How to worry less about your own lack of talent

I just now faced another manifestation of the impostor syndrome : “Am I really a developer — or is Google just good?”

Then came the answer, in which I, however, did not see the main thing - therefore I would have to answer: too many people are afraid without any reason.

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If information is easy to find, it does not make a person stupid.

I often hear one story - I guess its authenticity is doubtful, but, be that as it may, the essence is as follows. When they asked Einstein for a phone number, he searched for him and said: “Why memorize something that can be found in less than two minutes?”

In the 80s, they could have been credited to botanists simply because you had an encyclopedia, and you didn’t need to read most of it: there was a very interesting encyclopedia of 1937 in my house, and the article about the Nazi party contained only two paragraphs, in which it was said that the party is nothing serious. So I ended up in the "wise men club": it was enough to know about the existence of one of the most blatantly erroneous fragments of the text ever written - and I learned this knowledge from an unremarkable source, which I used along with the rest. All because then finding out something interesting was difficult, and the mere urge to search turned you into a nerd.

Now, when even the most ignorant plebeians can get any desired information, the elite of nerds retreated and proclaimed that there is de such an essential brain function that allows them to better orient themselves in the flow of information. This is a rather attractive delusion, and there is, as usual, a grain of truth: it is easy to feel superior to people who are looking for articles on the Internet about the relationship between vaccines and reptilians. And it’s just as easy to feel flawed: spend the whole day fighting an error, finally guessing through Stack Overflow - and there you will find that three years ago, five people had already figured out this problem, and two of them also spoke in the sense that if someone does not know the answer to this question from birth, then he is stupid.

Because of this new - and accessible to the masses - the way of obtaining information can feel weak, because you have to use what anyone can use ... But to argue this is terrible arrogance that should be eradicated - along with its secret homophobia.

Forget all this nonsense about loving work

Do you know what work I think is the best in my life? Washing dishes. I did a great job and could scrub the plates on autopilot, which freed the brain and allowed me to think about anything. And the great thing about this work was that if at the end of the day, after washing out a couple of thousand plates for a restaurant included in the four hundred best catering establishments, I looked haggard, no one sat me down and asked why I didn’t admire my own washing technique dishes

If without love for work it would be impossible to work, civilization would collapse. I'm sure someone gets intellectual satisfaction comparing the difference in the speed of i ++ and ++ i in for cycles - and thank God! - after all, someone has to program the guidance systems for nuclear missiles. The rest simply hope that the number of unread warnings in the “debug” folder of the email will not increase too quickly - in order to at least have time to deal with these errors.

In the good old days, when you could afford to go to a restaurant at lunch, drink a martini, talk about business and write it all down for "production costs", even before the general insanity in motivation, you didn’t need to love your work - it was important not to test her disgust and not to force colleagues to hate her. Today, when the generation desperate for a solid salary was brainwashed with “soft” porn about happy work, employers believe that asking us to keep cell phones on hand on New Year's Eve is in the order of things. Some fanatical coders are fully able to make everyone else hate both the work and themselves - he loves what he does, and if you dislike your work and do not spend Saturday evenings masturbating to end recursion guides, this is exclusively your fault.

For zinger go to the sales department

For modern startups, highly effective indifference is almost the worst insult. The guys who passionately loved hacking systems on tape drives created technologies that now have a lot of companies in our company consist of the sales department and the technical department, and the rest of the work is transferred to the website of another company ... consisting of the sales department and the technical department. If you are engaged in sales, then loving your business (or pretending that you love) is an integral part of the work. That is what allows you to earn. And for the technical department, the main task is to make something function, and here you can already be as harmful as you need to do this work - because the only thing you are selling is your own ability to implement the payment API, and for that there is no need Stormy and stiff rejoice no.

At any meeting, you can see smiling salespeople shining against the background of a team of tired developers who can't wait to leave: they are already trying to figure out how long it will take to catch the error of the race flow, which obviously cannot be a race flow, because “it never lupus ” (translator's note: this is a quote from the Dr. House series, something like this:“ because it always turns out to be something else ”) .

And you don’t need to worry: you have excellent communication skills, whether you can attract people and overshadow the sun with your radiance or not - this in no way refers to work.

