Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship
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The author shares their personal confessions as a software developer, embracing vulnerability and openness about their flaws and knowledge gaps. The post has sparked a positive discussion around the importance of honesty and transparency in the tech industry. Commenters appreciate the author's courage and vulnerability, and reflect on the benefits of being more open about one's limitations.
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Nov 28, 2025 at 5:21 PM EST
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I wish we'd be more open about our flaws and knowledge gaps in general. I think we'd all benefit.
I used to also fear appearing incompetent if I admitted to not knowing too many things, so I would avoid showing my knowledge gaps whenever possible.
However, this colleague was the exact opposite. He would gleefully tell people he had no idea how to do certain things, would be a ready listener when the person he was talking to explained how it worked, and would heap praise on the person for their knowledge and teaching skills. He would always defer to other people as experts when he didn’t know, and would make sure our bosses and coworkers knew who had helped him and how much they knew about the topic.
What I saw and experienced was that this did NOT, in any way shape or form, make people think less of him. It did the exact opposite. First, it made people REALLY happy to help him with stuff; he made you feel so smart and capable when you explained things and helped him, everyone jumped at the opportunity to show him things. He learned so much because he made everyone excited to teach him, and made his coworkers feel smart and appreciated for their knowledge.
And then, when he did speak with confidence on a subject, everyone knew he wasn’t bullshitting, because we knew he never faked it. Since he gave everyone else the chances to be the expert and deferred all the time, you didn’t get the one-upmanship you often get when tech people are trying to prove their bonafides. People were happy to listen to him because he first listened to them.
I have really tried to emulate him in my career. I go out of my way to praise and thank people who help me, always try to immediately admit where my skills and experience lack, and don’t try to prove myself in subjects I don’t really know that well. It has worked well for me in my career, as well.
Also, I am not sure how not touching computers after work is a bad thing; people can have families and other hobbies?
No not bad per se, but it did clearly show that, without on the job courses, why all of them are stuck in the early 2000s tech wise.
They don't even have a main() any more, it's great
(obviously it's not but it is super nice that main in Rust is just:)
I don't know if I could tell you with confidence the proper way to get a string length in any language. Is it a global function or an object method or property? Is it length or count or size? I have to look it up or rely on intellisense every time. I do too much bouncing between languages.
Well, I know it in BASIC. Len().
def main(): # code
The dunder syntax you see around isn't required; it just is for if you are having your module be both an application and library, which is not a pattern I use.
A “Confessions of a Software Developer” website where devs can come in and make anonymous confessions.
Honestly, if there's any chance the content they posted on your profile before locking you out comes close to defamation, I'd consider talking to a lawyer about it. It could be that getting one to send them a cease-and-desist letter on your behalf could take care of the problem.
I've generally found conversation there to be more respectful, all things considered, when compared to HN.
This leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.
Sadly, it seems like nothing was learned, since he settles only for diminishing his culpability in anti-social behaviour. He goes so far as to describe, in his blog post, his code as an "AI-assisted patch". When you profess that you don't even know the language of the code that the LLM generated, there is no "assistance" about it, you're at the deepest end of vibe coding. And in submitting it to an open-source project, you're making a maintainer spend more time and effort reviewing it than you did writing it, which is not sustainable. Moreover, if the maintainer wanted a pure-LLM-generated solution, there was nothing stopping them from hopping over and typing in a prompt themselves.
> you're advocating for a toxicly positive carebear forum
Please stop putting words in my mouth.
https://lobste.rs/c/mejg0v
One guess would be that the word 'torture' triggers people, even when it has nothing to do with error-prone medieval-style confession optimization.
But anyway, I think your take-away makes sense. Different venues offer different kinds of community and support (or brow-beating). Hopefully you find other places for that -- or, if this is a big enough problem for you and you have constructive ideas, write 'em up.
Being bad at problem solving with people far away is just another problem you can solve with practice. Same as being bad at problem solving even when help is right next to you.
Yes, "remote work sucks" is reductive, but I elaborated beyond the title. Also, I wouldn't disagree with "office work sucks." Remote work simply has its warts, too.
> just another problem you can solve with practice
Perhaps, but practice alone clearly isn't enough. I've been working remotely since 2020 and it hasn't gotten more enjoyable. I would love to solve that problem, though. I read _Remote: Office Not Required_ by Jason Fried in the past, but that was written a long time ago. I've added more recent works (_Effective Remote Work_ by James Stanier and _The Async-First Playbook_ by Sumeet Gayathri Moghe) to my reading list.
Work sucks in general. Remote work is of course not perfect, but its problems need to be compared against non-remote work problems..
And this is my biggest complaint about arguments about remote working. People turn it into something that’s evidence-based when actually it’s a deeply subjective topic and thus different personality types thrive in different working environments.
Thus it is always going to be an emotional argument rather than an empirical one.
But comparisons aside, some people will just argue over anything. Such as the meta debate we’re having right now over the stuff people will argue about. ;)
People not wanting others to indirectly force them to relocate, work additional unpaid commute hours and pay for it is not "emo". It's a critical fight.
