Roy Tang

Someone on quora asked:

What shall I do when I doubt my technical skills as a software engineer?

You know, you are already being given some free tips on how to improve yourself: they’re in the comments you get from code review! Study the comments, and if you don’t understand, feel free to discuss with the reviewer and ask how it could be made better.

Writing good, clean, robust code is difficult. Not even veteran software developers will get it right 100% of the time. The only difference between you and them is that they have a lot more practice and experience which translates into better instincts as to which code will perform better or will be easier to maintain. And experience and instinct can only be acquired with time.

You also have to accept that you will not write perfect code most of the time. Possibly never. And often there is no real “best” approach: even among senior developers implementing any nontrivial programming solution, the code will most likely be completely different among them. Even veteran software developers will often look back at code they wrote weeks or months ago and wonder WTH they were thinking.

Lastly, do not attach too much of your ego to your code such that you are embarrassed by how it turns out. You are not your code. You are not the snippets of Javascript or for loops or function calls you hammered out today. The code you have written is almost immediately yesterday’s news. The instant you save it or commit it or build it, you have already outgrown it. If you make mistakes, own up to them and figure out how to avoid them in the future and move on.