The key to learning fast is looking dumb
A common trait I see in new developers is the fear of looking dumb. I know because I had the same concern. I thought that seeming stupid would cause others to question my capabilities and affect my career progression.
Nothing could have been further from the truth. To explain why, let me tell a quick story.
One of my first tasks as a software engineer was to investigate a bug for an important customer. They were experiencing timeouts from one of our API endpoints and it was impacting their workload. Since I was still new to the company, I wanted to prove to my team that I didn’t need hand-holding. To show them that they had hired the right person.
I spent hours parsing through the source code until I found the root of the problem: an inefficient SQL query. To fix the timeouts, I would need to optimize it. Unfortunately, the query was complex and took some time to understand what it did. But I was determined to fix the issue myself. I wasn’t a SQL expert by any means, but I knew enough. After all, how hard could it be to optimize one SQL query?
Very hard, apparently.
I spent the rest of that day and the next attempting to improve it. I got stuck and beat my head against the wall several times. But eventually, using Stack Overflow and lots of manual testing, I was able to…
