It doesn’t depend on the student. Every developer starts out as a dumbass. There are an infinite number of sharp edges in software and we all cut ourselves on all of them.
This forum is the closest thing I get to coworkers and I don't even understand what half of you are saying. I'm fortunate for the opportunities that I have, but my antisocial tendencies and lack of professional peers can make progress a bit of a bear on occasion.
I have often thought about trying to build a network of like-minded individuals. Of course, it doesn't come naturally. If it did, there wouldn't be a need for it!
My contact info is in my profile, feel free to reach out.
> when I'm going to either stop cutting myself on things
Never. You (should) get better at recognising some of the themes and danger signs, but the field evolves so fast that at some point you are going to work with something so new that literally nobody knows what the sharp edges are.
> land a position with some people who can show me their cool scars for a while.
Meetups, slack, discord, IRC, forums. Find the one that works for you and be a regular. Be an expert in one subject and be modest and willing to learn when it comes to others. Nobody has it all figured out.
It's a definite time sink to learn these lessons, but it's of real value to me personally.
... I'm still a dumbass...
I wonder... if after 10 years... will I stop being one after 20? 30?
I hope you find that place in your life too. It's a lot of relief when it happens
While that may be true, you're less of a dumbass now, thanks to experiences. If you were to guide a junior developer now, you'd probably walk them back from a dozen sharp edges, thanks to your experience, but we tend to discount that.
This will have taken your younger self , twice or more to understand the problem and come up with solution
Last Friday learned that Postgres (and apparently MySQL) will effectively ignore an index in a column when combining “ORDER BY … LIMIT …” and “WHERE some_column IN some_array”. I had introduced a query that timed out on a critical prod table , fixed it by removing the limit, and turned it into a teaching moment to others who could have made the same mistake: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8909163/avoid-full-table...
But the feeling of being a dumbass may never leave you entirely. You will need to learn to control that some, and not always let on to everyone around you how dumb you feel at all times. But... honestly, the folks I've worked with who never ever admit to feeling dumb or doing dumb things - they STILL make the same mistakes, often more, and seem to have no capacity for self-reflection or skills improvement. So... understand your "I'm a dumbass" feeling may just be part of you pointing out that you can get better, and help you find opportunities to improve.
As you say, self reflection and skill improvement.
I honestly think it's why I'm a good programmer...
That... and being lazy. I'll work for weeks to make processes easier. IE: a release process that used to be manual and fraught with mistakes is now, more or less, button clicks and powershell scripts.