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On Feeling Stupid as an Early-Career Software Engineer
You spend half a day stuck on one bug before you ask your more senior teammate for help. They look at it, click around the codebase a bit, change one of the parameters you’re passing, and it’s fixed in 10 minutes. That’s when the imposter syndrome kicks in, at least for me — “That was so obvious. Why couldn’t I figure it out? Am I even smart enough to be a programmer?”
A lot of non-engineers, students, and early-career engineers associate being a good programmer with being “smart”. I’ve heard friends say “I’m not smart enough to be a programmer” and “he’s a software engineer; he must be so smart!”. I feel weird about how often I hear “smart” associated with software engineering, because after a few years of working in industry it’s clear that there are many other skills involved: teamwork, mentorship, and time management, just to name a few. But for this article, I’ll ignore all of those and just share my thoughts on smartness as a concept; what does being smart mean, anyway?
In 1963, a psychologist named Raymond Cattell conceptualized that there are two distinct forms of intelligence, fluid and crystallized. When people say “smart” in the context of programming, they’re usually thinking of fluid intelligence — the ability to solve novel problems using abstract reasoning. Examples of fluid intelligence include solving puzzles and seeing patterns in statistical data.
But the thing is, the problem you got stuck on likely wasn’t a completely novel problem for your senior teammate. It’s more likely that they’d encountered a similar problem before, and recalled and applied the solution from that previous encounter. This is crystallized intelligence — a person’s knowledge base of learned facts and procedures. Other examples are vocabulary and remembering quotes from your favorite movie. While fluid intelligence peaks in your late twenties, crystallized intelligence increases with age and experience throughout adulthood.
Another example of what you might assume to be fluid intelligence: your more senior teammate integrates a new library that improves a screen’s loading time by 5 seconds. Their…
