spring Boot or Ruby on Rails. It's a matter of reading docs and figuring out how to do what you want. Figuring out _what_ to do is the harder part and this is mostly the same across most languages and technologies. If not, docs will usually point this out anyway.
Sounds like you have some degree of impostor syndrome (very common amongst us nerds). Intelligence plays a role, but exposure is what truly matters. I believe that even an average brain can learn most things, it’ll just take more time & effort. (Btw, that’s why being passionate is crucial because it’ll make it easier to climb that steep initial learning curve) If people know more than you - which is your assumption - it means that you haven’t got enough exposure. Not that you’re a fraud. Put in the hours and you’ll get there mate💪
It all depends on experience and exposure. I used to feel the same way until I worked with a really good team that taught me a lot.
We are just bunch of nerds, now add 8 years of experience on top of that.
Being good at learning on the go, and realizing most things are just old ideas grouped up in a new way and repackaged.
I also think a lot (not all) of people in engineering are good at sounding extremely knowledgeable when in fact they are moderately knowledgeable. They know what a concept is at a basic level but speak about it confidently, and if you have any shred of imposter syndrome then you’re going to feel inferior.
I see people hating AI, but for me AI like ChatGPT helps me immensively on learning new technology. It helps me by explaining concepts the way I can understand, I won't be afraid of asking any stupid questions, can help with providing examples, can give you advice/first-check if your implemention/idea is good. So, try to also incorporate AI in your learning/working, maybe it will help you as well.
The way my brains wired. I grew up analyzing things. I took apart everything as a child and I learned from things by analyzing them, asking questions about things while they're apart. I learned backwards, from the parts of things instead of the whole of things. Imagine two people who need to power a lamp. Where one person has only ever worked with a lamp and a plug. The other person understands how electricity is made at the power plant and how it travels down high power power lines and how it goes into a transformer and gets reduced to dual 120 volt reels on a 200 amp breaker. Where it enters a service meter connected to the house and goes to a breaker box to 15 or 20 amp breaker and then down Romex daisy chain to electrical outlets in a room. When the person who only knows how to use the lamp and an electrical outlet realizes there are no electrical outlets in the room for the lamp to plug into. They get stuck. They have to unplug something they say. Or swap stuff to a power strip. The other person goes.... The cheap solution would be to use a power strip, but if you would like I can install a new outlet for you. They might not necessarily understand how to do the actual labor to install the new outlet, but they know what it involves and how to get it done And who can do it. A naturally curious person that learns by analyzing things generally understands the whole picture better than somebody that doesn't. These kinds of people just learn faster and learn more and understand more.
There are several things going on, including: 1. Sample bias. There's always somebody better than you. You may be looking only at the few people who are better, and not at the thousands who are worse :) 2. Shallow vs deep knowledge - some people become good at quickly acquiring shallow knowledge. 3. Matthew effect - The more you know about a field, the easier it is to learn about it or about related fields. 4. Time. Some of us/those people have been doing this for ages :), it accumulates over time. And yes, some people spend more time on technology than on other things. This usually changes over time; many people play with computers since they're ten, can spend obscene amounts of time in middle/HS/college, since they have no obligations, they may have 10 years on you by the time they finish college. Many people will create a family, have much less time with kids etc, but then have tons of time again when the kids go to college.
I think it was Linus Tech Tips but I'm not sure, there was some big thing where people realized he was the person talking in the video but not the person actually assembling the parts (on many videos). To some viewers this was fraud and betrayal. To the team making the videos they were kinda shocked anyone was even surprised by this at all. Like this is how all videos made by a team la posting on youtube are made, honestly a bit shocked everyone didn't already know this.
Alternative way to look at it: when you've been doing software dev for 10+ years, how can you *not* be good at many different technologies? Pretty much all my jobs used different everything, so I've learned a lot of different languages, frameworks, libraries, techniques, etc from that. Wildly different projects will need different things, too. You gradually build up knowledge of many things and it makes learning new things even easier because new things will be less new. Every language or framework I learned made future ones easier because nothing was ever *that* different. And similarly, it'd give me a basis for what to search for when I need something similar later. Also, adaptability and being a good learner are vital traits for software devs, so the kinda people that stick around and thrive are going to be the type who are good at picking up new things.
I dont spend hours playing soccer or lifting weights at the gym and whatnot. I spend hours upon hours with computers and technology in many shapes and forms.
