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I definitely felt that way at 29. I'm 40 now and I feel much, much better about my skills, contribution, communication, and stage of my career. A lot has happened since I was 29, including a substantial stint of unemployment when I was 30, and again when I was 34.
You're building experience now, which will open doors for better, more interesting positions in the coming years. -
@bahua i appreciate that, and I hope it's true
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You seem normal to me. Some people go deep early on, some spread thin early on, after sufficient time, both achieve about same if putting same effort and sincerity.
Also, you seem too eager to succeed too soon, may be reading lots of fake success stories.
Software is not a sports career. Normally people start achieving the fruits of success around 40, some bit sooner, some bit later.
In the end, success is what "you" define and when "you" get it. -
@ajit555 thank you for your comments
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@rutee07 i agree, and appreciate that posture of acknowledgeing it's small but on the background for you instead of like... the posture of denying it as if it didn't matter at all being Bill or whoever... I hate that shit, "you don't need to be X to be important"... fuck that...
I mean I would ideally want to feel that way... but I don't at all -
@erandria till your age, I was working in a steel plant. After 30+, moved into IT and virtually learnt everything myself. By 42, I was reasonably good to ditch regular job and be self employed.
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The imposter syndrome is alive and well in the IT industry.
I'm 29 and I feel the same sometimes. I would recommend that you try to set yourself a small goal and set a fixed time to achieve the goal. Be realistic with whatever challenge you set yourself. Start small and build up your confidence and programming abilities. You'll always have those days where you feel worthless. What is important is that you try to improve in some way so that you can look at yourself and say "You know what? I'm improving".
In closing, don't waste your time with negative thoughts.
"The race is long, and in the end, it’s only with yourself" - Baz Luhrmann -
I'm a bit older (approaching my 40s now) but since I'm looking more like someone in his 20s - I guess that evens it out. So - while not technically - I might be kinda your age. :P
Anyhoo. I know that feeling too. I'm missing quite a bit of focus (which is shit, as I'm self employed) and I'm severly lacking in architecture. The funny thing is - even though I don't feel that competent here and there, I still consider myself being like some kind of superman whenever I take a look at all the shitty code that I'm refactoring on a daily basis. Not that mine is perfect - but it still alleviates much of the previous problems. Which in the end leaves me with a mild "above average" feeling.
So with all that babbling I just wanted to say - you're probably doing just fine. That's the case for most people who have thoughts like this.
Also - think about what achieving means for yourself. It's not like we have only accomplished anything when we're the next Steve Jobs.
All the best! -
@irene Oh yeah. As an added bonus I also have depression. This time medication and sport doesn't help so much ... so. Well. Fuck.
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There will always be people smarter, faster and better than you. If they're not cunts about it, surround yourself with them. You will never improve if you're the smartest in the room.
The downside is that you will never be the smartest in the room. That's ok. You are not Linus Torvalds. I'm not Linus Torvalds.
The only person you need to compare yourself with, and I really cannot stress this enough, is the you of yesterday/last week/last month.
When you look back, do you see improvement? I bet you do. No, don't compare the acceleration in competence to that oh others. They're not you. You're not them. There is no point in that comparison as they simply have too many variables.
I was the runt if the litter of my class. I struggle to this day. And I continue to struggle. But man, when I look back at my origins I'm so high up in the stratosphere of Tech, I can barely make out where I started from and damn that feels good.
Keep on swimming! -
Oh yeah, and I'm the guy that ran sudo rm -rf /usr/ in the first five minutes and basically bricked my OS. (There's a rant on it).
The best part was that prime cane out of the Woodworks with "been there, fine that. Have you checked it safe-rm?"
You're not alone in this age it takes great courage to admit it. A lot of people claim to be fantastic but looking at their code makes your want to blind yourself. Find the ones who are good, but don't shove it down your throat. They're usually more willing to help others.
Best if luck!! -
So, it seems to me that you don't like very much your current "you" as a person. The good news is that you can improve. The bad news is that it won't happen on its own, or simply by wishing for it.
If you could have your life the way you wanted it, in 3 to 5 years, if you were taking care of yourself properly, what would it look like?
What would you want for your career? How would you spend time outside of your job? How would you manage your relationships?
If you wanna change you need first of all to have a vision of what you wanna change into. Once you have a vision, you break down the goal into micro-processes that you can implement in your daily life. Once you achieve these microprocesses it becomes rewarding, and this tangles your incentive reward system, producing positive emotions while you move towards a valued goal. But the goal need to be valued,otherwise you can't get positive motivation out of it. These are words of jordan peterson mostly. Sorry if I went psychology mode. -
I am half decade older and feel completely different. I read a lot of self-improvement books in the last years that helped me get my sh*** together. I recommend "The outward Mindset" by the Arbinger institute, "getting things done" by David Allen. There are mode but those were the ones I took out of most.
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@irene I listened to the Audio-book it's pretty good too. It helped me to "worry" about the important stuff and not getting sidetracked all the time.
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@irene You know that pandas are incredibly beautiful creatures right? 😊
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@irene Meh. I guess we cannot have it all, eh? Since you only share the looks you got all the good parts without the useless parts. IMHO that's a plus. :D
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@TheAnimatrix my feelings :'(
I'm a shit programmer
I'm 29 and I assumed that by this point I'd be successful some way or another, either by being financially abundant or technically complex.
I am not, just mildly accomplished instead.
Here'a list of thing I consider challenges that I have:
* I tend to tunnel vision ideas that are terrible or execute them poorly because of said tunnel vision.
* I don't hone my skills, I usually consider my potentials the same as my actuals, as if I achieved everything already, probably product of ny huge ego.
* I communicate poorly with my boss, I sidetrack into thing he didn't ask
* I'm a mess when it comes to reading documentation online, I have the attention span of a fucking fish.
* I work alone, I have 0 networking status or skills.
* I take huge amounts of time to finish my side projects
* Of all the side projects I started I only finished one, the ones that I couldn't finish usually bevame insabely stressful things, so much and so many that I questioned myself many times if I should be a programmer or not.
* I have little discipline or organization, if I work in more than one thing at a time, i get really anxious and stressed.
I am not saying I'm not competent, I think I am (I'm looking at you imaginary scary recruiter googling this online), I'm just not really proud of myself
rant