Hello HN,
I am too arrogant, and I tend to be very quick to judge or dismiss other developers over futile things. I am also very much overconfident about my abilities as a programmer.
Now something good about me is that I truly love Computer Science and software engineering, and I want to get better at it. It is that very passion that is motivating me to change; I have read about how mediocre engineers are overconfident and full of themselves.
I want to excel at software engineering, and I know that I first need to change. My question to the community is the following:
Have you ever felt overconfident (as paradoxal as it may sound)? How do you develop an object, down-to-earth knowledge of what you can or cannot do? How do you learn humility?
I feel like providing some context would help the community. I am a college student, interning at a big tech company. I am somewhat shocked by my immaturity or arrogance.
For example, one of my coworkers is a great engineer, he has been contributing a lot and very positively to the codebase. But I cannot resist looking down on him because his resume sucks, and he has never worked on a major OSS project or went to an elite school.
Yes, this is how stupid and flawed my reasoning is. Me, a not-even-junior engineer, looking down on someone who has over a decade of experience for completely superficial reasons.
Among other things, I tend to overestimate my abilities to solve problems and tend to set unrealistic deadlines. I am also very impatient.
I need your help to get rid of this shitty mentality, and I am not happy with thinking that way. I know it is very narrow-minded and full of elitist bullshit. I need your help HN.
And if you're thinking you're better than someone else, because of your résumé, or what projects you've worked on, or what school you went to, or where you grew up, or the color of your skin, or your gender, or your religion, or for any of the myriad other reasons we silly human beings come up with, then you're definitely wrong. On the other hand, no one else is better than you, either.
Learn to be alert to your ego. Don't let it get away with anything.
And if all that fails, learn Lisp! (Just kidding! Lisp users have a reputation for arrogance that is, alas, perhaps not entirely undeserved.)