Ask HN: How to cope with professional anxiety/self-confidence in tech?
First of all, my apologies for the possibly ambigous title. I do not know the exact terms to describe my issue, so I'll try my best to outline it.
I would describe my problem as a combination of lack of self-confidence, self-discipline and anxiety, mostly related to the tech field (I'm a full stack developer with 4 years of experience).
The thing is, even though I proved myself greatly at my current job (and previous ones), and my colleagues think I'm skilled, my feelings are the contrary because:
1. Whatever I learn, I forget rather quickly. I simply read and code, but this is not enough to 'learn', I know. However, there is too much stuff to learn, and I feel partly overwhelmed by this fact. This is a problem because the tech field requires an approach to constant learning.
2. Due to the feeling of being stuck in terms of knowledge, I believe to be stucked professionally, and to be unsuitable for more-skilled jobs. Recruiters contact me with nice offers, but my feeling is that I would be rejected.
3. Additionally, I am lost in terms of career path development. I haven't found a career path I would firmly pursue (yet) and feel that the clock is ticking, making me nervous.
4. As a result, I feel bad and lack self-confidence. I consider myself NOT ready to start a side-project (as means to improve my tech skills), because it overwhelms me due to the large number of considerations (for a web app: setup, choosing libraries/services/frameworks, good SEO, best coding practices...) and its complexity. Therefore I struggle and potentially leave the project aside.
Have you ever felt like this, completely or partially? If so, how did you cope with these feelings?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
The feeling of overwhelm in our industry is more common than you might think. It reflects the sorry state where getting older and having more experience does not relate to gaining value, most of the time the opposite (imagine a doctor being dismissed for having too much experience)
Some ideas for coping:
- try to focus on learning fundamentals, things that are still useful 30 years from now.
- don't worry at all about knowing the latest sh*t, framework, language. they'll disappear. focus on your toolset, but ignore the rest. Instead, see above
- your career only partly depends on your tech chops. You need to decide where you want to go: into management? focus on social skills. Technical lead? Take as much responsibility as you can, get around, also people skills. Going freelance? Specialise, and gain as much domain knowledge as you can (e.g. automobile, telecom)
- clock ticking? See point before, but with only 4 years into I don't think anything is ticking for you. In fact, I don't believe this at all. Ageism exists, yes, but there are plenty of ways to prosper
I have felt like this at times, and recognizing that my feelings on the matter change often helps me accept that if I am experiencing anxiety then that feeling will eventually pass.
Forgetting the stuff you learn quickly is an asset rather than a liability. It leaves space for future stuff that you will need to pick up. It also shows that you can pick things up and solve problems quickly. I recommend keeping a journal in which you summarize technical tasks that you resolved and that involved learning something new. After several years that will stack up.
A big challenge in tech is knowing what the lifespans are for specific technologies. Casting a wide net and focusing my learning by personal interests (in addition to tech hype) has worked out for me. The small technologies seem to win out over the big ones, as they require less effort for people to pick up and adopt, so if learning something seems like a huge effort you are probably not alone and are probably better off looking for alternatives.
Career path is an odd one, focus instead on working with the most capable and professional people that you can.
If you want to do a side project, I recommend breaking it up into tiny independent chunks. Consider how you would develop a web app without a web server, where would you host it? what tech would you use? what is the least you would have to do to make it useful? Those types of thought exercises are incredibly useful because often in a tech job you aren't making all the choices so you have to invent creative approaches to working with other people's decisions.
> 4. As a result, I feel bad and lack self-confidence. I consider myself NOT ready to start a side-project (as means to improve my tech skills), because it overwhelms me due to the large number of considerations (for a web app: setup, choosing libraries/services/frameworks, good SEO, best coding practices...) and its complexity. Therefore I struggle and potentially leave the project aside.
Read "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F___'. It talks about how many of us want to become X but are not willing to go through the pain (including failure and frustration) necessary to actually achieve it. If you really want to become a successful side project developer, you're going to need to bite the bullet and focus on what is below the iceberg (marketing, SEO, promotion, building a community). Choice of stack/code is not that important.
Personally, I haven't even attempted a side project for the reason that I just don't really want to go through the pain.
1. Forgetting is the brains coping mechanism for too much data. Its an integral part of learning. If you feel your forgetting algorithm is misfiring consider trying to leave bookmarks for yourself you can look up later.