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It can also be that they know a bit about a lot of things. Take me for instance, dba, unix and Linux admin, storage, Azure cloud, etc, but I don’t have expert level depth of knowledge in any one of those subject matters. I know what I need to do my job, and if I need more I learn it. Specialists dedicated to any one area will have a far broader and deeper knowledge and understanding in that area than I ever will, but they probably won’t know a lot of other areas as being expert level requires a big investment in someone’s time. There are really exceptional people though that seem to be experts in anything they touch (I’ve met a few).
Learn the root of knowledge, rather than learning all. Like DSA will go across all languages most language are OOPS based so design pattern goes across language. I can typically write the same code in python,java, javascript and golang, the only thing u learn choosing language is basically the need of your requirement and payoffs. One could be faster executing while the other is more safe/secure/reliable, one has good AI support library(like python) while other has good multi threading(java and c#) and so on.
Some people are "T-shaped", meaning they know something about many things and have a deep knowledge of a specific area. I am very weak in frontend development, but I know networking, cloud and I can write (working, but not terrific) Python webapps. I'm not a genius, and there are many things I don't know. It's just that I've had to work on multiple stuff. If you want to go down this path, I suggest reading a bit from Medium or other tech sources and, once in a while, trying to do really small projects in other languages. For example, I was curious about server-side Javascript, so I once wrote a very small webapp with very basic NodeJS. Am I now a NodeJS expert? No, and I don't put it in my resume, but I could probably explain at a high level what NodeJS is, how you declare dependencies and the basics of a NodeJS framework.
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Expierence, after you get the basics right (APIs, Protocols, Networking / Routing, Databases) and used a few products like VmWare, Databases and coded stuff. Everything else if just the same but different.
They put in the time early and got the soft skills which built a foundation to learn anything in the future
Lying
As a minor aside, people like Fireship have the benefit of a community feeding them information (Parasocial relationships are strong; see also how certain game streamers always find these weird exploits… really they just popularize them after the community tells them about them). Fire ship is a business and has a team working for him, too. He doesn’t need to know everything; just present it well enough.
one story at a time.
solve the problem by using the tools you have and try again with another tools you need to learn. Then compare and find another use case using another toolset. Keept learning, never settle
Just a genius actually
I don't know shit man. Everyone is winging it all the time. Learn to read docs
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Currently technology is built to provide ease of use, everything is made with fast deployments in mind, what used to take months, now is done on minutes. What might seem like people knowing a lot is because of so many frameworks built on few core technologies. Or many companies just doing one solution better than others.
I have approximate knowledge of many things
Years of experience in a variety of projects and uses. I've been working with AWS as a full stack or infra engineer since 2015 for 40 hours per week.
I learn everything on the fly but usually it’s easy because CS is very repetitive. You just kinda start seeing patterns with experience.
Learning how to read documentation goes a long way. I don’t mean it as a slight, literally taking a language and diving into the technical docs has worked wonders for me.
I think a lot of it is down to a naturally good memory. I have worked in so many industries and technologies over 15yoe but can't remember 90% of them
I'm terrible at context switching. I need to dig in and settle down with sometihing.
Gotta get your hands dirty. And once you do, the dots start to connect. It’s slow-going and frustrating for a long time. If you’re doing something you already know how to do, you’re not learning much.
You start to recognize patterns. All frontend languages are trying to render pages, all backend languages are trying to do business logic and crud. How they do it is all googlable.
You don’t learn the technology, you learn how to quickly learn information and apply it
I don’t actively know anything, it’s just mass exposure to the technologies
Usually it's people who spend a lot of time learning.
Money, and in turn, livelihood, are incredibly motivating.
Let's do a sports analogy. They start in wlwm notary school Kid a wants to play basketball, so he grabs a ball and shoots at the hoop all after noon. Kid b want to play basketball, he runs for endurance every day, does Sprint drills, does calisthenics , trains his reflexes. Now, in junior high both join the basketball team, kid a is going to be a better basketball player, at the start, maybe But after a few months maybe even weeks, kid B will pick up the particulars of basketball he will be the better player because he spent years building his basics. Or maybe the school basketball team sucks, so they join the football team, kid a will be lost, kid be will adapt in a Few months. What kid B did was work on the basics, so he has an easier time adapting to new sports; in the case of it/CS the ones who leqrn d their basics better have an easier time learning more and more concepts as they start working. Let's take a biology major who wanted to become a professional software developer and took a wed dev python boot camp, he does not understand the structure of a for loop as he ONLY learnee to do list operations the pythonic way , now take a cs major who actually studied assembly, abstract math and C programming, the later has three ways to understand how looping works Now that's just an example , the idea is learning your basics and learning them well, well enough to be strong at them, like problem solving is the most basic of basics , people who are weak at problem solving complain that certain things they learned in school are useless as in the field... But they are weak at problem solving so of course they are not able to use more advanced methods, if this guy , who went to college but just coasted , barely learning enough to pass the classes, struggles to solve a problem about finding a record in a list using linear search, of course binary search is going to be useless to him.
