I’ve always heard: “if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room”. Yours has a bit more tact and humility.
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Dunning-Kruger is real. And painful to watch in many cases.
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Thanks for the well wishes all!
Thanks, some feedback from my technical interview was how much they liked that I said I don’t know when I hadn’t a clue.
That is the aim, unless kids become a priority, then no sleep may deepen any pool I’m in for me 
Currently C# .NET so does that even put me in your current subpool too?
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I’m told C# isn’t a horrible language but the work involved in getting it to run anywhere I can run stuff would be excessive.
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I started out at my current company doing C#. Then I moved onto Ada95 and now I’m doing C++ (with dashes of Python and C# as required).
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I see. I think I saw a reference to visual studio. Do you use that fir your C++ IDE or is it tangential to your work?
I’ve been enjoying playing with it so far. It does seem like it’s only really useful if you’re fully in to a microsoft environment. Actual features of the language are smartly done. Like many things characteristics that are good in some areas and liabilities in other areas.
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Yup, mostly Visual Studio for C++ and C#. Though sometimes Workbench and XilinxSDK which are both Eclipse-based.
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Congratulations. The two most important things to remember when working as a dev (according to me):
- we call cook with water
- everyone makes mistakes, everyone.
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Almost finished work for a week off!
Hurrah! Also said goodbye to an excellent report today. Not hurrah!
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It’s nothing to do with how smart you or anyone else is, and all about challenging your self and not getting stagnant.
You can be the least smart person on a project, but if it’s something you can do in your sleep, you will be bored out of your mind. Or you can be the smartest person, and if it’s a hard problem— whether that’s because it’s hard, or just lots of new things to learn— you will find it interesting.
Or at least, that’s how I find it works. It’s probably not universally that way.
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What do you mean by this? I can have a fair guess but it’s nice to be sure
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Something my mom used to say. a German idiom which more or less means that we all rely on the same basics. It is meant to not let yourself be intimidated by others. Same thing others already said in the thread.
The senior dev may be a little quicker to get the ingredients together but in the end he is also just „cooking with water“ just like you.
Ps and I want to add one more thing: it is okay not to know something. We do not have to know everything. We need to know where to find stuff and how to get to a solution. But we have an internet full of knowledge to help us we do not need to know everything right this moment.
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Yeah, I know people who still want to ask interview questions like "which of these letters isn’t an option to ls" and my answer is “I’ll look in the man page, and if you have systems without man pages I don’t want to work on them”.
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25 years ago I got a question like that, for an HPUX utility that only existed on hpux, and had an alphabet soup of command line options. I pushed back, saying no one would know that, you have look it up in the documentation. the come back, was, of course, when it’s borked, you can’t look it up, and you’d have to know it. I came back with the set of commands you’d need to get the system in a workable state, from any of the reasonable starting points (scratch install from tape, cd, or network, or recovering a hosed root fs,) and noting that the command they were asking about wasn’t actually required in any of them. I was not offered the job, but the guy in the interview who hadn’t asked the question gave me the name of another hiring manager, who did give me a job. i later learned there was a whole slew of stupid questions like that, whose real purpose was to sort out the people who knew hpux from the broader unix sysadmin pool. (HPUX had it’s own sucking features, and you did need to know a number of them in the environment, which were 5 and 6 nines systems.)
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I would like to add that I feel this is not just an interview thing. On the job it is just as important. My current team consist of people having to find solutions and willing to admit they don’t have them yet. This kind of honesty is something I have rarely encountered in the workplace. But it is refreshing and we waste way less time on hot air and bullshit than other places I’ve worked at. Admitting to not know something requires confidence and feeling secure in the group. It is not an easy thing to come by, I know this.
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I’m currently really struggling at work, and I’m very good at the honesty thing when I don’t have the solution. However, I just can’t rely on anything.
I have to produce new documents and it turns out that the old documents aren’t useful as a starting point, the training is non-existent or wrong, and my boss isn’t super clear on what the end goal should be… under time pressure on processes I’ve never seen before. So I’m having to constantly adopt a position of being very humble about what I don’t know, which is fine and I’m good at, but it’s still not getting me to the answer and it’s been months.
I’m having to do a load of reminding myself that “I am not my job”, and that I’ve been very good at this previously.
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Producing documents of any kind is something I struggle with as well and I am glad I do not have to do this at the moment. My problem solving around “stuff I don’t know” usually involves
Stupid internet advice, please ignore
trying to work my way around the holes in my knowledge to isolate what I do not know so I can ask “narrow” questions which are more likely to get answers. Depending on the situation, I go either by a topdown outlining approach or bottom up sorting the existing stuff until I can see what’s missing. This abstract thing is really the only advice I have on problem solving. Make the hole in your knowledge as small as possible and either the answer becomes self-evident or failing that at least you can ask the best possible question. The smaller your question the more likely someone can answer it or tell you that there currently is no answer. Spend time thinking, organizing and analyzing. If they want documents, they should be prepared to pay for you spending time to do these things even when they do not produce results immediately. Writing up processes etc. is hard work even when you do not produce results right now.
(Next insert rant about all that is wrong with the fact that too many of us have to tell ourselves “ we are not our jobs”. No, we’re not. We’re so much more. We’re friends, spouses, parents, volunteers, artists, thinkers, dreamers, care-takers… please don’t mind the order or completeness of my list.)
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We’re currently struggling at my school district to get students to complete a mandatory Student Engagement Survey.
That sentence pretty much sums up my public school teaching experience at the moment.
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A mixed few weeks for me. We’ve had a good run but my wife’s finally tested positive and has some mild symptoms; it’s definitely from her office, which has been utterly apathetic about Covid from the start. The managers have entirely embraced whatever the government says, plus all the “it’s really mild now” nonsense. I am Cross. We cancelled a planned walk with my parents.
But we’ve actually bought a house now, which is good. I managed to order carpet fitting at the weekend before that test; it won’t be done for about 3 weeks though, so we can’t get any furniture or move yet.
I spent a frustrating few days trying to get accurate paperwork from the solicitors, before dropping it when I realised that the series of maths errors still worked out in our favour overall and they don’t deserve me arguing them into paying them more.
I’ve not had the headspace to keep up my forum game (but I will come back to it), and have instead written a stupid RPG that is exclusively rules for falling damage, after someone posted a screenshot on Twitter.
And now I’m procrastinating apathetically instead of doing any work…
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Best wishes for a mild Covid; big congratulations on the house; and…
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