Do not listen to snobs

Surely someone will say: "Every developer should know X ".

I don't know X - whatever it is. Bubble sort? It seems to have something to do with mixing dark and light beers. B tree? As if something is evergreen. Hash table? .. I learned to code in PHP, and before it dawned on me that the hash table was different from the array, two years had passed. When I came to work at OkCupid, I didn’t see the difference between a hash table and an array. In the pretentious office of OkCupid, even the gods are timid under the disapproving views of the toilet paper dispenser - but I still got the job.



It doesn't matter for what and how you write the code - in any case, you will have no idea about the huge amount of programming. And if you manage to learn all the programming languages ​​in the universe, the Russian schoolchild will ridicule the inability to overclock the processor, the boy from Korea hacks the PS4 account, the American, sipping a latte, asks why you spent only one round of investment, and the French administrator will only frown when you Ask him not to smoke in the server room.

Now it is not bad to have education in the field of natural, technical, engineering and mathematical sciences, because the concrete application of a specific type of logical solution of the problem allows an ordinary person to earn income at the level of the upper middle class, and the graduates of business schools above them enrich themselves more than anyone else in the history of human civilization. The generation of technical directors of the dotcom boom period has grown into a lack of sex and has become painfully turned on technology, so the culture they accidentally conceived turned out to be fixated on using mathematical approaches in the most unintelligible ways that one could think of - and everyone else was free to go and shoot.

If there is no way for such guys, then all right. Drop in your days when Google (and even Vim) did not exist yet, you would cling to any opportunity to raise your self-esteem in those dark hours when it turned out that your Amiga does not remember your wedding date - because you did not have a wedding and, probably , will never.

Once programming was a novelty. The heroes of those times, having gone through the machine codes, are still alive and accuse us of laziness. But today, programming is the same job as any other, because now all the knowledge that is needed to satisfy the commercial development department can be obtained without reversing engineering of the prototype of a vehicle on stone wheels.

Interview - bullshit, put up

Any interview can appear, it would seem, with a cornucopia of secret knowledge, almost by the stream of them - a little more, and land prices in the district will jump from such great holiness. Most often after such interviews you want to give up everything and start growing guinea pigs. Everyone on this planet knows something that others do not know, and most of us will somehow find ourselves in a position where someone will hire us on the basis that we can demonstrate knowledge that few people have.

Any interview techniques are flawed, and so on until an algorithm emerges that allows you to predict a candidate’s ability to do the job and not be a bastard - based on a small set of almost random data. A job interview is like a date without a condom, when a bag of money is at stake. To assert that such a state of affairs can be rectified, if a couple sits down and thinks well - this is groundless arrogance, and it does not matter what profession they are talking about.

In today's world, no one understands what is happening at all, but at the same time, many receive salaries and clicks, maintaining the illusion of some kind of activity. Some of them will interview you - and nothing can be done about it. And when, because of this, an impostor syndrome appears - rejoice, for those who do not have such a syndrome are fools.

Earn money

Got a salary this month? Excellent - you have a better job than the average on the planet. And if at the same time you are also a programmer by profession, then you have left behind 80 percent of employees around the world, not to mention those who cannot get a job. If you get paid again next month, then you are not a deceiver.

Where you see a mass of foul-smelling and careless spaghetti code that without purpose and meaning multiplies the entropy of the universe, the bosses see a black box labeled "The guy talking to computer gods." They invest money - something happens - and look! There is a product that gives even more money. You can imagine yourself as the fulfillment of Tesla's hottest dreams and hope that you have at least a tenth of the foresight of Ada Lovelace, but this is how to be born in Norway in the 11th century and grow a beard, believing yourself to be Thor. But you are not Thor. And not even a warrior, but only a poet - that's why they survived and can multiply.

If someone has mixed sexual feelings about pointers and equations in 3D graphics - he’s lucky: he was born in a generation that respects people like him ... and implicitly worships them - in a rather creepy way. But if you just need a job and you can and want to agree that computers are much more stupid than lemmings, then you have everything you need to continue to move the information age.


About the translator

The article is translated in Alconost.

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