The Worst Developer Mentality

Key Takeaways

and that fear is paralyzing it's the worst feedback loop in existence and in this video I wanted to talk about some of the mistakes the really big mistakes not small mistakes but big mistakes I see a lot of other people like developers making and honestly this applies to people that aren't developers either it's really just about how humans behave uh for the record I made all of these mistakes that I'm talking about and these mistakes like really really held me back for so long and I had no idea I was even making them for such a long time that's why I I want to talk about them cuz I feel like I made so many of these mistakes if I can offer a bit of advice to make other people's life easier I'd like to do that I'm not necessarily going to try to give anybody advice I really try not to do that on this channel I don't think it's my place to give people like personal advice I'll mostly be sharing my opinions and you can kind of take them as that I'm not trying to be like an authority figure but I'll also say that the opinions that I'm going to share I firmly believe them like I strongly believe them I'm pretty confident in them and these are not really my ideas or at least not exclusively like these are things that are well accepted by most very very smart people anybody who's High performing in their career they will agree with the things that I'm going to say and by the way no I'm not going to be talking about AI or anything like that that's not what this video is about so I'll probably end up splitting this video into two videos this video will mainly be focusing on like some of the problems that I see and kind of a mindset shift that you can do to like correct those things but I'll have a separate video which will probably be titled something like how to learn which will probably be like the followup and cover everything else so I wanted to show this comment I got about two weeks ago which I responded to maybe in kind of a dickish way maybe I was kind of a dick in this case and my goal is not to read too much into this comment or Focus too much on this individual person I'm trying to uh use this comment as a way to extrapolate and uh give my argument or make my broader point which is about the mentality that I see a lot of people have and why I think it's so self-destructive so I got this comment in for one of my leak code videos start writing the code in Java or C++ the python syntax that I currently use is hard to understand for people with no experience in Python which is fair when I first learned python it was very different from the other languages I knew that were based on c c was my first language that I learned and then you learn other languages like Java JavaScript they fall under the bucket of C syntax like they're very similar to that language now python is not python is very different and so my followup was with all due respect you should be able to understand the syntax within a few minutes if not it's kind of a skill issue okay I could have been nicer I I will admit that I don't think I was wrong and now again I'm not focusing too much on this specific uh point but more broadly let's think about what's going on here here probably this person is somewhat of a beginner but even if they're not they might still have the same problem they're familiar with the c syntax the python syntax is not familiar to them they're trying to learn some complicated algorithm and at the same time they have to kind of decipher my like python code which they're not familiar with you could say that they're trying to save themselves Time by suggesting me to use a different language now there are people that make leak code videos in other languages maybe they could just go watch that or maybe they could take my code and translate it into their language of choice or you know 10 different things which honestly I think would help them learn better I mean is it really that hard for somebody to take uh five minutes to just type out my code that you know I show in the video I type out my code in the videos I don't just show you a screenshot I'm literally typing every character as I talk into my microphone why can't you follow along why can't you watch it maybe 30 seconds then write the same code it won't take you that much time it'll take you 5 minutes 10 minutes I mean how long is it going to take and then you know throw it into GPT or Claud or whatever and translate it into your language why can't you do that so so don't tell me time is the excuse right time is is not that big of an excuse maybe you didn't think of that to think of what I just suggested to you which is fine it doesn't mean you're stupid if you didn't think of that you were probably so focused on like the little details of the algorithm that you kind of forgot to zoom out and think okay well maybe there's a better way that I could learn this stuff uh but but the other thing the other thing is maybe you're a little bit lazy and lazy is kind of a strong word I can't think of the better word right now and I don't mean it to insult anybody and I'm pretty lazy myself in many ways so I can understand that the laziest thing to do would just be to watch something in your language and then you know that's how a lot of people learn like the laziest thing to do sometimes is not the most effective I kind of just outlined one approach that will not cost you much time but you might not want to do that either because you're a little bit lazy like you don't want to have to type out the code yourself you want somebody else to have it you want to be able to copy and paste it but you're not going to learn as much doing it that way I promise you and watching my videos is definitely a decent way to learn like the thought process especially if you're stuck it's a it's a really good way to save time you don't have unlimited time but probably you'll learn better if you actually think of things on your own if you like do some pen and paper stuff before you watch my video or maybe then you don't even need to watch the video but humans uh tend to do like the laziest thing it's natural it's nature it's hard to fight against that emotion now the third factor is the one that I'm going to be focusing on the most because I think that in reality it's not just one reason why this person or someone would suggest something like this it's not just one reason there are many reasons and I think this is one that's often not discussed it's called fear or anxiety or any of the other emotions that people don't really talk about that much but it's very relevant because let me tell you the thought process of somebody probably somebody who's very very much a beginner like if you have 10 years of experience you probably don't feel this way but I know that there are plenty of people out there who call themselves like for example uh like I'm a developer I'm a JavaScript developer I'm not a software engineer I'm a JavaScript developer I have 10 years of experience in JavaScript but when I see a different language that I'm not comfortable with I I panic