Last year I signed in for a course called "Best Practices in Programming", and part of the course was to get the code of our current projects reviewed by a professional developer. I had a horribly written (out of inexperience) code in Python. The guy who had to review my code basically said I had no idea about coding but went on helping me a lot. Since then I started to learn some concepts of software engineering, how to code more efficiently, and so on and I've been much better ever since. So kudos to him for putting up with my spaghetti code and sending me in the right direction!

I once reviewed a Pull Request made by a fairly junior developer. They had joined recently, and this was one of the first times they had to touch a bigger part of the code.

Due to a mix of inexperience, new (to them) coding standards and lack of git knowledge, they ended up with a mess of a PR, with a few thousand lines changed, and no way to split it off.
I ended up spending the best part of a day reviewing the whole thing and requesting changes.

Even with the long list of improvements, however, I wasn't sure they would get the magnitude of their fuckup.
So I decided to use a real-world, palpable way to show them what they had done: I went and printed the github diff for that PR. It rendered the glorious amount of 73 pages.

I'll never forget their face, and those of their teammates, when I barged into the room with a thick wad of paper and deposited them on their desk.

At least it worked. I never saw another big, ill-thought pull request from them again.

I'm a founder of a small startup. We had a board meeting on a Friday, and Thursday night I sent a strongly worded email to the chairman and point investor, both of whom are worth well over $100 million, expressing my concern that we were undercapitalized and they were taking advantage of our youth and inexperience in order to make a quick return on their investment. The board meeting the next day was 2 hours of me getting railed.

Being 25 and just now getting employable dev etc skills is really quite daunting when you learn of the old geniuses like Bill Joy, Linus, Wozniak and then hear daily stories of 16 year olds doing amazing things.
Inexperience in a field where everyone demands experience is scary. Still excited to see where I Can l can get though.

Don't be afraid that pair programming will show up your inexperience, embrace it as the quickest way to build that experience!

So I am currently making an app for a retail franchise and that retail franchise is getting a website done by a company. Since the recipes that the guys want are going to be on the website, the web dev company made a mysql db that has all the recipes.

I thought since the people at the head of the retail franchise have spent time gathering these recipes, I'll just get the data for the app from the db.

I called the project manager for the website up (That's the only contact I got) and asked if they could given me access to the db to use for the app or if I could make a script that would get data from it.

Now this is the part where I tell you I'm only 14 years old and these guys know that because of the head of the retail company.

He puts it on speaker and asks me to say it again and I hear quite a bit of people laughing. I knew what was happening. He asks do you know anything about databases, I explained to him what a db was and how I was going to get the data from it and etc. Half way through me telling him that it would be beneficial for both me and the retail guys, he hung up the call and blocked me.

I asked the head of the retail company if he could ask them about it and he said that he didn't know much about tech so he couldn't ask and if I could find an alternative option.

You might be thinking that the company didn't want to give me permission to access the db which is respectable but they have done this previously as well.
I gave them advice on putting a rewards card feature on the site so the customers could track their points on the site as well as on the app and the PM said "We don't want advice from you."

It has now been 3 weeks on and off because of school where I had to code a ui for the lady at the company to enter all her recipes for the app and waste a lot of time communicating with different people to get all the data.

I hate being disrespected because of my inexperience when I can truly do some extraordinary things with software. 😡😤😣

Its also very hard to find a job being 14.

Me: I just know there's gotta be a better way to do this.
PM: No I think it's just a problem of inexperience. You and $coworker just haven't spent enough time in WordPress.
Me: no you're right. I'm just trying to get a better handle on the code and make things as less error prone as possible.
PM: well we really don't have very many errors.
Me: wait, what about the (list off other issues)?
PM: those all have been resolved already.
Me: Oh. Ok. I guess it's just me.
PM: See, I make changes and nothing breaks. You guys just need to continue working on this.
Me: ... 🤨
Me: (weird flex but ok) hey! Look at this guy over here!
PM: (Laughs)

How can I ask my coworkers for feedback without coming off as insecure?
A year and a half ago I got my first job as a remote developer when I was 30. I've done web and IT related jobs before but not full time development. Everything was fine for the first 10 months and then I started getting negative reviews, that my productivity rate is much lower than the rest of the team. I felt really sad and stressed, which led to a minor breakdown, which led to my contract being changed from a full time employee to a contractor that gets paid by the (estimated) hour. After a bit of research, I found out that my productivity rate was low because I was the only developer following our "One test per pull request" policy, which was obviously cancelled at some point, but nobody informed me. I didn't bring this up to my boss because I didn't want to make my manager and coworkers look bad. Working as a contractor isn't so good because a lot of times my features are delayed because of external factors I can't control(code reviews, testers, tests randomly breaking). I want to find out if I'm a bad developer or if the company is trying to cut costs by taking advantage of my insecurity and inexperience.

