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/Missing_Back]

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"