Well, in my opinion the view a young person can develop by reading a site like Hacker News is a skewed reality of what it is to be a software engineer, a hacker.
One example of this is what I will generically call the "Google Interview". I know brilliant engineers how have done massive non-trivial projects that have generated millions of dollars in revenue who could not pass such an interview.
The other aspect is the constant exposure to the language-of-the-day and framework-of-the-day club. I can see a young aspiring developer becoming utterly disappointed when realizing it is nearly impossible to keep up with it all. Where do you start? How do you learn this stuff? Someone could very easily think they are not up to par if they can't walk in these mythical shoes.
The truth is very different from that. There's a huge world out there for software engineers. There are real problems to be solved. And, no, not everything in software engineering lives and dies on a web browser or a smart phone.
Is the OP saying that she needed to feel like a hacker to feel legitimate? That would be sad.
What the hell is a hacker anyway? Definitions abound. In many ways it is more about how someone might approach hardware and software problems than anything else. You don't have to be YC material to be a legitimate software engineer. One could very easily argue there are tons of software engineers out there doing far more important work than almost any YC developer has done to date. Most of them are invisible. Think about the people writing code for MRI machines, aircraft avionics or even your car's ABS system.
If you are young and love software engineering please don't think that building websites is the only way you are going to become somebody in this business. Explore what's out there and dare to learn about other interesting problems you might be able to solve.
> Is the OP saying that she needed to feel like a hacker to feel legitimate? That would be sad.
Hi! I am not, and I agree that it would be sad. I am happy to be satisfied with who I am, what I do, and where I'm going. I may not identify with the term "hacker" due to some of its connotations, but I do feel like I get to playfully work on difficult things--one of the few definitions of a hacker I relate to and fortunately the one that I think best embodies its true spirit.
Unfortunately, many people I know who have yet to feel established in the field do feel at least a small need to relate to the "hacker" to feel like a software engineer. As there are parts of this I could relate to (even if they are not bringing me down right now), I thought I'd share my experiences.
You've accomplishe a lot. Realize you will never know everything there is to know in CS. How you approach what you don't know is what makes a difference.
There's a lot of folklore going around in places like HN. Very soon kids are going to think that if they don't use vim, reject the mouse and do away with Windows they will never be real software developers. It's a bunch of macho nonsense.
I started programming sprite and 3D demos in DirectDraw/Direct3D at age 11. I wrote a microkernel for a hobby in high school.
I'm in grad-school now, and I still don't feel like a "hacker" or a "real computer scientist", because I don't eat and drink RFCs, crypto specs, deep-learning algorithms, and every web technology under the sun. And because I'd much rather spend my time at an anime convention than A/B testing a new website feature or cross-validating a recommendation algorithm.
Plenty of very competent professionals are merely very good at what we do and not actually married to the job.
One example of this is what I will generically call the "Google Interview". I know brilliant engineers how have done massive non-trivial projects that have generated millions of dollars in revenue who could not pass such an interview.
The other aspect is the constant exposure to the language-of-the-day and framework-of-the-day club. I can see a young aspiring developer becoming utterly disappointed when realizing it is nearly impossible to keep up with it all. Where do you start? How do you learn this stuff? Someone could very easily think they are not up to par if they can't walk in these mythical shoes.
The truth is very different from that. There's a huge world out there for software engineers. There are real problems to be solved. And, no, not everything in software engineering lives and dies on a web browser or a smart phone.
Is the OP saying that she needed to feel like a hacker to feel legitimate? That would be sad.
What the hell is a hacker anyway? Definitions abound. In many ways it is more about how someone might approach hardware and software problems than anything else. You don't have to be YC material to be a legitimate software engineer. One could very easily argue there are tons of software engineers out there doing far more important work than almost any YC developer has done to date. Most of them are invisible. Think about the people writing code for MRI machines, aircraft avionics or even your car's ABS system.
If you are young and love software engineering please don't think that building websites is the only way you are going to become somebody in this business. Explore what's out there and dare to learn about other interesting problems you might be able to solve.