Gnome, you are a piece of shit. It has taken 4 people over 3 hours to create a .desktop file to launch a fucking bash script due to varying levels of inexperience.

Die in a fire you flaming putrescent turd.

What the fuck does putrescent even mean?

I currently have to finish some intermediate report for a big international research project which my CEO forced us into because of the incentives. But he doesn't care for any of the research and just want to get the money.
Due to my inexperience I promised some things for this project, which now prove to be untenable. And now I realize all this and I get to deal with small anxiety attacks (especially today).
I just want to say "fuck you all" and go, but this no real option for me. That makes me totally exhausted, especially because it feels like a personal failure. :/

Can I list this experience? Will it look bad?

I am an entry level programmer in a software shop, or whatever they are called. I was given no mentorship on the task I have done. Not even proper documentation and it seems management is passing me around. What I mean by that is that the task I work on no one has ideas about since it seems the last guy who was responsible left. He was a senior though and it seems that I might have been too eager to find a job. Now I am being tasked for things a senior would do but I have the entry pay and knowledge and skill set. 2 months experience...

I am going to design a whole system from scratch and they have not read anything on it. From networking to applications to fees to compliance requirements. Oh the great part is they want it soon, no pressure, but we have to start certification within a tight deadline. This is a great opportunity and maybe a dumpster fire waiting to start. I will gain so much real experience but they are taking a great risk. It seems that is throughout their code and infrastructure though.

I plan to leave after the project. I also will document and hopefully they start reviewing my stuff to catch my incompetence. Not on purpose but from pressure and inexperience, which I hate cause I was excited at first.

I plan to stick the year or until Covid strips work-from-home, cause they are bit “old school”. I will begin my job search as well. I just know I will burn out long term and the money and package is shit.

Do I list them if I leave earlier but finish the project?

I'm building a script parser to make mods for a game I like. The first step is to write an importer.

The documentation is nonexistent and I'm delving into byte manipulation, which I'm not familiar with - at all. I'm porting existing code from Java to C#, and everything is similar but different enough that I can't always just to a 1:1 transfer.

I get everything working, cleaned up and split into classes so I can write the exporter.

I do an import and the file won't parse. I try all previously know working files and still no good. I clean, rebuild, clean rebuild, run, debug, restart my computer, clear my cache, clean, rebuild. No good.

IT WAS WORKING 5 MINUTES AGO

Proceed to revert to every version from the last hour. No dice.

I was in the wrong folder the whole time.

Navigate to the proper folder, open the filename I know to be good and bingo, works like a charm.

The same project caused me headaches because I had a "== -1", when it should have been "== 1". Between my inexperience with byte manipulation and my untreated astigmatism, I was nearly sent to the shadow realm fixing that.

The fucking Unity Transport Layer API documentation is horrible! There's a bunch of information missing, and whenever I try to send data I just get a "NoResources" error. All the docs say about that one is: "No internal resources ro acomplish request.", nothing on forums or google... Worst part is, I've not even started dev that long and Unity has already given me quite some trouble. I hope that's just inexperience, and not Unity being a bitch.

i am frightened. i have a feeling the only person i can talk about programming stuff twice a year is getting out of touch.

as if the rarity of the talks is not bad enough, our tech stack edges away every time. he is the most intelligent person, yet i see no huge advantages and my strides just raise a shrug. not out of lack of interest but from pure inexperience. we have a long history of joint projects, but i fear the day only he relieves about his webdev experiences with his php-es5-css-stack, while i can not contribute with my knowledge about python- and vba-automation, oop and es6+. as if he would not be able to wrap his head about all this in a blink of an eye.