Ask HN: How do you overcome your self doubt?

[hsikka]

Hey HN,

I just turned 23 and am wrapping up my master’s in CS and Computational Biology at Georgia Tech and Harvard in 2019. I had a non traditional path to computer science, and have mostly taught myself programming, algorithms and machine learning.

I want to either work on challenging, technology defining projects and maybe even research, but I’m honestly scared of coding because I have 0 confidence in my ability and feel i’m going to break something.

My knowledge is brittle and limited, and I just can’t see myself building anything interesting because I freeze up when studying something technically complex.

How do you overcome your fear? I used to have high expectations of myself, but I just get scared thinking about the future now.

[itamarst]

1. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone breaks things. Happens at your first job, happens after 30 years. A good organization will have processes in place to prevent massive damage. You can learn techniques to limit damage of mistakes (from testing to resiliency).

2. Your knowledge is limited cause you're 23. No one hiring you will expect your knowledge to be massive. It's expected.

3. What's the worse that could happen? In most jobs, not that much. A feature doesn't work? Oh well, that happens, fix it in the next release (and QA should've caught it anyway).

4. Knowing you might mistakes is useful: https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/08/03/self-confidence/