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Ask HN: How do you deal with the powerlessness feeling of coding?
I've been a developer for 7 years. I'm just a random web developer doing random application for random companies.
But I have a recurrent powerlessness feeling every time I code. I often get blocked on issue that are not made by me.
The last few years I was a front end developer and as you know everything is complicated in the javascript world and everything always change. For example it was recurrent to have issue with webpack or the ES6 compiler. It was the kind of hard issue, the manager doesn't care and doesn't understand, he just wants the new form to work but here I am, just another day and nothing work for no reason because of external issue (webpack here for the example).
The problem is this, I don't know how to resolve the issue, (and only a few people on earth know because webpack is so hard to understand), and I don't have the skill to resolve the issue which is not mine.
Yes I know I can report an issue, try to fix it, debug all the application and maybe with a lot of chance I will be able to resolve the issue. But the manager don't want me te take a few days on something he doesn't understand and which it isn't my fault. What am I supposed to do ? I feel powerless. How do you resolve this kind of issue ? It's a difficult state of mind and it get a lot of stress from it.
For the last few months I've been learning back Django which was my first love. I'm learning back the django rest framework and today I have an issue where in the DRF interface the button for POST/DELETE/PUT/PATCH don't work. They don't even send the POST/DELETE/PUT/PATCH request, they just reload the page as if the only thing those button do where `window.location.reload();`.
What am I suppose to do with issue like this ? I've found a 1 year and 11 months old stackoverflow issue with no answer, and it's such a basic feature. Nobody use the DRF framework nowadays for nearly 2 years ?
What am I suppose to do? Debug it ? I don't event know where to start from. Develop a better alternative than DRF ? I don't have the skills. Post an issue on github ? I will get an answer like "we don't have an issue here maybe check your code you should have miss something". But I don't know where to search because the interface is made by DRF and not by me. The browser don't even send a request, and the server receive just a get request to reload the page.
I feel so powerless and it's always like this. It's not as if I was missing something I mismanage in my model, it's the library I use that doesn't work. What am I gonna say when I will be looking for jobs ? Sorry it doesn't work for no reason so I couldn't improve my skill so I'm a shitty developer.
This is not a post about shaming famous project (like here Webpack and DRF for the example), those are incredible project that change the life of millions of people. I would have never been able to do 10% of those. I just often get stuck in those kind of things. I find no answer on the internet and I don't know what to do next. Pay a freelancer to help me debug the application ? What am I suppose to say to a manager or recruiter ? How do you manage the stress of the powerlessness feeling I have. Am I the only one to feeling like this ?
- NicoJuicy 5y agoWell, as soon as you adopt a library it becomes your problem if something is happening. I tend to simplify things as much as possible and using my own code. Doing PoC's to see if i can adopt a certain "thing". So my solution for being "powerlessness" is owning the code i use and therefore I know what it does. I use tools a lot, but also because of that, I'm able to fix issues fast and mostly the error is from my end. For example, i had some slow query generation in EF a couple of years ago and this led to the EF team implementing a Like operator. - https://github.com/dotnet/ef6/issues/115 https://github.com/dotnet/ef6/issues/115 ( I actually had to debug the library and give a reasonable explanation to the team. They found a solution, that they already considered. Which i think is pretty awesome of them! I use the like operator a lot by now)
- BoumTAC 5y agoBut what do you do when you don't own the code ? It as never been me which had the decision to choose which things to use. It is the manager or the market. The market is looking for certain kind of developer and I need to know how to use those libraries otherwise they will not hire me.
- NicoJuicy 5y agoFixing other people's code is actually part of the job. The more "s*t" you fix, the better you understand the toolset and the better developer you become by making better decisions. The powerless feeling you have could be because a certain toolset is currently new to you. Eg. I received a legacy project from a junior developer ( an important one), it took me 4 months to fix all ( and huge) issues. Now it takes me 5-10 minutes to identify an issue ( after improvements). It's a similar situation, but from a big internal project instead of a "small" library. While your manager doesn't pay you to solve an issue from an external tool. He does pay you to solve the issue in the internal project. It's the same thing, but another perspective. If you need to spend 2 days in that opensource project and you're sure that's the cause, so be it. A manager "only" cares about the end-result, not the road to it.
- GianFabien 5y ago