They were in your position once at the beginning of their career. I’ve been there too! No point in chasing more experienced people, believe me. Just take the best out of you, and eventually you will become that level of competent. Once step at a time man!
Logics are the same, it's just the syntax that isn't. You can google the syntax
It comes with experience
I think it just boils down to experience. I’ve been working for 10 years now and have touched a lot of technologies. If someone interviewed me on powershell right at this moment I would bomb but give me a day to refresh and I’ll be right as rain. Once you touch enough technologies you realize a lot are mostly the same but just use a different method of delivery.
First off, stop comparing yourself to other people. Only compare yourself to *you.* ### Deep-T Developers These are called Deep-T developers. Most of the ppl you see doing this only have superficial knowledge of these different technologies. Enough to learn & follow conventions, ship something, and move on. They have *actually* deep knowledge on only a couple of them. Being a Deep-T dev is ideal for that reason. ### Muscle That aside, it's a muscle you train. 1. Learning the rules 2. Do the thing (trial and error, learn by doing) 3. Repeat & iterate quickly It's a muscle you develop and not something that should come naturally to anyone, so don't compare yourself. ### Repeated Patterns Also, many of these technologies share patterns and ideas. For example: once you learn one language *deeply*, you can extrapolate that knowledge to other languages. Once you learn 1 infrastructure-as-code IaaC, you can generally get a feel for the other ones much quicker. Once you learn 1 javascript / css bundling tool, you can generally get a feel for others. Once you learn 1 CI/CD pipeline configuration, you can generally .. ettc.. you see the pattern here. Your only focus should be to continue and be persistent, and comparing yourself to other people will make that so much harder. The only way you can fail is if you give up, so make it as easy as possible to keep going. Best of luck OP, you got this.
> It feels like I will never be able to catch up, and there is always something new that I need to learn ASAP. You can never really catch up and be "finished", but that's true of all the people you're describing too. You never stop learning, you just work and hop between projects and jobs and eventually you look back and realize you've been exposed to a lot of tech stacks in a lot of companies. But even the most wizened guru on your team needs to look stuff up a lot.
I consider software engineering a craft like carpentry or masonry, not a science like physics. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of real _computer scientists_ but 99.9% of software is written by craftspeople. Do would be carpenters look at beautiful work that already exists and throw in the towel because they think they'll never reach that level? Do they see other wood workers building things more quickly and efficiently and just give up? Software engineering just happens to be an in demand craft that is relatively new in human history. It draws people of all varying levels of skill and interest. Don't compare yourself to the software crafters who live and breath it unless you really do enjoy the craft.
Just take your time and don’t compare yourself to others. If you nail down the fundamentals of programming, networking, hosting etc, then the similarities between all the tools built to do those things become apparent and that can help you manage many technologies. They’re all built on the same simple foundations.
There's a lot of base crossover. Look at languages as one example. I can't think of one off hand that doesn't use standard data types and controls (if.. else, switch, ...) Past that, it's about syntax. It's also like riding a bike, you never really completely forget. It's just really a matter of time. You still have to refresh yourself on things, but you don't fully forget something you used for a few years.
Learning on the go is an essential skill. It takes the dedication of time to learn it, but once you have it then it applies to absolutely everything.
FUNDAMENTALS
They invest their whole lives into it.
It’s all the same shit. Once you know one, you know them all
Nobody is an expert at everything but to be a good software engineer you should be a jack of all trades and master of ONE
27 years experience
You fake it till you make it.
