#programming culture

I had a very interesting conversation about coding and self-esteem recently. A friend commented that most of the programmers they knew considered themselves bad programmers. When I thought about this myself, I couldn't help agreeing. I mean, the discussion began with me talking about how I'd like to transfer from raw programming over to program management because I don't think I'm a good programmer. This is in spite of being hired for my programming expertise. So, I had to question, why is it that I, along with what seemed like many others, felt this way. I certainly have friends who don't and... most of them are either working for one of the big four or are founders. Is there something about how other groups handle coding that makes the difference? Or is it a function of the job itself? My most proud moments for all of my skills happened when I was working on a hard problem that I couldn't find a solution for. And, I think that may be a large part of what causes this. The vast majority of what I do as a "Senior Developer" is search google or stack for solutions made by people who are more skilled than I am. All too frequently, I never come to a complete understanding of why this method is better or faster; it just performs better. There are a few exceptions. For instance, I have Opinions about when to use raw javascript over any of the other frameworks. However, that's the majority of my job, figuring out how to use someone else's work to solve a problem. This is especially true for commonly found use cases, aka the majority of the coding work. I don't know too much about the specifics that my confident programmer friends work on, but what I've gleaned makes it sounds much more novel than most of mine. Many other professions have large histories of knowledge that people should be pulling from, but it feels like this is more prevalent with code. For a different example, I play a lot of video games where you can look up meta-builds for any given character or build type. This builds are much better than anything I'll come up with randomly, but... playing with one of them just feels empty. I was much happier, and felt like a more skilled person, playing around with an inefficient, throw lightning that will arc between mobs build that I came up with than the super efficient meta-caster build a friend recommended. But, wound up switching to the later because I was slowing down the team. It makes me wonder about a lot of things and when it might be better for a given group to accept inefficiencies that make people happier.

tfw a supposed expert is explaining New JavaScript Features That Will Let You Write Better Code™ and they illustrate async/await using an example that causes independent asynchronous functions to be run in series instead of in parallel.