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In my opinion, "be humble" isn't a winning strategy. Don't be so arrogant that you stop improving or fail to understand mistakes, but by all means don't be hum

In my opinion, "be humble" isn't a winning strategy. Don't be so arrogant that you stop improving or fail to understand mistakes, but by all means don't be humble. Be proud of who you are and the work you've done. You work in an industry where 90% of people don't understand what you do. Chances are your own boss won't understand the actual value you're providing. So don't be humble. "There's always someone better than you out there" -- sure, but that person's not here, right?

D_Guidi 10y ago
> be kind and realize you might be wrong this is the author mean for "humble", and I think it's damn true
YCode 10y ago
> "There's always someone better than you out there" -- sure, but that person's not here, right? Great response to a devil I've had on my shoulder for a long time.
tabeth 10y ago
Failing to be humble eventually leads to arrogance. This advice is counterproductive. The part regarding being proud of who you are is completely tangential. I also highly doubt that "90% of people" in the tech industry don't understand what a "good programmer" does. The best advice is just to become as best as you can by trying as much as you can: 1. Deliberately working 2. Learning from people you perceive to be better. 3. Keeping up with trends. 4. Mastery of the basics/fundamentals. 5. A razor sharp focus on what really matters -- value in the context of the business/domain.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > 5. A razor sharp focus on what really matters -- value in the context of the business/domain. This is a tricky part, and you have to ask yourself explicitly - what do you want to work on? Becoming a better programmer, or a better employee/entrepreneur? Because business does not optimize just for good, quality work. It optimizes for earning money. Which involves things like: - doing good, quality work which can be sold - doing good enough work, minding the essential tradeoff between quality and business realities - doing shitty, half-assed work and having a good sales team sell it anyway - doing useless shiny things that don't really help the intended audience, but help your business to get their money If the needs of your business are from the latter two groups, being a good programmer goes directly against your career success in that place. Unfortunately, it is my belief that most of the jobs in our industry fall into those two groups. From the POV of everyone else but programmers, the code is only means to an end. I want to emphasize it, because a lot of advice for programmers tells you about the "razor sharp focus on what really matters -- value in the context of the business/domain", and I found that for some reason, it never resonated with me. It took me a while to understand why - it's because this advice comes from a business mindset, where making money is the goal and the means to it are tangential. I have the opposite mindset - for me, it's the product that matters, not how to make more money off it. Realizing that those are two different worldviews has helped me stop feeling inadequate just because I couldn't bring myself to enjoy the business value. It also helped me understand the POV of management and what they expect from me.
tertius 10y ago
Being proud of your work and being humble are not mutually exclusive.
- A_Crazy_Idea 10y ago
  Bad advice and anonymous posts on forums are not mutually exclusive.
shadowfiend 10y ago
I think that's crossing the wires of humility and confidence. You can be confident but humble. Confidence is your ability to come up with solutions and feel like they are the right solutions, and that they are good or excellent solutions. Humility is your ability to come up with solutions and realize that (1) they might not be the _absolute best_ solutions, (2) some solutions that look like they're better are actually better (and identifying these). I think it interacts well with the concept of “strong opinions weakly held”. Have a strong opinion that you've built a great thing, but hold it weakly so that in the face of clear arguments or evidence that it is in fact not great, or that another solution is better, you can admit it and adjust. This, to me, is the right balance of confidence and humility---in programming, as in life.
- darpa_escapee 10y ago
  > You can be confident but humble So many people miss this, unfortunately.
- awfgylbcxhrey 10y ago
  You can be confident but humble. I agree with you in principle, but again, I don't think that's a winning strategy. A humble, competent woodworker creates a piece that's beautiful, visually rich, has a solid, study feel to it, and can be appreciated by most. The software engineer, who checks in a fix on the back-end service that pre-empts several bugs that had yet to be discovered, goes relatively unappreciated. So can one be humble and confident? Yes. Will it be understood and appreciated from the outside? Probably not. Is it a good strategy? Probably not. I'd say a person has three options: 1) work for people who are technically competent enough to understand the true value of your work. In my experience, this is pretty rare out in the real world. 2) become a salesman and sell yourself at all times. This seems fundamentally opposed to dominant personality types in software. 3) stop being so humble and be proud of your work. This seems like the most logical choice to me. Our industry is rife with imposter syndrome, legends of the 10x engineer, impressions that everyone else is succeeding flawlessly thanks to polished blog posts and GitHub portfolios [1], and endless pontificating on things that often boil down to fashion and code style. I don't think we need anything telling us to be more humble. You may be a completely average engineer writing CRUD software for some local bank. Yeah, maybe that guy blogging about his work at Google would do a better job than you. But he's not here, and your the best you company has found. You're valuable and capable. Be proud of what you've accomplished! [1] - people have written recently about how Facebook causes negative feelings since you seem to see others only at their best. I think this is normal folks finding out what tech types have experienced for decades, but nobody has ever talked about it.
jondubois 10y ago
There are people who are very opinionated and also "appear" to be right almost all of the time. But in practice, I've found that this is an illusion and that there are long-term repercussions for being too invested in ideas or technical philosophies. I think that the "be humble" criterion makes sense because it is directly correlated to the awareness that there is no single right way to do something. Changing requirements can pull the rug from underneath you and turn a good idea into a bad idea. Software engineering is a bit like economics; a lot of people think that they understand it, but in reality nobody does.

