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"unrealistic self-confidence" is usually termed arrogance. If you are an arrogant programmer, you will make mistakes of judgment because you're acting on wrong
by 50CNT 10y ago
"unrealistic self-confidence" is usually termed arrogance. If you are an arrogant programmer, you will make mistakes of judgment because you're acting on wrong assumptions.
Regarding actual "self-confidence" based on a proper assessment of self-efficacy, I find it makes me a better programmer. It allows me to experiment and play more freely.
When I was a wee young lad, I used to be very scared of the command line. I read that you could really mess up your system with just a single typo. This imagined danger held me back from learning things. With my unfounded fear, even testing something like "python3 script.py" would make me double guess each character I wrote.
Now, I know that I can just reinstall the system if I mess up. Or play in a VM. There's negligible danger to that. With prudent precautions, I can afford to be bold with it. Pull up a virtualbox, and do a "rm -rf" and see how it burns. I believe playing with a system, breaking it and fixing it is necessary for getting a feel for it. You can't do that when you're scared our doubtful.
- marcosdumay 10y agoThere's a fine line between enough confidence to know your precautions are sufficient for playing up with the system, and not enough confidence to know you need sufficient precautions. When destroying a local system on a VM, the line is very easy to find. When developing components in a large system, it's almost impossible to locate.
- 50CNT 10y agoI think large systems would benefit from "playgrounds" as well. Staging servers are a thought in that direction, but they're a very serious matter designed to root out failures before they destroy a production system. I think it might be useful to have a playing server/system as well, similar to the staging server which houses the version currently in production with mock data, intended for rapid testing and iteration or playing through failure scenarios. Let's see if we can put feature X into it. Let's see what happens when Y fails catastrophically. Let's do a practice deployment with one of the devs. Let's see how quick can we get it back up if the cleaning lady pulls the plug by accident. That kind of stuff.
- 0xmohit 10y ago> and do a "rm -rf" and see how it burns `chmod` can be interesting as well. sudo chmod -R -x /
- burb16171 10y ago'"unrealistic self-confidence" is usually termed arrogance.' It's actually termed "Google employee".
- 50CNT 10y agoI heard impostor syndrome was en vogue at Google. That strikes me as the other extreme, unrealistic (low) confidence. Which is still damaging. Haven't worked at big G though, so I can't tell.
- burb16171 10y ago'"unrealistic self-confidence" is usually termed arrogance.' It's actually termed "Google employee".