Honestly, youre doing great. At the very early point in your career that you are at, it is normal and expected that you dont know much. The important thing is that you just keep learning.
There will always be people that are smarter than you. Perhaps even better at your job than you are (currently) in every way. Dont let it get to you; there's nothing wrong with not being the very best. There's also the old saying that "comparison is the theif of joy" (idk who said it, but it has truth). The hardest part is accepting it's ok not to know something; you can always learn it if it interests you.
For me, as a rookie developer, I find I often have little to no clue what needs to be done until I've started coding and figured out through trial and error how to implement it and what the requirements even should have been up front.
Just because I feel more people should hear this early in their career, that’s perfectly normal. I fairly routinely answer questions about how long a piece of work is going to take by saying I’m going to need n days to work out what needs to be done, after which I’ll be able to give an estimate.
That sort of exploratory work is really good because you’ll end up reading relevant documentation, then actually trying to use whatever it is you’re learning about. Often I’ll throw together a hacky version of what we’re aiming for, but ignore anything but the happy path. No error handling, no UI beyond the bare minimum, just the very core of what’s being done.
And on that note the ”trick” to being more experienced is being able to anticipate what’s coming up next and already have a mental model for how to solve that.
Heh, I don't think that will ever really change. What changes in my experience is your knowledge and confidence when it comes to translating requirements into maintainable technology. The real world stuff seems to be always messy. My attitude is to try to locate areas of potential unknown risk, plan how to deal with the known risk and then hack away, knowing that no matter how much time spent, the plan will be flawed. During this whole process, communication is really important (i.e. 30% feedback, where I just write comments of what I would change in the codebase and then talk about it with a collegue)
I think that throwing more people in jail technically is a solution, but it's a very expensive one that does nothing to address the reason why people are committing crimes.
There are many factors at play, and I won't pretend to know them all, but most people turn to crime out of despiration. Throwing people in jail for more minor offences and giving longer sentences will not make repeat offenders less desperate. Not to mention the fallibility of the justice system, and the ramifications harsher sentences has on people who were falsley imprisoned.
As a previous commenter said, the US has tried the "tough on crime" stance many times in its history (e.g. war on drugs, Bill Clinton), and while it is an effective strategy for easy results to report in time for your next campaign, the problem has not been solved, merely swept under the rug.
I personally am glad that the US is at least attempting to find a solution that addresses the root cause rather than the symptoms of crime. But I would agree that we have not found that effective solution yet.
> I think that throwing more people in jail technically is a solution, but it's a very expensive one
It's not, compared to the costs of the crime. Tangible costs of crime are big enough, and the intangible costs are bigger still. Cost of imprisonment is really nothing compared to the economic and social damage done by repeat offenders.
There is also big heterogeneity in the cost of imprisonment. Places with high prison costs could just send their prisoners to places with low costs. The reason it is not happening is, I suspect, precisely to argue for reduction of imprisonment, based on its high cost.
> that does nothing to address the reason why people are committing crimes. There are many factors at play, and I won't pretend to know them all, but most people turn to crime out of despiration. Throwing people in jail for more minor offences and giving longer sentences will not make repeat offenders less desperate.
This is very much false, and in fact, it is honestly quite insulting to tens of millions of desperately poor Americans who'd never turn to crime, or, for that matter, to billions of people in foreign countries, who are much poorer than pretty much everyone in US.
Nobody in US is actually so desperately poor that they have no choice but to steal basics. Supermarkets here don't put bread behind locks, they put alcohol and Tide, because it's easy to pawn off on black market. Carjackers are not desperate for transportation. Urban shooters are not desperate for places to practice target shooting. Assholes setting sawzall against your catalytic converters are not starving contractors unable to land a job.
It boggles my mind to see people suggesting that crime in US committed out of desperation. This might be believable if we talked about crime in the slums of Lagos or Sao Paulo, but not about the types of crime and its perpetrators as it actually takes place in US. I grew in a place that was (and continues to be) much poorer than the American crime hot spots (or, really, almost entirety of the country), and crime was basically nonexistent.
> As a previous commenter said, the US has tried the "tough on crime" stance many times in its history (e.g. war on drugs, Bill Clinton), and while it is an effective strategy for easy results to report in time for your next campaign, the problem has not been solved, merely swept under the rug.
If the strategy effectively and persistently reduces crime, how is it not solving the problem?
> I personally am glad that the US is at least attempting to find a solution that addresses the root cause rather than the symptoms of crime. But I would agree that we have not found that effective solution yet.
With this attitude you'll keep searching forever, and always remain mystified as to what makes teenagers in some of the wealthiest and most full of opportunity places in the world so desperate that they are forced to steal cars at a gunpoint, only to joyride for a few hours and then abandon in a ditch. Is it hunger? Lack of shelter? We might never know.
So, you’re arguing that Americans are just more prone to crime than Germans or Brits or Canadians? And that out incarceration rate naturally should be orders of magnitude higher than peer nations?
Sorry, I don’t buy that. There has to be something else at play.
> To ensure developers are context-switching, recompilation should take at least 20 seconds.
So true. But only 20 seconds? The project im working on takes 20 MINUTES to compile for any code change. I constantly forget about it while trying to get something else done in the mean time. It frequently takes whole days to track down and verify simple issues.
I wont discount that as a possibility, but it kind of goes against the company's mission, so I think thats kind of unlikely.
A more likely explanation (in my mind) is that being a small company, there's a lot more variability of quality in each unit's parts than you would see from a larger company with more mature factories etc.
My partner and I both have frameworks, but mine has had a lot of issues with the track pad and theyve never experienced any.
This is true, but I dont think high school was ever intended to be preparing kids for the labor market; I thought it was to teach a basic education for understanding the world.
Until maybe four decades ago, high school was exactly intended to prepare kids for the labor market. They taught conformity, punctuality, the three Rs, and civics. It was the final education for the great majority of people in the US, as few went to college.
But high school and college both got dumbed down, and now an education at a state university is comparable to high school in the first half of the twentieth century.
That was your first programming class? That's actually a pretty amazing idea. I think many people's first exposure to programming is something low-level on the command line (printing like "hello world" then digging around with file I/O, network and other OS stuff) or special-purpose and graphical (making a little square or something in Logo) - doing the graphics stuff with a general-purpose language probably involves pulling in external dependencies or learning a simple image format like ppm/pgm.
Introducing a powerful language like scheme, having a graphical output and planting the idea that students should hunt around for ways to integrate with or otherwise poke at existing applications is smart.
And yet, the US and capitalism are both still around, and their continued existence ensures we don't get people in comments sections claiming that we don't know how capitalism works as a system because _real_ capitalism still hasn't been tried.
This is like the spiderman meme where they're all pointing at each other. One flavor of capitalism fights another, is it any surprise that a capitalist wins or that the overall result is a strengthening of the military-industrial complex due to increased defense spending?
How about a more interesting question. Do you believe capitalism is the best or most just way to organize an economy which is possible, that it is "the end of history?" Do you think on an infinite timeline, assuming no extinction of the species or any other confounding factors, humanity will never come up with a better way to organize our economy?
I think the main issue with the original art piece was the lack of consent. The pictures are clearly of a single subject (the device user) and not of a space that mutiple unconsenting persons happen to be occupying, which makes the violation feel more egregeous and uncomfortable.
There will always be people that are smarter than you. Perhaps even better at your job than you are (currently) in every way. Dont let it get to you; there's nothing wrong with not being the very best. There's also the old saying that "comparison is the theif of joy" (idk who said it, but it has truth). The hardest part is accepting it's ok not to know something; you can always learn it if it interests you.