D_Guidi 10y ago

> be kind and realize you might be wrong this is the author mean for "humble", and I think it's damn true

YCode 10y ago

> "There's always someone better than you out there" -- sure, but that person's not here, right? Great response to a devil I've had on my shoulder for a long time.

tabeth 10y ago

Failing to be humble eventually leads to arrogance. This advice is counterproductive. The part regarding being proud of who you are is completely tangential. I also highly doubt that "90% of people" in the tech industry don't understand what a "good programmer" does. The best advice is just to become as best as you can by trying as much as you can: 1. Deliberately working 2. Learning from people you perceive to be better. 3. Keeping up with trends. 4. Mastery of the basics/fundamentals. 5. A razor sharp focus on what really matters -- value in the context of the business/domain.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
> 5. A razor sharp focus on what really matters -- value in the context of the business/domain. This is a tricky part, and you have to ask yourself explicitly - what do you want to work on? Becoming a better programmer, or a better employee/entrepreneur? Because business does not optimize just for good, quality work. It optimizes for earning money. Which involves things like: - doing good, quality work which can be sold - doing good enough work, minding the essential tradeoff between quality and business realities - doing shitty, half-assed work and having a good sales team sell it anyway - doing useless shiny things that don't really help the intended audience, but help your business to get their money If the needs of your business are from the latter two groups, being a good programmer goes directly against your career success in that place. Unfortunately, it is my belief that most of the jobs in our industry fall into those two groups. From the POV of everyone else but programmers, the code is only means to an end. I want to emphasize it, because a lot of advice for programmers tells you about the "razor sharp focus on what really matters -- value in the context of the business/domain", and I found that for some reason, it never resonated with me. It took me a while to understand why - it's because this advice comes from a business mindset, where making money is the goal and the means to it are tangential. I have the opposite mindset - for me, it's the product that matters, not how to make more money off it. Realizing that those are two different worldviews has helped me stop feeling inadequate just because I couldn't bring myself to enjoy the business value. It also helped me understand the POV of management and what they expect from me.

tertius 10y ago

Being proud of your work and being humble are not mutually exclusive.

A_Crazy_Idea 10y ago
Bad advice and anonymous posts on forums are not mutually exclusive.

shadowfiend 10y ago

I think that's crossing the wires of humility and confidence. You can be confident but humble. Confidence is your ability to come up with solutions and feel like they are the right solutions, and that they are good or excellent solutions. Humility is your ability to come up with solutions and realize that (1) they might not be the _absolute best_ solutions, (2) some solutions that look like they're better are actually better (and identifying these). I think it interacts well with the concept of “strong opinions weakly held”. Have a strong opinion that you've built a great thing, but hold it weakly so that in the face of clear arguments or evidence that it is in fact not great, or that another solution is better, you can admit it and adjust. This, to me, is the right balance of confidence and humility---in programming, as in life.

darpa_escapee 10y ago
> You can be confident but humble So many people miss this, unfortunately.
awfgylbcxhrey 10y ago
You can be confident but humble. I agree with you in principle, but again, I don't think that's a winning strategy. A humble, competent woodworker creates a piece that's beautiful, visually rich, has a solid, study feel to it, and can be appreciated by most. The software engineer, who checks in a fix on the back-end service that pre-empts several bugs that had yet to be discovered, goes relatively unappreciated. So can one be humble and confident? Yes. Will it be understood and appreciated from the outside? Probably not. Is it a good strategy? Probably not. I'd say a person has three options: 1) work for people who are technically competent enough to understand the true value of your work. In my experience, this is pretty rare out in the real world. 2) become a salesman and sell yourself at all times. This seems fundamentally opposed to dominant personality types in software. 3) stop being so humble and be proud of your work. This seems like the most logical choice to me. Our industry is rife with imposter syndrome, legends of the 10x engineer, impressions that everyone else is succeeding flawlessly thanks to polished blog posts and GitHub portfolios [1], and endless pontificating on things that often boil down to fashion and code style. I don't think we need anything telling us to be more humble. You may be a completely average engineer writing CRUD software for some local bank. Yeah, maybe that guy blogging about his work at Google would do a better job than you. But he's not here, and your the best you company has found. You're valuable and capable. Be proud of what you've accomplished! [1] - people have written recently about how Facebook causes negative feelings since you seem to see others only at their best. I think this is normal folks finding out what tech types have experienced for decades, but nobody has ever talked about it.

jondubois 10y ago

There are people who are very opinionated and also "appear" to be right almost all of the time. But in practice, I've found that this is an illusion and that there are long-term repercussions for being too invested in ideas or technical philosophies. I think that the "be humble" criterion makes sense because it is directly correlated to the awareness that there is no single right way to do something. Changing requirements can pull the rug from underneath you and turn a good idea into a bad idea. Software engineering is a bit like economics; a lot of people think that they understand it, but in reality nobody does.