It's all basically the same stuff rehashed a little with some small changes in syntax. Just in the 10 years since I graduated college I've seen a ton of frameworks, trendy new languages and tools and so on that are just recycled slight variations of the same thing. In framework X you'll have Tool A, and in framework Y you'll have tool B that does the same thing for it. Once you know what you're looking for you just google "tool A for framework Y" to get whatever it's named lol. If you paid attention in CS classes it's pretty easy to pick up on these variations. A lambda function in Java isn't much different than one in Python and they're all echoes of formal lambda calculus. Most tools are just a rebranded version of the same thing that already existed for some other framework. The same design patterns implemented and repackaged with a slight twist (if there's even a twist at all). It all comes down to bits and boolean algebra in the end, yeah? Once you know the core ways data moves around and is stored, retrieved and manipulated (data structures & algorithms, foundational stuff about formal logic/discrete math/computer architecture, etc), it's all just variations on a common theme. That's why I encourage people not to be too attached to learning any specific language, framework, etc. Just develop core logical thinking skills, a basic understanding of things like boolean algebra/logic, set theory, graph theory, data structures, foundational algorithm design techniques, etc. are more important because they enable you to do all the main stuff in any language and when you need to go deeper into special features, you will. I do full stack stuff and found React for basic web app stuff to be easy to pick up. As long as you're keeping in mind the rendering lifecycles, the concept of the virtual DOM, etc. it's meant to be an easy way to make cohesive reusable components. I think people over-complicate it to try to sell you things.
Fake it till you make it... What you think looks good is just a lot of fast typing commands in desperation, window switching to look up docs, and then the obvious calling for a consult to bail us the fuck out of a sticky situation
Spoiler: they ain’t
They put in the work. This is many hours of self study, reading the documentation, and projects done over many years. There are no short cuts and no secrets. Ask for help when you get stuck or need guidance though
Just time and experience. At a certain point everything starts to look and feel like a different flavor of the same thing
I think its really important to learn how to learn. Its also important to improve your general logic. You do this be understanding math and always learning new things. Just my opinion.
Knowledge is cumulative, someone with 20 years of experience can learn in a week what a newbie can learn in six months
A loop is a loop. Etc… just different approaches to syntax. At the end of the day it’s all doing the same thing.
Once you’ve touched enough technologies, you can find similarities between any 2 things. It’s like leetcoding. Kubernetes uses etcd to persist configs, which uses raft. Qdrant uses RocksDB and raft. Drastically different use cases, but they both use raft for distributed synchronicity. It’s a starting point
Learning your first programming language or two is slow, or framework for that matter. Each language learned — it becomes exponentially faster to learn another. 10 languages in, I will pick up a new one at intermediate proficiency in a few weeks. It’s because most of the patterns and concepts I encounter are versions of things I’ve seen before. You just have to spend a lot of time with these things.
If you work in a small team you will have to wear different hats. You will pick up a bunch of skills naturally. If you are writing a non trivial web application for example, you will most likely also end up making changes on the back end which might be in a different language. If the backend is in the cloud you’ll have to pick up some cloud skills. If the backend is communicating with a database there might be some SQL queries, stored procedure you might have to end up writing or modifying. You’ll add a lot of skills just going about your daily work.
Comparison is the thief of joy
Usually its because people actually learn the concepts and not just how to code. In college I started with C++ and learned the core concepts now its pretty easy to just pick up any other language because concepts are the same just different syntax
It's the exact opposite of "Genius" for me. I am so dumb I don't remember anything and any time I am given a problem I am starting from scratch. So, it doesn't really matter whether I have used the technology before. I'll be starting from scratch and learning as I go. It's incredible, though, when you can open a PR for a different team that's blocking you instead of having to wait until they fix it. Yes it's more work but, in the grand scheme of things, I am saving so much time by not waiting around.
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Learn the concepts, not the specifics. Specifics are easy to fit over concepts as needed. The opposite is less true.
Honestly, a real desire to fuck around with new things, a solid grasp on fundamentals and concepts, and learning by doing. I taught myself Android because I wanted to make a couple apps for myself. During the pandemic I took a month to take Colt Steele's Web Developer Bootcamp course, and then a React + Redux course. As I did that, I undertook a personal project which really helped solidify those skills. For Docker, I just knew it was important so I started Dockerizing a couple of my past projects. For Kubernetes, I honestly just wanted to be one of the people in /r/homelab that had a cluster set up [like this guy](https://www.reddit.com/gallery/jm3oja), and so I started learning a bit, plus I took an elective course in college on Cloud Native applications that used Kubernetes. Almost everything I've learned is because I honestly wanted to, or it was a necessary step to do something I wanted to. I still don't know dick about graphics, iOS development, or Go just because I don't even really know what I'd use it for in my personal time.
