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by cblackthornekc 1909 days ago
Why do you have to come at me like this? This is a feeling I go through all the time. It's partly imposter syndrome, but partly that you're probably holding yourself to a higher standard than others.

> I'd been assigned a medium complexity task

Who decided that it was medium? A manger? Some lead? You? You can't really compare what is easy and what is hard when it comes to software. I worked on a project that timelines started to slide when I came on board. Not because I didn't know what I was doing, I had just moved from one project to another. It was because the manager didn't account for the time it would take for me to learn the code base. He assumed that developers were cogs in a machine that can be replaced with no downtime. That doesn't work.

> I've realized I'm not a senior software engineer as I thought and now I don't know what to do next.

There are two pieces of advice I can give you here;

1. Nobody else knows what they're doing either. We're all making it up.

2. You're going to fail at something, a lot, before you get good at it. Go dunk a basketball and get back to me if you think you should just coach(manage) because you couldn't dunk

>A third option would be to take a break from work and try to learn to write good code

You're already at a place paying you to write code. Why take a break to do it for free?

1 comments

"He assumed that developers were cogs in a machine that can be replaced."

Well large corporations do want this very much and there are things you can do to make it work like this. Not without investment of course.

Right, it is understandable that a large company would want you to get going quickly. But yeah, without investing in code quality tools, or something to keep code bases similar, it won't be a fast transition.