How to worry less about your own mediocrity

Just now I came across another manifestation of impostor syndrome : “Am I really a developer - or am I just good on Google?”

Then the answer followed, in which I, however, did not see the main thing - so I will have to answer: too many are afraid without any reason .

Translated to Alconost

If information is easy to find, it does not make a person stupid

Often I hear one story - I believe its authenticity is doubtful, but be that as it may, the essence is this. When Einstein was asked for a phone number, he climbed to look for him and said: “Why remember what you can find in less than two minutes?”

In the 80s, they could be credited to botanists simply because you had an encyclopedia, and you didn’t need to read most of it: in my house there was a very interesting encyclopedia of 1937, and the article about the Nazi party contained only two paragraphs, which stated that the party was nothing serious. So I ended up in the “clever club”: it was enough to know about the existence of one of the most blatantly erroneous fragments of the text ever written — moreover, I gained this knowledge from an unremarkable source that I used on an equal basis with the others. That's because it was difficult to find out something interesting then, and just the urge to look turned you into a nerd.

Now, when even the most ignorant plebeians can get any information they want, the elite of the nerds backed down and proclaimed that there is such an essential brain function that allows them to better navigate the flow of information. This is a pretty attractive misconception, and, as usual, there is a grain of truth: it is easy to feel taller than people who are searching on the Internet for articles on the relationship of vaccines with reptiloids. And just as easily, you can feel flawed: spend the whole day struggling with a mistake, finally guess to run Stack Overflow - and there you will find that three years ago five people figured out this problem, and two of them also spoke in the sense that if someone does not know the answer to this question from birth, then he is a dumbass.

Because of this new - and accessible to the general public - way of getting information, you can feel weak, because you have to use what anyone can use ... But to argue like that is terrible arrogance that should be eradicated - together with its secret homophobia.

Forget all this bullshit about love for work

Do you know what work I consider the best in my life? Washing dishes. I did a great job and could scrub plates on autopilot, which freed my brain and allowed me to think about everything. And the cool thing about this work was that if at the end of the day, after washing a couple of thousand plates for a restaurant, which is one of the four hundred best catering establishments, I looked exhausted, nobody sat me down and asked why I don’t admire my own washing technique utensils.

If it was impossible to work without a love of work, civilization would collapse. I am sure that someone receives intellectual satisfaction by comparing the difference in the speed of i ++ and ++ i in for loops - and thank God! - after all, someone must program the guidance systems of nuclear missiles. The rest simply hope that the number of unread alerts in the debug folder of the email will not increase too quickly - in order to even deal with these errors.

In the good old days, when you could afford to go to a restaurant for lunch, have a martini, talk about business and write it all down on “production costs”, even before the general insanity on motivation, it was not necessary to love work - it was important not to experience disgust her and not make her colleagues hate her. Today, when a generation desperately in need of a solid salary has been brainwashed with “soft” porn about a happy job, employers believe that asking us to keep mobile phones on hand on New Year's Eve is in the order of things. Some fanatical coders are quite capable of making everyone else hate both work and themselves - after all, he loves what he does, and if you do not like your work and do not spend Saturday evenings, masturbating to end-recursion guides - this is exclusively your fault.

Go to the sales department for zinger

For modern startups, high-performance indifference is almost the worst insult. The guys who passionately loved hacking systems on tape drives created the technology thanks to which we now have a lot of companies consisting of a sales department and a technical department, and all the rest of the work is transferred to the website of another company ... consisting of a sales department and a technical department. If you are engaged in sales, then loving your business (or pretending to love) is an integral part of the work. This is what allows you to earn money. And for the technical department, the main task is to make something function, and here you can already be as harmful as necessary to carry out this work - because the only thing you sell is your own ability to implement a payment API, and for this there is no need there is no stormy and tense rejoicing.

At any meeting, you can see smiling salespeople shining against the backdrop of a team of tired developers who are eager to leave: they are already wondering how long it will take to catch the thread race error, which obviously cannot be a thread race, because "it never lupus ” (translator's note: this is a quote from the series“ House MD ”, the meaning is something like this:“ because it always turns out to be something else ”) .

