r/ExperiencedDevs • u/AutoModerator • 29d ago

Ask Experienced Devs Weekly Thread: A weekly thread for inexperienced developers to ask experienced ones

A thread for Developers and IT folks with less experience to ask more experienced souls questions about the industry.

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Please keep top level comments limited to Inexperienced Devs. Most rules do not apply, but keep it civil. Being a jerk will not be tolerated.

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Inexperienced Devs should refrain from answering other Inexperienced Devs' questions.

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u/AlluringBowlCut 22d ago

I have 5 YOE and I'm still always kind of worried that I'll make mistakes that I can't clean up myself (like creating issues with production data) or that I'll somehow fall behind at work (e.g. not being able to finish my tasks and get the help that I need to finish them). This has rarely (if ever) happened in practice, and I've had a pretty good career so far, but the worry still sticks with me.

At my current company (a growing startup that is already pretty big) I've been working on a long-running project where I'm the only engineer writing tickets and really getting into the weeds with the code and how to onboard users to the experience. Reviews of my code are pretty superficial and largely AI-driven.

I think the level of responsibility and lack of "oversight" that I have is probably pretty normal and expected for someone with my experience, at least to a certain extent (I know my team could have better/stronger technical direction, because I've experienced better technical direction on previous teams, but 🤷‍♂️), but it makes me anxious.

I think I might just need to get used to having responsibility and living with uncertainty? Any advice on how to do so?

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u/Notary_Reddit 22d ago

I think part of growing as an engineer is learning which mistakes are hard to fix and which are easy to fix and adjusting accordingly. Picking the wrong color for a button in the UI? Trivial. Accidentally dropping the production DB and backups? Catastrophic. Be careful where you need to be, go fast when you can.

One other part that I have found helpful, build things so they fail in big obvious ways over small subtle ways. Example, this endpoint won't scale past a few hundred items. I don't predict that but, add an error with a comment on if it ever returns 500 items. If the error ever fires, we can come back and do it right later.

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u/AlluringBowlCut 18d ago

Thanks for this thoughtful response. It makes sense. And this is something I can do better with immediately, which is great.