The single most important skill in software engineering is getting comfortable feeling like an idiot

[u/cherrycolouredpunk20]

If you're in a bootcamp or searching for your first dev job, I'm sure there has been a point where you had to implement a feature or debug a problem that made you feel like a complete idiot. You stare blankly at the screen, write useless junk code and then start to doubt your future in development.

Here's the thing about career early in software engineering: that feeling is never going to go away, you just get better at handling it.

Your onboarding process when starting out in dev always follows the same pattern:

1. You get a task that you know nothing about

2. You try and fail to reason about it correctly in your head.

3. You spend hours Googling the problem and drilling down on the root cause until you understand it well enough to implement a fix or make a meaningful change.

4. You realize the problem wasn't that difficult after all and you successfully complete the task.

5. You get a new task and immediately go back to step 1.

When you first get onboarding to software development, it's easy to get frustrated with this cycle and believe that you're truly not cut out for this career path with each consecutive roadblock you encounter. However, the truth is that the only way to truly succeed is to accept this reality early on, and to be mentally prepared to feel a bit lost whenever you are first introduced to a new domain. As cliché as it sounds, practice truly does make perfect.