And do not worry: you have excellent communication skills, you know how to attract people and outshine the sun with your radiance or not - this in no way relates to work.

Don't listen to snobs

Surely someone will say: "Every developer should know X. "

I don't know X  - whatever that is. Bubble Sort? It seems to have something to do with mixing dark and light beer. B is a tree? It’s like something evergreen. A hash table? .. I learned to code in PHP, and before it dawned on me that the hash table was different from the array, two years passed. When I came to work in OkCupid, I did not see the difference between a hash table and an array. In the pathetic OkCupid office, even the gods shy under the disapproving glances of the toilet paper dispenser - but I still got the job.



It doesn’t matter for what and how you write the code - in any case, you will have no idea about the huge layer of programming. And if you can learn all the programming languages ​​in the universe, a Russian student will laugh at the inability to overclock the processor, a kid from Korea will crack the PS4 account, an American, sipping a latte, will ask why you spent only one round of investments, and the French admin only frown when you ask him not to smoke in the server room.

Now it’s good to have an education in the field of natural, technical, engineering and mathematical sciences, because the specific application of a specific type of logical solution to the problem allows an ordinary person to receive income of the upper middle class level, and the graduates of business schools above them are enriched more than anyone else in the history of human civilization. The generation of technical directors of the dot-com boom grew in lack of sex and became painfully turned to technology, so the culture they accidentally conceived turned out to be fixated on using mathematical approaches in the most obscene ways that you could think of - and everyone else was free to go and shoot themselves.

If without this, such guys can’t do it. If you had a time when Google (and even Vim) did not exist yet, you would have grasped at every opportunity to increase your self-esteem in those dark hours when it turned out that your Amiga does not remember the dates of your wedding - because you did not have a wedding and probably , will never.

Once upon a time, programming was new. Heroes of those times, pushing through machine codes, are still alive and accuse us of laziness. But today, programming is the same job as any other, because now all the knowledge that is needed to satisfy the department of commercial development can be obtained without doing reverse engineering of the prototype of a cart on stone wheels.

Job Interview - Bullshit, Humble

Any interview can be claimed, it would seem, with a cornucopia of secret knowledge, almost myrrh-streaming with them - just a little more, and the price of land in the district will jump from such great holiness. Most often, after such interviews, I want to give up everything and start growing guinea pigs. Everyone on this planet knows something that others do not know, and most of us will be in one way or another in a situation where someone will hire us on the basis that we can demonstrate knowledge that few people have.

Any interview methods are flawed, and so on until an algorithm appears that allows us to predict the candidate’s ability to do the job and not be a bastard - and based on a small set of almost random data. An interview is like a date without a condom when a suitcase of money is at stake. To argue that this state of affairs can be corrected if a couple of people sit down and think carefully - this is unreasonable arrogance, and it does not matter what profession it is about.

In today's world, no one understands what is happening at all, but at the same time, many receive salaries and clicks, supporting the illusion of some kind of activity. One of them will conduct an interview with you - and nothing can be done about it. And when the impostor syndrome appears because of this - Rejoice, for those who do not have such a syndrome are fools.

Earn money

Did you get paid this month? Excellent - your business is better than the global average. And if at the same time you are also a programmer by profession, then you have left behind 80 percent of employees around the world, not to mention those who cannot get a job. If you get paid in the next month, then you are not a liar.

Where you see a mass of foul-smelling and careless spaghetti code that multiplies the entropy of the universe without purpose and meaning, the bosses see a black box with the inscription "A guy talking to computer gods." They invest money - something happens - and take a look! A product appears that gives even more money. One can imagine oneself fulfilling Tesla's hottest dreams and hope that you possess at least a tenth of the gift of foresight of Ada Lovelace, but this is how to be born in Norway of the XI century and grow a beard, believing yourself to be Thor. But you are not Thor. And not even a warrior, but just a poet - that's why they survived, and you can multiply.
 
If someone has mixed sexual feelings about pointers and equations in 3D-graphics, he is lucky: he was born in a generation that respects people like him ... and implicitly worships them - in a rather creepy way. But if you just need work and you can and want to agree that computers are much dumber than lemmings, then you have everything you need to continue to move the information age.


About the translator

Translation of the article was done in Alconost.

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