Ask HN: How to manage personal expectations and self-doubt when starting?
My biggest concern is the size/scale of what I'm working on. There are endless holes of methods and implementations, and I have no idea where I end up. For example, I see many classes/methods that basically just join other classes/methods. In my previous roles, where I was either coding just for my own consumption or had full leeway in choosing what and how to build, I knew where everything I did fit.
Just getting my dev environment set up was way over my head. I followed onboarding guides, but it was me typing in commands into my terminal and trusting it - I had no idea what it actually did.
I hear about imposter syndrome a lot but I feel like in those cases they have the skills and not the comfort, whereas I don't have the baseline altogether. I was a good interviewer, DS + algos/Leetcode interviews came naturally to me and I worked hard at them, but that's about it. Before switching I was excited because I felt it would be a great opportunity to learn how these big companies work tech-wise, but now I feel like I was handed the blueprints to the Soyuz spaceship in Braille and told to figure it out. I'm not exaggerating when I say I know 0 about what's going on. My team is extremely accommodating and tells me this is natural, but I feel like they're underestimating how far behind I am.
I'm not terrified about getting fired, but I'd still like to do well in this because it truly interests me. How can I keep myself in check and be honest as to when the "you'll get it with experience" period is over and it's just clear I'm not the right person?