So, some thoughts about confidence as a developer, a thread...

I read a lot of Tony Robbins growing up, so I have “growth mindset” as a core belief to an extent that most people don’t.

In other words “if I apply myself, I can learn to do just about anything”. This may not actually be true, but it’s a useful thing to believe.

You can’t teach a chimpanzee triganometry. My good friend @shadchnev once said (paraphrased) “yes everyone CAN learn to code, but how many of them actually WILL?”

In other words there are genetic limits & resource/time limits that making learning absolutely anything impractical

However it’s USEFUL to believe you can with enough time and effort do absolutely anything. It means there’s theoretically no situation you can’t get yourself out of. It also means imposter syndrome is a slightly odd concept.

I’ve never felt imposter syndrome, like I don’t belong in a place. If I don’t belong somewhere, then that’s the fault of whoever hired me.

I feel bad at things all the time, but I don’t feel any shame. I think a lot of people do, and there’s a lot of anxiety about not knowing x y or z programming language, or whether or not you call yourself a “developer” etc.

Being bad at something is a requisite step before being good at that thing, so being ashamed of that is like being ashamed of your first step on the way up a mountain, or your first rep of the day at the gym, utterly nonsensical.

That lack of shame is a different thing again from _confidence_ though. Confidence I think comes from having core skills that you’ve repeated and have solved problems with in a number of different contexts.

Those skills include things like debugging, code reading comprehension, refactoring, task decomposition, etc. The richer your experiences with those the more confident you’re going to be.

Another element of confidence comes from comparison. You’ll discover that human incompetence is effectively bottomless, so even if you don’t have complete confidence in your skills, you can at least be content that you’re not the dumbest (in a bad way) person I’m the room.

All of this feeds into attitudes about compensation too. Being aware of your colleagues salaries is always a good thing, especially when you know you work harder than them, are more effective, and they make double or triple your pay.

(There’s a much longer conversation about “the physics of money” when it comes to developer compensation that is quite deep: in short, there are 2 groups of developers, neither can believe how much the other gets paid for the same job)

The other big confidence booster is the ability to articulate yourself effectively about your job. The bar is so low for clarity of thought in these parts that you immediately signal value by being able to string together a coherent argument about basically anything at work

Put all those elements of “developer confidence” together, and you will actually be better at your job. Encouraging thought patterns help with filling your executive function tank, give you reasons to ask for more money, help you take on more responsibility, etc