like because I'm just I've been staying at my cushy comfortable job where I haven't really had to learn that many new things I just stay where I'm comfortable I'm scared to go out and like have to do something that I've never done before like I panic and so the mindset of somebody like that when they see code in a language that they never learned they start to panic I mean they might not get like a full-blown planic attack or something but they start to get a little bit of anxiety they're like well I'm uncomfortable right now I'm reading a language I don't know and and that fear is paralyzing it's the worst feedback loop in existence and if you're thinking that this only is relevant to leak code I promise you I think I'll be able to convince you by the end of this video that it's not only related to leak code it's not only related to seeing a programming language that you're unfamiliar with it's related to so many things and uh you know I know this from my personal experience like I think if there's one emotion that's dominated the vast majority of my life it probably is anxiety and I'm probably not the only one like I could tell you guys my personal life story and all that stuff but I don't really think I need to because I think you guys probably have very similar experiences that I do now before I focus on the more broader Point let me kind of stick to this like leak code example for a second is it actually true that we should be afraid as we think we are like let me show you a very quick example so I'm going to go to leak code I'm going to go to a problem that I've never seen before a reasonably difficult problem let's say separate squares even though it's a medium it has a relatively low acceptance rate so it must have been somewhat difficult for people I'm going to look at somebody's solution code in a language that I'm not familiar with hopefully I can find one okay so I found this post and I'm going to try not to like look at anything okay so this is the python code I'm trying not to look at it I'm going to go to cotland definitely a language I've never used personally before so that's why I'm picking it I'm trying to pick the best language among these maybe I'll look at some of the others but I honestly I know most of these other than rust and go but now I'm looking at this code I don't know cotlin I never learned cotlin but I know programming I like to think that I'm decently good at logic and decently good at learning so now I'm looking at this code I'm trying to figure out what it's doing and uh it's pretty obvious look I don't know what this syntax is I've never seen this syntax before but if I had to guess looks like an array of integers or specifically looks like an array of integer arrays and uh confirming on the right side in Python it's a list of lists so okay so that's confirmation I guess I wasn't 100% sure of that so maybe that's something I could quickly Google but again like that's a two-c question for me to answer just via Google or GPT looks like it's returning a double looks like you initialized a couple variables uh this is a decimal this is an integer it looks like there's a nested function in here looks like there's some logic going on I mean all of this is pretty readable to me so uh maybe I picked an easy language go is pretty easy it's true let's go or cotlin is pretty easy let's look at A Go Go is a little bit different uh but again looking at this I I pretty much know what this is two-dimensional array of integers float 64 couple of variables initialized like all of this code looks readable to me I can read and understand every single line pretty much like I I I don't see anything that I wouldn't understand maybe there would be some minor syntax things that I would have to Google or something like that but that that's it like reading code in a language you've never seen before it's just a skill you develop like when you have a panic attack before you do it then you you trick yourself you scare yourself out of trying and when you actually try when you're not scared to fail when you're not scared to look at a piece of code and think what if I don't understand it oh my God then I'm just going to feel so bad about myself it's going to ruin my day it's going to lower my self-esteem and that's not an easy thing to fix like the the psychology of it that's the hardest part but like you have to recognize that reality is often not like what you kind of make it out to believe in your head you get too much in your head about it now now uh I'll quickly go to rust and uh looking at this there might be some syntax that I don't quite understand even though like we pretty much know what's going on here and you know we got the helper function okay so this syntax is a little bit funky but it looks like it's an inline function which is then being assigned to this and so so I'm mostly able to understand it and depending on your amount of experience maybe you're really early in your career you might not but again I'm just trying to make like a more General point and now let me kind of focus away from leak code specifically and talk about this more broadly so now I want to show you just a short Sports Clip actually and just to give some context so this is uh Lebron James famous athlete NBA player his son bronny James on the same team and this is just moments before his son was about to enter his first NBA game playing basketball as a professional athlete and look listen carefully to what LeBron said to his son and LeBron he's not a psychologist he's just a professional athlete right so how does he arrive at the same conclusion that I did see an intensity right just play care free though wor about mistakes just go play hard now LeBron told his son not to worry about making mistakes why would he do that because when you worry about mistakes then you become afraid to act and that can be a good thing right like if you touch the stove you you're going to burn your hand you're going to be afraid of doing that then and it's good to have some level anxiety even as a professional athlete you should be afraid to some extent of making mistakes but when you're a beginner when you're starting out there's no point in worrying too much about mistakes you need to have some level of confidence it's required not just for professional athletes but for Professionals in any discipline whether it's like medicine software engineering or other things like you can't be paralyzed with fear of like what if my code has a bug well it's GNA have a bug no matter what you're gonna make mistakes well what if I cause issues in production there's a real risk that that does happen Okay you can do everything correct you can um you know have all the tests in place and stuff production issues still happen it's possible you might be responsible one day for a production issue that's something you got to accept otherwise you're just going to be paralyzed and very quickly let me just ask you a quick question and it's not related to sports maybe U most of you are more familiar with like video games for example if I had two