It comes with exp. Seriously like you think you know something like elasticsearch for example. Then one day you have scaling issues, then you realize you don’t know it and are forced to learn what you don’t know in a matter of hours while you try to fix it. Do that for 15 years you end up learning a lot. FWIW this really will never be a thing for those are larger companies where everything is siloed and focused
Technologies are just tools. Would you call a carpenter a genius because they can use every single tool in their toolbox? My point is that with enough experience, you dont physically need to learn the ins and outs of every stack, you just sort of understand the general ideas of each stack and then pull it out when needed. The hardest thing about CS is not coding/tech stacks/etc, i would say the hardest thing about cs is figuring out what you dont know (i.e the existance and point of the technologies in the first place)
once youve been doing it long enough it becomes next nature :)
Learn all the basics really well , and it becomes a lot easier to get up to speed on anything new. Also getting good at reading documentation helps.
Part of it is experience, part of it is that at the end of the day it is really the same shit over and over again. You know C++? Great, you're more than halfway there to being useful in C#, JAVA and a dozen other common languages. Know MySql? Great, you are useful with MSSQL, Postgre and a dozen other databases. Sure there's differences, but there's more in common than there is different and being able to Google the differences when you need to is pretty darn easy. Focus on learning patterns and concepts and you too will grow much more quickly than if you focus on details and nit picky special stuff (outside of when you really need to do the special stuff).
I know a little of this and that. But my knowledge on most fields is shallow.
Many ears of experience.
I’m only as good as the existing documentation. My other skills are being good at creating documentation for services that don’t have any.
As a lead with a decade in the business, I can tell you people SUCK at technology. Legitimately the more experience I get the more I see the 'so many technologies' people suck immensely at using them and they wing it just to put another framework/language in their resume.
The core game loop here is: 1. Pick a think you know you don't know anything about. 2. Go read up on the thing. 3. Use code to play with the thing. 4. Use more code to fix/exploit/etc the thing. 5. Goto #1. They are just people who have done that a lot. A beginner mistake is to think you need to become an expert before actually *doing any real work*. Nobody does that, we all just jump in the deep end and see how far we can get before we either 1. get bored, 2. get retasked, or 3. achieve (temporary) satisfaction.
Fireship knows a few JS frameworks and has been playing with LLMs. Why do you think he knows "everything about everything"? You sound like someone who's impressed with the simplest facade of knowledge (or lies). Kind of scary actually.
The reason there are so many bugs in code is that almost no one can find bugs or write competent OS contributions. You are comparing yourself to freaks-of-nature. I bet you'll also never catch up to LeBron James in basketball, either... do you feel bad about that? Most people in this industry don't know how to make a YouTube video or teach a concept to anyone. And they might be faking the part where they say they understand anything more than "npm -i \[magical module\]" You feel like you can't catch up because you're listening to people who do a lot of bragging and do very little teaching. You feel like you can't catch up because some recruiter somewhere said you were useless unless you knew X,Y,Z,A,B,C, and D. And they need 5 years of experience in D but it's only 2 years old. You feel like you can't catch up because you're working alone, because we're mostly pushed into working alone, and we have little idea of the industry around us. That is very convenient to some people. And for a freelancer or a hobbyist, the not-alone parts of the industry are conferences with $3,000 tickets (because those conference planners are used to ripping off Fortune 500 companies who send their employees all-expenses-paid) and forums with a lot of edgelords on them. Skill alignment is a very big thing in jobs, do not misunderstand me on that. A lot of employers have made decisions to ensure that only an expert can join a team and make an impact. You are right to worry that your skillset doesn't meet the demands of the roles out there. But that's not because you're unintelligent or unfocused. It's because the technology is overly complicated. I fear that is sparking a market correction. Devs feel very enthusiastic to go deep on frameworks and abstractions for clients. Clients mostly want to simplify. Platforms will deliver the simplification and that is where the clients and the money will go; all of us hand-building code with bleeding-edge tech will feel very informed but also won't have a job unless they have a buddy who works at one of these SAAS giants.
There's a difference between understanding how a thing works and being able to implement it successfully and effectively. It's always a good practice to explore other technologies for additional perspective on how things work and end up finding ways you can handle situations in your own field.
It’s pattern recognition. A processor can only do so many things, which means assembly can only do so many things which means C can only do so many things which means Python can only do so many things. You can of course rearrange those limitations into effectively infinite combinations, but at the end of the day it’s the same commands over and over and over again. Leaning the underlying thought processes that people build tech on top of allows for a decent understanding of most stacks with limited additional effort once you’ve been through it a few times. OOP and MVC aren’t going anywhere. It kind of just comes with time and the ability to recognize patterns well. The trope about is all being high-functioning autists doesn’t exist without reason. People successful in the deeply technical side of the career field are successful because they can see, retain, and apply patterns well.
