Ask HN: How do you handle the fear of complexity? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you handle the fear of complexity?

4 pointszuzuleinen4 comments

I'm working as a software developer and sometimes I feel a certain anxiety when starting a new complex task.

I would like to get rid of this unpleasant feeling of initial frustration because I feel it's holding me back.

Sometimes I see software developers working on complex tasks without being afraid to start them and they somehow ignore the frustration of working with complex tasks.

I was wondering if there is someone here who had same issue and how they managed to get rid of it.

Thanks!

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In the end, every complex task is made up by a lot of simple ones.

Always do research before starting on the actual development. It will clear up a lot of things on the very beginning. Helps you create milestones (goals), which can give you confidence when you reach them. The more you practice this, the easier it will be to see the details in new projects in the future. Helps you create an analytical mindset.

I think everyone suffers from this, from time to time. Only practice can help you overcome this.

I had the same feeling a couple of months ago with a brand new project, with lots of tech I haven't used before. But we (another dev and myself) sat down and spent a month with research. We wrote numerous documents on every aspect of the project. Spent a week in a meeting room shelling out the design and how things will fit together. It was a priceless experience.

Highly recommend the R&D approach. We are engineers and it seems so many times we fail to do the R(esearch) part of our work. We just jump right in and drown in the middle of the complexity we face.

Another example I should mention here to prove the great value of Research.

I had a project years ago, was working alone on it. Took months to complete, but the whole application was a small disaster. Lots of small bugs and UX issues.

Made up my mind, sat down, rewrote the whole thing in two weeks. Was 70% better then the first version.

The lesson is that I could have spent a month or two with Research and create a clear goal, instead of writing an application from scratch with no clear goals, guidelines and milestones.

Could have saved a couple of months and lots of headaches. But I was fresh Dev back then and this is not taught in schools. Or at least it wasn't when I was there.

I think the first thing is to realize that this is normal. Whenever you start something that is outside of your comfort zone, you will most likely feel discomfort. So, trying to get rid of something that is normal won't really work :) However, what you can do is change the way you look at this discomfort. Ask yourself where it is coming from. Are you maybe afraid that you will fail? Once you see what causes the anxiety, you can start seeing it for what it is: just a feeling that comes and goes.

I follow Polya's advice, and find a part of the problem that I know how to solve. Divide and conquer, basically. I think the panic comes from overload, from trying to visualize too many parameters. I've been doing this for 30 years, but I still get the same experience every time I step out of my comfort-zone.

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