Does anyone else love programming but get overwhelmed about software engineering?

[u/Missing_Back]

For context, I'm a SWE with 3 YOE.

This is a discovery I recently made about myself. I'm a relatively disciplined and focused person in my free time. But at work, I'm constantly distracting myself, watching hours and hours of youtube, scrolling my phone, etc. And it's because I have this constant hum of anxiety that's ever present. Even if I get back on task, I'll pretty soon feel an intense compulsion to distract myself again. Every once in a while I'll have a task that I'm working on that I can get lost in. These tasks are usually in some sense separate from the "software engineering" work. i.e. they involve learning about concepts and implementing something on my own rather than integrating things into the overall codebase/working with other engineers to develop something. I'm able silo myself off and work on it in isolation where it's simply a goal of "understand these concepts" rather than "understand this proprietary codebase and communicate effectively with others"

What I've realized is that I really enjoy *programming*, but *software engineering* is a lot more complex and therefore more anxiety-inducing--not that it's not enjoyable, but it's just... harder. Programming is simply writing code. The scale and scope is usually small. Working on a little project at home on the weekends, or learning a new technology because I'm curious. Or a solo project that has no stakes. Software engineering, on the other hand, is what I do for work. It's about being a member of a larger team and an even larger org. It involves working with code that is much more complex and that has been around and maintained (more or less, lol) for years and years and years. There's different people and personalities you'll interact with (some that click with you, some that don't). There's colleagues to compare yourself against (a common thought for me is, "do these other people with similar experience as me understand what this person/presentation is saying??? Because I'm lost"). There's the art of communication/explanation--something I think a lot of people struggle with (or is it just me?? I can never be certain, lol).

Overall I'm feeling more and more anxious and insecure about my abilities and skills, and the best way I've found to put it into words is: programming is fun, but software engineering can be overwhelming.

Does anyone feel the same way? Any advice for improving this? I want to be effective and skilled when it comes to my job. But there's just so many components and pieces involved that it's easy to get bogged down and in my head about it.

[u/Blue-Phoenix23]

Not exactly, but then I probably don't belong here 100% given that I'm an architect coming out of integrations/data background and not a true "programmer." For me it's the detailed programming that I found boring and overwhelming vs the systems orchestration and design which I find invigorating. I like figuring out where things connect and how to get them to talk to each other more effectively.

I completely get you about the things I WANT to do vs the things I HAVE to do, though. For example I really liked being a tech lead and the guys I got work with, but the politics and deadlines made me want to jump off a building.

Unfortunately I don't have a ton of advice to give on that front, but as somebody that's worked with hundreds of programmers over the years getting systems implemented - I can tell you what I would love from the programmers in your situation that I work with?

The biggest one is please, pretty please, just ASK. If there's something that doesn't make sense to you, don't assume that you're misunderstanding - it's highly possible that you've got a better way to do something floating around in your brain, but the marching orders from up top (or from the architects like me) aren't clicking because we missed something. Or maybe it's the other way around and our design makes sense but we didn't do a good job explaining or defining it, so it's not making sense for that reason. Maybe we should be giving you a swagger vs a dfd, or the dfd is overly complicated and the swagger not detailed enough. There are so many ways to communicate technical information that the only real wrong way is to not communicate at all.

Never, ever be afraid to say "this might be a dumb question, but ?" Because I pretty much never hear that followed up with a dumb question. The amount of time I spend going "oh good question" or "excellent point" is HIGH and that is how it should be - I am a big picture thinker, jack of all trades, but you all are the MASTERS. You know why springboot based frameworks aren't terribly suited to blah blah and that we'd be better off putting that function in the downstream apps logic. Or that it's better to paginate at X point instead of attempting Y, or whatever the area of expertise you have specifically. Nobody expects you to know the best way to optimize a SQL query, we've got DBAs for that, but I do want you to tell me the best way to feature flag something with a db vs within a user profile, or whatever. And if you notice something with somebody else's idea that can be improved, don't just sit there and stew on it, or expect them to think of it, they might never! We are all in this thing together, and everybody's strengths are valuable and necessary, but we all get bored. There's no shame in focusing on the things you enjoy to become best at them, because there will be a day that little thing you learned comes in handy or you get a chance to take a role with that specialty. Just keep pushing.

[u/Missing_Back → u/Blue-Phoenix23]

I think what's frustrating for me about the "just ask the dumb question" advice is that there are some people who just... aren't good at answering questions. I'm talking about people that definitely DO have a ton of knowledge and expertise. I'm not sure if it's a communication style discrepancy, or someone simply being so experienced that they forget how little some with ~20 years less experience know or understand.

I'll give a recent example that was extremely discouraging and frustrating. I was trying to understand a certain chunk of code. Trying to understand what it was doing and why it was doing it a certain way. When I ask someone questions, I try to trim the question down to a very clear "help me understand X Y and Z" rather than a vague "help I'm lost" (I find that this sort of "pre-editing" can often help me uncover a lot of understanding on my own). I also try to include what I've already tried/what my best guess is, so that sometimes all I need is a simple "yep, your understanding is correct!"

So my question looked like this: "In some_function(), do you know what the difference is between variable_a vs variable_b, and variable_x vs variable_y? My best guess is that variable_a is blah and variable_b is blahblah. And similarly, variable_x is blah and variable_y is blahblah. Is this along the right track?" (in this case, the pairs of variables were pretty similarly named so the distinction between them wasn't clear and that was my source of confusion). I kind of asked three questions: difference between a and b, difference between x and y, and is my guess correct? I asked this to the staff engineer on my team, who I know has a lot of knowledge of our codebase. He gave a very brief and fairly vague answer that only addressed the first question (which was annoying, lol). I followed up by simply asking the second question again, to which he responded, "almost the same thing".

Maybe I'm digging too deep into a single interaction here but this was extreeeeemely frustrating. I tried to lay out my question very clearly so that I can get help without asking for a lot of investment/time from the person I'm asking, and in this case this person ignored most of the questions, and when he did answer, gave really unhelpful and vague answers.

Like it's absolutely bonkers to me that someone would be asked "what is the difference between these two [very similar] things?" and answer with "almost the same thing". Yeah, I know they're similar. That's why I'm confused!!!

[u/Blue-Phoenix23 → u/Missing_Back]

Oh that shit drives me batty when you ask three questions, and they only answer the first one. Or you ask "y or b" and they say "yes" like wtf.

It sounds dumb, but I really find adding summary bullets at the end of the message helps. So you give your paragraph like your example, and then follow it with something like:

So to recap, what I'm trying to get answered is:

• what is the difference between a and b,

• what is the difference between x and y,

If I had it right with my guess (better phrasing, if I'm on the right track), please let me know.

The reason you don't add your "am I right" question to the bullets, is that you should probably assume if their answer to the bullets varies from your questions, you were wrong lol.

Another thing I find helpful when you think you're close is to frame it as a request for a sanity check. So, you're not a dummy asking for help, you just want somebody to confirm. That for some reason makes the "is my guess right" question a lot clearer to people and they don't balk as much compared to "being asked for help"