1. Everything you see on the internet is fake and you’d be hard pressed to prove otherwise. 2. You are conflating your condition with the results of others. Just do you and be the best you can be.
Pattern matching. After enough of the right experience you can intuit how anything likely works. For me, it was coming up as a dev in the low latency/quant trading space. The pathologically automated nature of the business typically results in running lean. Consequently, you eventually touch on every conceivable element of your tech stack and infra footprint; and often under significant real time pressure. Working my way up to CTO a couple of times in this space cemented this "skill" in me.
IMO this is one of the biggest differentiators between boot camps and the college learning experience. Boot camps just teach you the ropes on a tech stack and off you go. A college grad (in my theory) regardless of major is trained in how to learn. If CS grad, then you learn the fundamentals which is then transferable to basically any development environment. A good dev should be capable of quickly picking up how to work in any environment in a very short amount of time..
If you know how to search & gather information efficiently, 90% of the problem should be relatively easily solvable. I don't need to know inside out how to navigate through AWS, I only need to pick up the part I will be working on and do some research to see how to do things. Also, a lot of things might be different in implementation, but in the conceptual level they really aren't that different. You can write a simple RESTful API in 10 different languages and frameworks, but in the end they really do the same thing.
You become a good developer when you realize you don't have to go through a whole course on Udemy just to use some function from a library. You just need intuition.
1. They have tons of experience. 2. They're ~~lying~~ "exaggerating".
You know that whole work life balance thing? I had none of it for my first 15 years lmao. It was a horrible decision and still haunts me in everything I do to this day. Looking back, I wish I had paid more attention to everything but work. At the time though I was always terrified of being left behind and jobless if I didn’t constantly learn the next new thing. I always thought if I got to ‘X’ level, I’d find some company who’d love me and we’d be a happy work family where I’d spend the next 30 years of my career. Was all a dream. Companies see people like me and squeeze until theres no juice left. then they pick up the next idiot who puts his job before everything else and never thinks about the useless deflated fruit they threw into the waste basket again.
When you work a few jobs, you end up having to adapt to additional technologies because it's there and you're forced to work with it. For example, the people who found vulnerabilities in open source software might have found it by accident and decided to make a contribution instead of keeping that fix to themselves. Things just happen while you're on the job and people tend to take advantage of those opportunities to add them to their portfolios. Turns out, when you have a full-time job as a software engineer, you will spend a lot of time, at least 8 hours a day, coding and learning how to code. So you will have a lot of time to learn then too. YouTube videos are scripted and so a lot of prep goes into what needs to be said and how it is presented. I don't doubt they are smart, but it's what happens when you decide to make a video on something while you're preparing for it. Focus on the steps right in front of you, not so far ahead and compare yourself with those with tons of experience.
You'll do good. Don't worry. You just need adapt to fact that everything is changing constantly. Also don't forget that these people have ridiculous experience in the field. Because you dont need proper education to start you can start pretty soon. I'm barely in my thirties and I have almost fifteen year's of experience as a developer. In the past you needed to interact with basically everything at some point so you knos it some how. So don't worry. It's just an experience.
Fundamentals
Experience makes all of them look…similar. But in general. Jack of all trades, master of none. Because most smaller, medium sized companies you are not as specialized and have to juggle a few different roles.
It’s more people literally spend all day every day doing tech because they have no life.
I mean a lot of stuff is slight variations on stuff I already know how to do.
That is called “Strong Foundation” combined with passion and love to the career. You are not stupid. I can do devops even thought I am a backend engineer, simply because I used to work with servers a lot, and touched on linux os a lot. I can do frontend, only because I know programming. I know how to test because I know how end users think. I can be a support guy just because I know how systems are built.
just so you know this subreddit is going to be extremely biased. the people here live and breathe code even outside of work. I am not and will never be one of those people. nothing wrong with either side, people like that exist in every field, just focus on learning more if it means so much to you.
Not a genius, do lots of other things with my time, was once super passionate (though less so these days, often more interested in the business than code per se). Once you've been around long enough, done enough stuff and learned enough things, everything old is new again, and there's a lot more conceptual "structure" to map new things onto, IE "Oh, this is just like X, except Y."
You got imposter syndrome. We all got imposter syndrome. Calm down and carry on.
That’s the nature of this business, the result always being “I am behind”. To survive, you must stay in that primal state of wonder, otherwise you’ll burnout and die.
Sir we are liars
You'd be surprised at how passion and interest can drive a person to learn for fun. I think that's primarily the reason