The cost of my utilities? Listen, I don't know know much electricity costs where you are, but the cost or running an extra computer is pennies a day. The cost of internet is set for me. We might talk about the increased cost of heating and cooling, but I was never one of those people who turned their system off when gone because that doesn't make literally any sense with my utility's time based pricing. It's literally cheaper to let it run as it is than than do that.
As for space and confidential items. I'm not sure ahat to say. I don't have thieves coming in and out of my house and I have a password good enough to defend the casual nosy child or relative. I have an office now because I have a house, but I have worked remotely in smaller spaces and it was never any problem. At least not compared to commuting 1 hour being, although I have commuted up to 2 hours on bad traffic days which were not particularly rare occurrences. And this is just have it is in all the cities I have lived. Perhaps not all cities, but the two metropolitan areas I have lived within and in the suburbs of. Living within the city didn't even guarantee me a reasonable commute.
If the trade off is a company getting a corner or a room I wasn't using anyway plus a few dollars of electricity subsidy and I get several hundred dollars in my time measure by my pay rate not commuting plus a couple dollar in not spending it on gas, I am happy to trade that. I'm also capable of putting my computer away and safely like literally anything else I own.
I also don't worry about the isolation that people mention (although not you here) because I have a vibrant social life. As someone who was never the typical demographic of the field, I have neve depending on socializing with my coworkers in office for social fulfillment. I still somehow maintain the correct level of social comraderie via digital means. Remote work doesn't mean not interacting with your coworkers at all.
Because corpo clowns want to put leash back on everyone after corona.
Apparently for RTO you don't need any reasons, but for some reason you have to defend remote work with evidence.
We were doing remote work effectively decades ago. Don't have hallway conversations to fix bugs? Easy, just post your problems on the team chat and someone (often one of several people) would love to drop by to help.
I'm not sure exactly all of the forces that have led to this changing so much, but I'm certain that merely blaming "remote work" isn't it.
Somehow we were better at using remote tools while literally in the same office than some teams are at using them now while fully remote.
Some people consider email something you MUST answer ASAP, others can have 9000 unanswered emails without an issue. They'll get around to it.
And with chat, some think it's real-time and expect an answer in seconds, others will check $chat_app a few times a day like email and reply.
I personally prefer chat, because you can use it asynchronously, BUT you can escalate to near real-time if everyone is present at the same time. You can have an actual "conversation" via chat - you can't do that with email.
In electronic chat I can ask someone to explain their question and wait for it in writing. In person, I often have to listen to them stumble over the concept because they didn’t think about what they wanted to ask before asking it.
In a video call I can clearly see the other person’s screen and zoom in on what I’m trying to look at. In person I have to lean over their desk and squint at the right angle.
Consider the effort to accommodate those preferences though. Accommodating a video call preference is easy. Same for chat. Accommodating a preference for face-to-face requires spending an hour (2x average US commute) traveling to meet you. That's quite a significant ask for the other person.
I couldn't agree more. I pushed to get the place I worked for to use Slack when it first launched, moving us off AIM (ha!). Our use of Slack when we shared an office in the twenty-teens was so much better than the use I've seen of Slack/competitors on fully-remote teams.
Arbitrary discretion in the exercise of power is the bedrock of our society.
I’ve managed to be invited or told of them after ingratiating myself to the teams, or more often, after quitting and getting invited as one of the “good ones”
They all know that every word on company shit is being monitored
Sometimes you just want to vent and call your boss a fuckhead and it only takes one time in a persons life to see HR punishing/firing/admonishing someone for conduct on company communication channels that would have been perfectly fine in any other setting, for that person to never trust in the “company culture”
There is no environment where messy human beings fit into the perfect set of rules and behavior that companies demand
IME building up communication skills (including when and what to communicate) comes with experience.
I'm currently in feeling things out phase with my current team, and people seem really laid back about responding to messages - but it also seems like we're getting stuff done. Hard to figure.
Notification fatigue is a thing and people are just used to ignoring notifications and messages nowadays which ends up with slow responses and poor communication all around.
This is sort of the point. Remote tools work great when you have spent a lot of time building relationships and rapport with the people involved. That's hard to do in professional settings, and extremely hard to do in remote professional settings.
Letting teams that know each other well work remotely works great. Building teams remotely is very hard.
I'm a diehard for remote work, but we have to be realistic abouts limitations.
It requires to be comfortable exposing lack of knowledge or saying weird things to peers, and be confident it will be taken in good faith. As you point out, that requires a whole level of culture building.
Ok, gonna go read it.
> as a starting point
Even you disagree with the author :) But yeah, a team with the power to change its own processes, rather than have Agile imposed on it, isn't a team that's cargo-culting an Agile Brand).
(Last couple of months I've been introduced to "resrospective story points"; we're supposed to fill in how many points the ticket actually took after we've done it. I haven't yet found the words to express what I think of this).
That's the thing... Agile processes do position themselves as a starting point, and suggest that once the team understands it by living it (but not sooner!) they might adapt it and customize it.
