How dare you expose my fraudulent career!!!

tbh, I feel stackoverflow went to shit. Most questions are now closed as duplicates of other unrelated ones. I rarely use it anymore

"Stack Overflow, Google, and ChatGPT"

"It's Stack Overflow, Google, and ChatGPT"

"Stack Overflow, Google, and ChatGPT"

tbh I've switched from Stack Overflow to Documentation and Reddit (yes I know)

I've found Stack Overflow answers to be either not helpful or so outdated the answer doesn't work anymore

Keep it up. I’m on 37 years of breaking shit. Never gets old.

This is the one

That used to be a problem for me too, now I'm a senior dev and my day job is just criticizing junior devs for their code.

No, you heard wrong. We're good at googling, not coding.

I am finally comfortable saying that I'm good at it, but I've been doing it for 20 years. So like the comic said, "it's practice!"

Personally, I enjoy the problem solving. Debugging is fun once you're good at it (and when there isn't major time pressures).

Professional software dev is also waaaaay more than just coding, too. And the more you do it, the less coding you'll do. A junior dev might spend most of their time coding, but senior devs are spending a lot of time doing high level design, helping the juniors, and reviewing various kinds of things.

...well, I do that, and enjoy it, so I guess that's why I feel like an impostor that has my hobby for a job. "If they figure out how much I enjoy doing this, they'll cut my pay..."

Well, the second I clock out I'll stop thinking about how to solve a coding problem for work.

(Instead I'll start thinking about how to solve a coding problem for a ~~never to be finished~~ hobby project.)

I remember being like that when I was learning, I literally couldn't get problems out of my head, my brain would be trying to solve a code issue while I'm trying to sleep.

Now I do it everyday it's learnt to just switch off when I'm done for the day (most of the time).

This is maybe less of a gift than you think and can also be learned with practice. It's about having a growth mindset. If you practice framing things in terms of growing ability then everything becomes achievable and the challenge becomes enjoyable.

Blame Hollywood - every movie programmer is just a natural savant (probably on the spectrum) who operates a computer in more or less the exact same way a wizard operates a wand

Wait until you see the original version of the comic…

https://m.tapas.io/episode/923459

To be fair, as someone who cannot see things in my brain at all, there is some amount of innate talent to drawing, but obviously as with everything it takes practice to make it actually good.

Ok, but I've never really seen anyone casually lauding the skills of a lawyer either.

Can you get this virus off my computer?

We hired a greenhorn dev several months ago. He had two years experience at a larger company. I only have about five so far and my company doesn't really pay all that well to field great talent, so I wasn't hoping for the world. But we were expecting at least something a little above entry level experience.

The guy did know how to write basic code. Frankly not to the degree I hoped for, though. Also lacked all auxilliary skills like effective use of version control, logging in to remote servers over SSH, documenting code with doc comments. He doesn't even write particularly legible code without the formatter to fix it for him. Very sloppy with spacing, braces, etc.

But those are all of little concern. Those could all be taught. It meant more effort needed to be spent in onboarding than we wanted, but it could be done. Helps that he has a very positive oulook on constructive criticism and he uses it to improve.

One thing that I don't think I can teach him in any reasonable amount of time, though, is how he mentally tracks the structure of the program he's working on.

When I program, every time I change anything, I construct a mental web of everything this piece of code might affect when changed, and the ramifications it might have. I think of neighboring code and concepts looking for patterns, and whether the new thing I'm adding or changing could be better expressed differently to leverage those patterns. I think of the future trajectory of the module or feature, and whether it would be advantageous to bake-in a certain kind of forward-thinking extensibility now rather than after it becomes partially entrenched later. And most of all, I think of how someone completely unfamiliar with this code might read it, and how I can improve the way it is written to make the most important parts stand out clearest.

And when I'm debugging code, even if I see the problem and think I immediately know the solution, I still take time to read the surrounding code. I try to piece together the original bugged code's intent. Is this onvious-looking problem the real problem? Or is it a poorly documented, poorly structured mess that looks like it wants to do one thing but is intending to do an entirely different thing? This hesitation has saved my ass on several occasions.

New dev doesn't do any of these things. He pulls a bug ticket, figures out what module or function is the supposed source of the problem, and bangs on it until the effects of the problem disappear. Little research done to understand what the intent of the code he's altering wants to do, and even less spent on figuring out what downstream systems will be affected. And once he achieves his singular result, he just pushes it as-is. No cleanup pass, sometimes forgets to format it the way we ask him to.

To be fair, it's a big new codebase. I can't expect him to reason around things he is not familiar with, nor would I think it reasonable that he study the entire codebase before touching it.

I also don't think these things can't be learned. I had to learn them at some point, after all. But I do believe that people like myself and one of my fellow devs are more predisposed to picking these programming soft skills up, whether it be through nature or nurture or some combination. That, and I don't think these kinds of soft skills can really be "taught" in the traditional sense. These are wrenches you can only really learn to dodge after being hit by a few.

I think you need to enjoy it to be good at it and I think you need a certain kind of brain to enjoy it

Feel like it's kinda telling that my dad and both of my uncles are also devs

masochism is a weird way to spell stack overf-- actually nevermind