Feeling Stagnant As A Developer

hey guys so one of the benefits to what I do is I get to hear from all kinds of people and I get to hear what they struggle with developers of all skill levels and I also know that no matter what skill level you're at you can feel stagnant or stuck and feel like you're you're not progressing so in this video I want to talk about why that is and how you can start to get out of that rut and see some progress all right so feeling like you're not progressing can lead to things like burnout imposture syndrome or even just giving up entirely and I know this not just from other people but from my own experience and right now I'm putting together a nextjs Ecommerce course with the most advanced project that I've done in a course yet and it had me doubting myself quite a bit not just in a developer sense but also in a teaching sense so I know how it feels even recently to feel like you're not progressing so first we're going to talk about uh a few reasons why we feel like we aren't getting any better and number one is the Dunning Krueger effect and that refers to a cognitive bias where people with low ability in a specific area overestimate their competence so it's pretty much the opposite of imposture Syndrome from what I understand uh in fact many developers start out with dun and Krueger and then they kind of go to the other side of the spectrum and get imposture syndrome and that's because when you start up when you start learning to code you guys remember it seems pretty straightforward you you pick up the basic syntax you write your first hello world and it feels like this is something that I can actually do and be good at but then as you you dive deeper the complexity starts to grow and suddenly you realize just how much you don't know and the shift can make you feel like you're stagnating even if you're actually learning more than ever so number two is comparison with others this is usually um what moves you from that feeling of I can do this it's not that hard to I really don't know if I even belong here and I think with social media it's easy to see someone's polished portfolio projects or their open- Source contributions or success stories and that kind of makes you feel inadequate but what you don't see on their social media is their years of struggle their late nights uh all the mistakes they make they have the same struggles you do you just don't see it because they only share the good things so don't compare yourself to other developers and then number three is the infinite dep depth of programming and there's always a new language framework Library Paradigm there's always this new stuff to learn and again the more you learn the more you discover how much you don't know and that gives you a feeling of insufficiency and then number four is lack of visible milestones in programming progress isn't always tangible so if you're let's say an artist you can create physical pieces that others can see and praise you for uh I mean of course if you build a full application or website you have that but a lot of times our progress is in a few lines of code or a subtle performance Improvement so it doesn't hit the same as some of the other professions you also don't get that Ty same type of praise and number five is imposture syndrome and that is where you feel like you're in a position that you're not qualified for and you feel like a fraud in many cases this just isn't true so it's very possible that you just feel like you're not progressing but you actually are and that's why you should never compare yourself to others compare yourself to yourself last month or last year and then you'll start to see how much you've actually grown so some things that you can do to to look for signs that you've actually grown are ask yourself do you understand Concepts that you used to struggle with do you recognize errors faster or debug faster um do you find yourself helping others with their code and being a teacher really helped me boost my confidence and it still does when I'm feeling this way um is your approach to problem solving more systematic than before uh and look at your pro your projects are they better than they used to be so really examine your work and re-evaluate your your if you're actually stagnant or if that's just how you feel um now I want to look at some reasons to over overcome feeling stagnant so number one set small achievable goals and break down your your learning into manageable chunks for instance instead of just thinking I want to learn react focus on building a certain application a certain project with react in let's say two weeks and map out each step even if it's a tiny project and this will give you a better overall sense of accomplishment like you've done something rather than just learn react also number two know where you want to go in your career and there's uh there's so many areas of software development if you're just flailing and you don't know which direction you want to go in this can make you feel stuck because you're not working toward a specific goal so there's no way to really track your progress so sit down and really think about where you want your journey to end up write it down as well so you can reference it when you need to and that brings me to the next one which is reflect on your progress and you can do this by keeping a journal or a document where you note what you've learned each week you know reviewing past entries can remind you of a of how far you've come and then you want to celebrate small wins if you solve a tricky bug or you learn a new library or whatever it is um celebrate that and realize that that's another step forward number five learn to embrace the process uh programming it's it's all about problem solving not just writing perfect code shifting your focus from the outcome to the process can really reduce that pressure that that makes you um feel like you always have to be better and then you want to limit comparisons I know this is the third time I'm mentioning this in this video but it's so important um to not compare yourself to others or anyone else but yourself unless you know someone else's failures it's never a valid comparison and people don't walk around bragging about their failures so next build something that you're passionate about I've experienced burnout a lot in my career and one of the things that always brings me back is creating a project that has to do with something I'm really interested in and this will remind you why you got into programming in the first place whether it's sports or or some hobby you have just anything you like and then lastly join a community I know that developers AR aren't usually the most social beings including myself but joining some kind of community whether it's online or an in-person Meetup it'll boost your confidence because you'll actually get to share your knowledge with other people and get some feedback so that's my advice guys if you're feeling like you're not progressing the way that you want many times it's it's really a matter of your point of view also if you're feeling burnt out it's okay to take a break for a few days if possible maybe do something fun and relaxing and come back fresh so hopefully you enjoyed this video and I know that it's really been slow on the channel lately mostly because I've been putting all my time into this nextjs e-commerce course um but once that's done which it should be in the next like 3 weeks or so then I'll start to to get back to the YouTube stuff