scenarios one I have a kid and and I buy this kid a video game and I buy the other kid a video game as well and maybe the first kid they start reading the manual before they start playing the game because they want to make sure that they know everything before they get started and so that they don't make any sort of mistakes maybe they start doing a bunch of research online about the game and all sorts of things and they wait days before they actually start to play that video game and you have the other kid for example who just plays the game they're maybe they're dumb like they don't even know how to read they just start mashing buttons and then they just keep going they just play they make a lot of mistakes maybe it's like a video game where you progress and you die and you have to restart all over and they just keep dying but eventually they're progressing which one of these kids do you think is going to be better at the game who do you think is going to beat the game first I guarantee you I guarantee you this person will win every single time because I've played video games my whole life I never read a single manual that's not how you play video games nowadays online games are so damn complicated there's so many things going on like some of these strategy games how the hell do you learn that you're not going to read you're not going to learn that by reading books and like stuff like that you just learn by doing the brain is very powerful it builds intuition automatically just as you do things as you collect data points for your brain and feed them in your brain does magical things inside of there and that's one of the things I'm going to talk about probably in like the follow-up video but um I want to quickly address that in some ways this kind of seems like contradictory advice doesn't it like in terms of uh reading the manual because there's some parallels to that with like reading documentation right everybody says just read the documentation it'll save you so much time and there is some truth to that that's why this is difficult and that's why like sometimes there is contradictory advice and you yourself you have to know when to apply it and know like what to do in uh the correct situation and stuff like that again one of the things I'm probably going to try to address in the followup video I don't want to like Ramble On too much right now now one thing like even if you agree with everything I've said up until this point everything I've said sounds simple and it is simple but simple does not equal easy and that's again like one of the hard things that that's one of the nuanced things this stuff is simple but it's really hard to put into practice I can spend like hours and hours talking about that and talk about like how I've personally been able to do that and I'll tell you it was not a quick process I made this video uh like a year and a half ago now about like quitting Amazon that was like a part of my story this video it was only 10 minutes long it didn't cover everything and by the way I'm not the only one who like thinks this that like most things in life are simple um I think like this tweet I saw the other day kind of backs that point up where Paul Graham says the most valuable insights tend to be the most General so a lot of people will almost have had them when you write about them some readers will say you put my thoughts into words and others will dismiss your observations as obvious and both are describing the same experience he talks a little bit more about this and I've had the same experience with the most valuable books that I've ever read in my life and the things that I've learned it was so surprising to me how they were so simple but like actually uh putting them into practice takes time and that's why I think like having uh some kind of book or some kind of thing or resource which takes ideas that are seemingly simple and then combines them into one place where it's very explicit about every single thing you don't have to read between the lines about anything it's very explicit about like how the brain works and how life works and like sort of those things uh for example like the book How to Win Friends and Influence People everybody says that book is like common sense but Common Sense isn't so common that's the thing about it and when you really really get really really good at those fundament and I'm not talking about fundamental data structures and algorithms talking about fundamental like psychology principles that that's like the major thing that's been able to improve my life to be honest and like I said it was not a quick Journey like if you're if you agree with what I've said and you're like starting to feel like inspired in some sense I do want to give a little bit of caution not everyone has the same starting point uh depending on where you're at and the life that you've lived it might take you a lot of time to get over some of these things that maybe you've experienced in the past or some bad habits that you've like built up and in my experience like some in some ways you don't 100% get over certain things and that's okay you don't have to it's good to have emotions it's good to have fear once in a while as long as like those emotions are pointed in the right direction uh like for example uh when I make these videos I get some anxiety I get some fear about it and for me my biggest fear isn't that someone is going to be like mean to me in the comments or something like that and I sincerely mean that like it really doesn't hurt my feelings uh sometimes I even find them kind of funny but um my biggest fear is that once in a while I'll make a mistake in my videos I'll say something that even I don't fully agree with and then I'll look back on that and I'll regret it and that's a legitimate fear because who can be correct and right 100% of the time it's impossible if as I make videos if I choose to make videos there's 100% chance I'm going to make mistakes as well uh but I just have to acknowledge that maybe once in a while I'll also say something correct though maybe once in a while I'll uh have a positive impact on somebody's life and say something powerful so like there's two sides to that coin and like if you want to improve if you want to grow you have to be willing to make mistakes and that was the biggest problem I had my whole life and now that I've kind of gotten over a lot of that all I can tell you is man my life improved in every single way you can imagine almost every single way like I'm not so afraid of making mistakes anymore I'm not not so afraid of looking dumb even publicly like sometimes I'm going to look dumb in front of thousands and thousands of people online and I'm public right now I'm showing my face and I can live with that sometimes I'm going to talk to people and they're not going to like me like I'm going to be nice to somebody and for whatever reason they're just not going to like me I might ask out a girl and she might say no so what like you just got to move on and like for that reason like I just think life is so much better for me now