2. You're rejected for 100% of the positions you don't apply for. You have to try.
3. I feel this is closely related to #2. Nobody is born innately knowing exactly their life path. You have to open yourself up to try new things and accept you may fail at some.
4. The key here is to just start. It doesn't matter if any of your choices are suboptimal, that's not really the point of a side project.
Thank you. Will try to follow your advice. Even though your points seem obvious, it is very easy to miss them when in a situation like mine.
I'll just start small when learning or starting a side-project for the sake of focus.
Firstly if you feel like you have anxiety go see a professional, it helps. At the very least look up CBT.
1. You could fix this by changing your method of "learning", maybe you could do sketchnotes for things you learn if you are more visual or record yourself answering a pretend question about what you learned (i.e. explain to someone what a reflection in Java is.)
2. Nearly everyone in tech has impostor syndrome - let the recruiter or company decide you aren't skilled enough - if you think you aren't worthy you are holding YOURSELF back. Being a senior/lead dev doesn't mean being 2-10x quicker, neater etc. than a junior developer.
3. Hard to comment that the clock is ticking without knowing if you have a mortgage or family but as /u/slededit said life isn't linear and you are doing yourself a disfavor by acting like you are behind. I personally think I am behind of people who have traveled more even though I am doing very well in my career.
4. There was a comment here weeks ago about people painting vases - one class was told they have a month to paint a vase, the other class was told to paint one every day and then start again the next day - the ones who practiced everyday did it better. Accept that your first side-project won't be perfect in terms of SEO etc and give it a go. There aren't many tech-debt style things that you can stuff up with that you can't fix later down the track.
Just to finish, everyone feels like this - just take a break and reconsider whats important for you.
> 2. Nearly everyone in tech has impostor syndrome - let the recruiter or company decide you aren't skilled enough - if you think you aren't worthy you are holding YOURSELF back.
well said. I've had such a hard time convincing really great people that if you find the job interesting, but say sideways from or two+ steps up from your current position, call the person advertising it and talk to them about it. Then if you still like the job, apply for it! You're (most often) much more skilled than you think you are.
(plus the phone call can help to get your CV noticed when you do put it in ;) )
Thank you for the response. I skimmed through the CBT definition and it seems to fit my case up to some point. Will check it more in detail.
As for the 'clock is ticking' part, what I had in mind was that somehow I need to learn as much as possible now so that my future-self is better professionally. This arises from the 'fear' that I will not be a valid professional by (say) my 40s-50s, as from what I understand, software engineers by that age are a smaller population compared to the younger one, and in addition, younger engineers are preferred over older ones. Of course, I am probably mistaken, but it's the general feeling I got by reading posts over the Internet. This, again, has to do with the feeling of 'rejection'.
I'll try to reconsider my situation by taking a break. Also, will improve my learning methods from your advice.
I think you may be mistaken on the 40's to 50's part.
What you don't see from experienced, well aged professional software engineers is they probably don't want to work in SV or at startups because they may see it as silliness (take home pay beating out lottery ticket options). They don't care much about new & shiny frameworks, etc. unless it helps solving a problem in a better way. They probably have seen new tools/frameworks come and go a few times.
Maybe look for opportunities to work on tougher problems to solve. Maybe explore other options like project management or people management? Don't be fooled into thinking those are the only path to more salary though.
It's also common to forget things with how many libraries and apis we have to use. A common concept in a lot of these is pushing complexity down the stack so you don't have to have it in mind when doing things. Least used things get forgotten.
One of my breakthrough moments in my career while I was transitioning into a full time developer role was when I realized this:
There will always be developers better than me but I am definitely better than "that guy" over there - and I am getting better every day.
I was concerned that I wasn't good enough and I almost treated the above statement as a mantra.
Better yet, don’t care if you are “better”! If you are the worst developer that can get the job done, that’s good enough.
It's a self-esteem problem. One easy thing you can do is not to express it too much. For example, avoid to be sorry about stuff you're not responsible for.
About the "career", it's an HR meme. You're supposed to be the perfect guy who is never wrong and always healthy.
Don't buy what the others say even if it's told by someone who is supposed to know (like someone on tv or a teacher). Make yourself an opinion on everything.
buy a copy of The Now Habit by Neil Fiore. it's about overcoming procrastination, but the advice could definitely help you out in my opinion.
Thank you. I will look for the book and read it as soon as I can.