You can tell how long someone's been coding by what scares them
Hey everyone, I'm Samyak. First real post here, so instead of a résumé, a confession:
The longer I do this, the less impressed I am by clever code and the more terrified I am of specific little things. I've started to think you can guess a developer's age by their fears. Here's my list. Tell me where you land.
Junior me was scared of
- The build failing
- Merge conflicts (genuinely thought I'd broken git forever)
- Being asked a question in a meeting I didn't know the answer to
- The semicolon. Somewhere. It's always somewhere.
Present me is scared of
- Caching. Not writing a cache — invalidating one. The two hardest problems in computer science are naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors, and I've made peace with the first and third.
- Any sentence that starts with "it works on my machine." That sentence has never once been the end of the story.
- The word "just." "Can't we just add a flag?" "Just restart it?" Every "just" is a three-week ticket in a trench coat.
- Code with no comments and no tests, written by someone who left the company. This is the coding equivalent of a horror movie basement.
- Retries without idempotency. Sleep well knowing your "harmless" retry sent the same email 4,000 times.
- A PR that says "small refactor" and touches 47 files.
Things I stopped being scared of
- Deleting code. Deleting code is the best feeling in software. The line you didn't write can't page you at 3am.
- Saying "I don't know, let me check." Nobody senior actually knows everything. They've just gotten comfortable admitting it fast.
- Boring solutions. Boring scales. Clever pages you on a Saturday.
The one that never goes away
Pushing on a Friday. I don't care how good the tests are. Something in my lizard brain knows the universe is watching, and the universe loves a Friday deploy.
Here's my actual theory: you don't get more skilled, you just get scared of better things. Junior devs fear the compiler. Senior devs fear their own past decisions. Staff devs fear meetings.
So tell me ✌️ what's the one thing that scares you now that didn't used to? I'll reply to every one — and I already know at least three of you are going to say "DNS."
Glad to finally be posting instead of just lurking.
— Samyak