Hi. I've been working at my first job now for about six months. It's a non gamedev but enterprise software product company.

In my humble opinion the codebase is pretty nasty with millions of gotchas, but then again I don't have much to compare with.

I often doubt my abilities as a developer since it feels like if I implement or fix 5 features I also create 3-4 bugs.

Edsger Dijkstra: If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in.

It is hard to compare directly, some codebases just have more bug traps due to poorly defined practises, silent or lack of error handling and vague requirements.

That said, if you're unhappy with your feature:bug ratio perhaps you should spend a little more time when developing them. For example, writing more unit tests, or moving to a test driven process. Taking a little time to think about things that are likely to go wrong when adding new features, and the impact the feature will have on the rest of the program. This could involve a little research to see what impact your changes will have on a given subsystem you are unfamiliar with.

Prepare a list of bugs you have created when adding new features, and see if there is a common pattern in them. Try to incorporate knowledge of the kind of bugs you create into your process of testing and writing new code.

I wish I had the time to do just that, but there is just too much pressure to get stuff out of the door.

I've heard that the employment turnover is quite bad. About 20-25 people in 8 years in a company of about 10 employees.

I often doubt my abilities as a developer since it feels like if I implement or fix 5 features I also create 3-4 bugs.

Seems like progress to me.

As for confidence - few people are really confident. Curiosity and sheer desire to learn lessen the effect on a conscious level, but ultimately it always boils down to how you handle your lack of confidence, especially among peers and in public in general. The best solution, IMO, is to just keep learning and perfecting your craft until such unconfidence is naturally replaced with know-how and experience. Which is just a fancy way to say that it's a good sign that you show and acknowledge a lack of confidence as that directly shows that you care enough to improve yourself.

As for the question in the topic, we're pretty much all born the same so there's your measure

I've heard that the employment turnover is quite bad. About 20-25 people in 8 years in a company of about 10 employees.

25-30% new employees/year. Sounds like a pretty stable work environment ;)

Fixing bugs is no fun, but this is the reality of any job in software. You will come into a pre-existing codebase and work with the code beforehand that 30+ people have touched over several years.So right now your doing good, and that's what companies look for.

Hi. I've been working at my first job now for about six months. It's a non gamedev but enterprise software product company.

In my humble opinion the codebase is pretty nasty with millions of gotchas, but then again I don't have much to compare with.

I often doubt my abilities as a developer since it feels like if I implement or fix 5 features I also create 3-4 bugs.

I think that's to be expected. You can't really know what to expect until you try something. No matter how smart you are you can't predict all potential out comes for anything. Even large cooperations fail to predict things which is why they have resorted to beta testing.

How often do you doubt yourself?

I'm not sure.

[color=#1C2837][size=2][s]As for confidence - few people are really confident.[/s] Curiosity and sheer desire to learn lessen the effect on a conscious level, but ultimately it always boils down to how you handle your lack of confidence, especially among peers and in public in general. The best solution, IMO, is to just keep learning and perfecting your craft until such unconfidence is naturally replaced with know-how and experience. Which is just a fancy way to say that it's a good sign that you show and acknowledge a lack of confidence as that directly shows that you care enough to improve yourself.

^^ this one.

I do have confidence.

On one hand, I am confident that I am human, that I don't understand everything in the system with so many moving parts, and that I will continue to make mistakes until I die. While this might be seen as negative, it is just life. Everyone makes mistakes, occasionally everyone will make some really big mistakes. The more you do the more mistakes you will make.

If there is a bug I assume it was my error.

If my work didn't make it through the pipeline I assume I missed a step.

If the animation doesn't play when I run it through code, I assume my code is bad and the animator did his job right.

If I'm not sure where the error is I will enlist help to track it down, all the while assuming that I am doing something wrong until it is proven otherwise.

The computer only does what it is told. Animators and artists and audio guys create data, they don't create instruction. If the computer is doing something wrong, I assume I gave it the wrong instructions and that generally is the case.




But that is not all I am confident about.

I am confident that whatever I did wrong, I also have the ability to eventually identify it, correct it, and avoid the mistake in the future. Or if I didn't do it wrong, I am confident that I can still identify it, correct it, and get better at handling that type of situation in the future.



Big projects that last many years can have many tens of thousands of issues. A large percentage of them are programming bugs. But programming bugs aren't the only bugs; there are art bugs, animation bugs, design bugs, translation bugs, and many more. Nobody is perfect, and team leadership know this. Accept that you make mistakes and learn from them as best you can.

To echo what people have been saying: confidence is acquired through time and experience.

I had been in your shoes. I know exactly how you feel where people around you are way smarter than you and they lecture you about good practices, and they are correct. And I could still be in that position down the road. The key is to keep an open mind and learn.