Monday 6 May 2013

Software development anxiety

When things are going wrong in a software project, my first instinct is to knuckle down and try to figure it out myself. This usually takes a long time, which makes me feel bad for wasting time and money, which makes me feel simultaneously that I am a bad developer and that I need to fabricate some explanation for why this task was harder than I thought.

All of these feelings are bad and wrong, of course. The real way to deal with a problem like this is to go and ask someone for help, but that brings up the feelings of inadequacy, while adding to them some feelings of lowering myself in the eyes of my colleagues ("if he needs help, he can't be that good, so better not trust him or promote him") and feeling like I'm wasting someone else's time, too.

This fills my job with a lot of anxiety, and I'm not sure if any other developers have this problem or if I'm alone in it. And if other developers have these anxiety problems, is it just the bad developers?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - My brain can offer up a thousand reasons why I might not be a good software developer.
PPS - Or a good actor, author, friend, husband, son, brother...

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