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Fear of learning something new...? I have real problems understanding the question. Honestly. The only way it could even remotely make sense to me is somethin

by Pamar 8y ago

Fear of learning something new...? I have real problems understanding the question. Honestly. The only way it could even remotely make sense to me is something like: "Fear of failing to learn something that is required knowledge to save your (your) job/livelihood/life. Case in point: am I "scared" of learning German? No, but I can think it will be too hard for the level of energy I will be able to put into studying it compared to the benefits. So - at least in my case - the only "scaring" element would be "scared of wasting my time/money pursuing this". (EDIT: typo)

saberience 8y ago
Sounds like you're having trouble with honest empathy or understanding what other people might be thinking or feeling. This kind of feeling is EXTREMELY common, especially with engineers. You sound like you're over-indexing on logic and not really trying to understand how other people might think and feel. You might not get this now, but working on these other skills will make a bigger impact on your life and career than being a better programmer.
- Pamar 8y ago
  Plot twist: I am 55 - worked most of the time as a consultant, so for me "having to learn something new" and especially "while everyone else around you either knew more than you or were looking at you expecting you to know all the answers" was more or less a constant. Maybe this is why I do not understand what the problem is, exactly?
- Grustaf 8y ago
  I can’t understand this either. Of course you know very little about something when you are just starting out, that is expected, where is the shame in that? Hopefully you’ll learn it eventually, and if not, well then it wasn’t for you. We can’t all be good at everything. /another (ex-) consultant.
scarface74 8y ago
There is a real fear of immersing yourself in an environment where you feel everyone knows more than you and you feel like an absolute idiot for not knowing the simplest things that you think “should know” I felt like this 10 years ago when I got a job as what we would now call an “Enterprise Developer” working in C# after being stuck in a bubble in the “expert beginner” phase bit twiddling in C and C++ and doing VB6 that was already out of date and I was working with people younger than I was who knew the latest tech and people my age who were already experience led architects. It happened again two years ago, by then I was the dev lead who knew all of the best practices from a development side but didn’t understand infrastructure, high availability, scalability, dev ops, or modern cloud infrastructure. I fumbled my way through that project thanks to Hashicorp’s Consul and Nomad, and self demoted to a senior dev at a smaller company where I could get hands on experience. I’ve filled in a lot of those gaps now, but still I don’t know the $cool_kids back end tech like Docker and Kubernetes or a single modern front end framework. So yeah, it’s frightening jumping into a new tech stack heads first where you need to be somewhat productive since you convinced the company to pay you slightly above market rate.
- Pamar 8y ago
  You are not the OP (I believe) but if they wanted to really say this (which I can at least be sympathetic about) the title should have been something like "how do you get over the initial fear of NOT KNOWING ENOUGH?" which is a separate thing.

by Pamar 8y ago

saberience 8y ago

Sounds like you're having trouble with honest empathy or understanding what other people might be thinking or feeling. This kind of feeling is EXTREMELY common, especially with engineers. You sound like you're over-indexing on logic and not really trying to understand how other people might think and feel. You might not get this now, but working on these other skills will make a bigger impact on your life and career than being a better programmer.

Pamar 8y ago
Plot twist: I am 55 - worked most of the time as a consultant, so for me "having to learn something new" and especially "while everyone else around you either knew more than you or were looking at you expecting you to know all the answers" was more or less a constant. Maybe this is why I do not understand what the problem is, exactly?
Grustaf 8y ago
I can’t understand this either. Of course you know very little about something when you are just starting out, that is expected, where is the shame in that? Hopefully you’ll learn it eventually, and if not, well then it wasn’t for you. We can’t all be good at everything. /another (ex-) consultant.

scarface74 8y ago

There is a real fear of immersing yourself in an environment where you feel everyone knows more than you and you feel like an absolute idiot for not knowing the simplest things that you think “should know” I felt like this 10 years ago when I got a job as what we would now call an “Enterprise Developer” working in C# after being stuck in a bubble in the “expert beginner” phase bit twiddling in C and C++ and doing VB6 that was already out of date and I was working with people younger than I was who knew the latest tech and people my age who were already experience led architects. It happened again two years ago, by then I was the dev lead who knew all of the best practices from a development side but didn’t understand infrastructure, high availability, scalability, dev ops, or modern cloud infrastructure. I fumbled my way through that project thanks to Hashicorp’s Consul and Nomad, and self demoted to a senior dev at a smaller company where I could get hands on experience. I’ve filled in a lot of those gaps now, but still I don’t know the $cool_kids back end tech like Docker and Kubernetes or a single modern front end framework. So yeah, it’s frightening jumping into a new tech stack heads first where you need to be somewhat productive since you convinced the company to pay you slightly above market rate.

Pamar 8y ago
You are not the OP (I believe) but if they wanted to really say this (which I can at least be sympathetic about) the title should have been something like "how do you get over the initial fear of NOT KNOWING ENOUGH?" which is a separate thing.