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Comment by pcowans | Hacker News Reader

Stop defining success in terms of praise from others. At best you'll spend your time doing unfulfilling work and not learning much, and at worst you'll be manipulated.

From the discussion in this thread I don't believe that you're a particularly effective developer - it seems you're used to playing the hero programmer role and have been too poorly managed for anyone to question that. Your descriptions of the C++ STL show that you don't know what you don't know, and if I were working with you I'd be asking all sorts of questions about what was going to jump out of your code and bite us further down the line.

You're probably smart and have a lot of potential, you just need to realise that there is a vast amount that you don't know.

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I know there are lots of stuff I don`t know.

What bothers me very much is that there are seemly noone ever to look at my code and say what I could have done better, or tell me what I should be knowing.

In fact I asked as birthday gift to my grandmother to import the special edition of Bjarne book because I concluded that the only way to improve my C++ pratically now is just work my ass off trying to learn the whole damn thing, because noone will teach me.

And not wanting to be too much pedantic, but std != STL

Yeah - that's life, the people who will tell you what to do next are few and far between, and you need to demonstrate that you deeply care about them (possibly in ways you don't yet understand) before they'll reciprocate the favour.

And am I confused here? I'm interpreting std as the namespace in which most of the C++ Standard Template Library lives. I assumed you were using them synonymously, because I've never heard anyone refer to std as anything more than a symbol used in STL code. Maybe there's a different acronym I'm not aware of though.

... having said that, on a good team there will be a culture of code review. Have you ever asked for feedback on your code?

I rarely get a good team.

Not the lack of the good, but the lack of a team.

Usually I am tasked into solo or soloish positions.

But I think this is kinda expected, considering what I work with ( mobile games and non-web apps, where most of the time one coder is enough, also small indie games for other platforms, that rarely have more than one coder )

So, at least we've got from 'I'm too gifted to learn from anyone' to 'I'm in a difficult position without access to peers to learn from', which sounds more plausible and is probably worth sticking with.

I guess you have two options really - find another job that will give you access to a team, or start doing something to give you contact with programmers outside of work, whether that's getting involved with an open source project, finding a meet-up to go to, taking a class, etc. In any case, approaching it with an appropriate level of humility is probably a good idea.

... and finally, teaching yourself C++ from a book isn't exactly unusual. I'm entirely self taught, and I'm sure a lot of other people here are too.

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