If I could give advice to myself when starting as a software engineer

so i have been programming professionally and on the side for getting close to two decades at this point i've spent many years writing java c c plus plus python rust go javascript typescript you name it if i could go back and correct one mentality of mine from that entire time i know exactly what it would be so first let me tell you a story so that way you can kind of understand where i'm coming from in 2007 89 i was in college i'm pretty excited just learning how to program getting pretty dang fast you know i did a little bit in high school i did a little bit of it when i was like you know in sixth grade but now i'm really actually doing it and the thing is is that i've always been on a windows machine at that point i just loved obviously gaming that was my thing you almost got me trapped oh i had a lot of fun doing it and now all of a sudden i'm in college and that's still the operating system that i prefer of course a lot of my classes and everything require me to use centos or centos i can't i have no idea the fresh maker i have no idea how you actually say the thing but either way i you know would straddle the line right for labs i used centos at home i used windows and netbeans on both because come on it's netbeans the greatest editor of all time in about 2008 i decided i wanted to start a website i called it life in america is hard i thought it was funny you'd leave little notes about things that are hard in america such as having to wait in line for coffee those kind of things right anyways while i was developing it i kind of had this idea okay i kind of want to get good at linux and so in 2008 got partitioned by machine put ubuntu on it and i stuck with it for probably about a week but i just i kind of like avoided it you know what i mean like yes i was using it but i really just avoided it i didn't actually do it and ultimately i stopped using it all together i kind of had this mentality that i was right and when i looked at things that had some sort of friction or difficulty to them and i could kind of perceive it i would just assume they are wrong and what i mean by this of course is like using the cli or vim or any you know kind of like the more hardcore hacker type things it just felt like they were kind of a thing of the past a relic of the past and really the futures and these ids and that is it and i didn't realize how much that was going to hinder me for quite some time uh for many many years i just simply avoided all these hard things uh things that were different not because they were not beneficial but because i simply assumed they weren't beneficial i had this mentality where i believed i was right and that didn't just stop with the technologies i used it also happened to be when i was at work how i treated people all those kind of things right because it all is one mentality i simply believed myself to be more correct more often than others in all sorts of areas and yeah i was pretty smart i did the best top of my class i was obviously very good at my job excelled above other people confidence kind of you know even though it was a bad type of confidence it kept compounding in on itself and if i could go back i really just wish i could tell myself you know it is okay to be uncomfortable it is okay to use something that is perceivably slower than what you use right now or even way more difficult to do the same thing because it's not about your instantaneous speed up it's about that long-term dividend play if i would have known this i would not have had nearly as bad of an interview as i did for a company i had they asked me hey could you go through a directory and it has subdirectories and all these different files have uh you know just have a bunch of html and all this but we've been hacked and there's a bunch of free viagra call this number throughout all these different files and we'd like to remove all of them now of course me being the young spittin engineer with zero tolerance for the cli and those other things what did i do i literally by hand wrote perfectly working java code buffered writer tokenizer bam bam bam bam bam wrote the entire recursive directory walk from my heart of hearts onto the board and of course what did my interviewer do you could have just used crep and it was kind of like in that moment i realized i should probably know more right because looking back on it it's obvious i know exactly how i would solve that now you know boom little said grep super combo right it'd be super easy to kind of go through some stuff and just depending on like if you just want the list of files or do you want me to change them right and so i kind of feel stupid right now looking back and so i really hope you can hear this it's not just me trying to get you to use vim or saying the cli is the best place but really for you to look at problems and understand that you don't know everything and that using things that seem different or strange it's okay because ultimately it's gonna make you a better engineer and who knows it may pay some amazing dividends down the road and hopefully you don't look like such a doofus as i did during that interview so go ahead if all you ever use is vs code try emacs look at this i'm not even suggesting my favorite editor vim at this point go just try anything else go try intellij go try some other things see what you can do your all you ever do is just do react and front end try solid try view expand your horizon try to understand things better because ultimately the more ways you see a problem be solved the more ways that you can solve a problem we are often limited by our experiences and that's really what separates a junior from a senior is just experiences experiences seeing things done differently and ultimately that's going to make you a much better engineer and i really wish i could have told myself that a decade ago i hope you liked this video please subscribe and of course actually make a comment down below tell me a little story about yourself i probably will reply to you my name is the primegen

Channel: ThePrimeagen

Views: 479,563

Keywords: software, vim, programming, javascript, typescript, software engineering, web developing, web developer, software developer, developer, cpp, programmer humor, humor, reactjs, js, ecmascript, tc39, Netflix, Engineering, Engineer, Facebook, Amazon, Interviews, Software Interviews, vimrc, neovim, spacevim, vim c++, vim editor, text editor, vscode, vscode vim, vim plugins, autocomplete, vim autocomplete, nodejs, twitch, developer productivity, spacemacs, algorithms, datastructures, Data Structures, python, bash

Id: QIyc6NKS5J0

Length: 5min 55sec (355 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 16 2022