From The Art of Agile Development, 2nd Edition by James Shore et al. (the most recent eXtreme Programming book, if you will):
> As a result, although it’s tempting to customize your Agile method from the beginning, it’s best to start with a by-the-book approach. The practices that are the least familiar are the ones that are most tempting to cut, but they’re the ones you need most, if you’re really going to be Agile. They’re the ones that involve the biggest change in philosophy.
> Mastering the art of Agile development requires real-world experience using a specific, well-defined Agile method. Start with a by-the-book approach. Put it into practice—the whole thing—and spend several months refining your usage and understanding why it works. Then customize. Choose one of the rough edges, make an educated guess about what happens, and repeat.
From The Scrum Book by Jeff Sutherland et al.:
> It’s important to understand the rules, and it’s even useful to follow them most of the time. But reading the rulebook of chess won’t make you a great chess player. After learning the rules, the player then learns about common strategies for the game; the player may also learn basic techniques at this level. Next is learning how to combine strategies you learn from others while maybe adding some of your own. Ultimately, one can transcend any formalism and proceed from the cues one receives from one’s center, from one’s instinct. [...]
> Some day, long from now, you may even outgrow these patterns as you evolve them and define your own. There are no points for doing Scrum, and these patterns are the gate through which a highly driven team passes on the road to the top echelons of performance.
That’s pretty weird and uncomfortable and I don’t know that I would want to work with someone like that in or out of office.
Sure it applies to things like random people on social media and such, but after a mutual exchange or two you should be over it.
Text requires correctness to some extent; bullshitters will just yap away for hours and nobody can point to one piece of text and say "Here, this is where you are objectively wrong, and/or misrepresenting things".
The unfortunate reality of remote work is there's a lot of zoom meetings where yappers in high places will BS away -- a lot more "important" zoom meetings than "important chats", especially in public.
Perhaps it’s useful to have these people in the office, in a room of mirrors, where they can listen to themselves talk all day.
They would be right: HR will get access to everything you ever posted in a company chat if they have a reason to check. Some people don’t care, some… do.
Yes it absolutely is formal communication. Microsoft makes this painfully clear with how they market teams.
I agree, but this may mostly be pointing out they are not very good/qualified at whatever they are doing tbh.
Kind of a ship of theseus situation culture wise - when the original leaders are all gone, did they pick good successors to fill their spots? Very often not.
Have a senior leadership team and want them to not tell you bad news when you are the CEO/Leader? Then link their salary/performance to metrics like number of production incidents their team has. Suddenly the number of incidents that you know of decreases.
If that does not work then link their salaries to a metric like number of projects finished before or at deadline and watch how tech debt increases multiple folds and how everything is suddenly estimates are increasing all over the place.
Want people not to ask meaningful hard questions in All Hands? Just make sure anyone that seems critical be labeled as not culture fit and done. All questions are positive and nice. Make sure to always ask for name and disable any anonymous questions asked.
Not trying to say metrics are bad or they should not be used. But they are not pure functions :) they do have side effects and sometimes very large ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
At first they said it was "great". But it soon turned sour and resulted in "it seems like you spend too much time answering questions", and I could "focus" and "free up" that time to work on my assigned tasks.
Well, I don't answer anything anymore. In fact nobody does.
It used to be that you got precise technical answers from someone directly working on the tool or problem you asked about. Not anymore.
Now people ask, but nobody answers. The rest has devolved into LinkedIn style self-promotions and announcements.
It also has access to our internal wikis, GitHub, and other internal tools.
People weren’t assholes and/or snowflakes in those days. Implicit in being on the net was that you were fairly well behaved.
The main difference is that more spaces were quasi-professional and non-pseudonymous, in that one largely got one’s internet access and identity (IP address, email address, invitation) from the institution of higher learning one attended or worked for. So there were direct, two or three degrees separation consequences (my boss knows someone at your institution) in those spaces. I suppose this is what you are referring to.
But away from those spaces were many places that were just as bad as they are now.
The internet has always (in my time of using it, which is all of my adult life as someone who is over half a century old) demonstrated that a good culture is a question of starting conditions and quick maintenance actions.
A non-trivial amount of the worst behaviour I have personally witnessed on the internet happened before the year 2000.
That’s not to say there’s more vitriol today; it’s swung the opposite direction, where newbies expect to have answers handed to them, or worse, they’ll post AI slop and then be genuinely surprised when someone asks them to explain it, or to show their work.
I don’t think that people should be belittled, but I also think it’s unrealistic to expect that experienced people should patiently teach every newcomer the same things over and over, without them having put in the minimum effort of reading docs.
I’m reminded of something I saw once on Twitter from a hiring manager who said that the best signal they had was whether a candidate had a homelab. This was met with criticism from many, who bizarrely accused him of being classist, since “not everyone has time to do that for fun.”
For the 70s, I would agree with you. But the moment home users, and particularly kids, gained access to the internet, you started to see a subculture of trolling.
Source: I was one of those 80s kids. It’s not something I’m proud of, but writing bots to troll message boards and scrapers for porn and warez played just as significant role in my journey into my IT profession as writing games on 8bit micros.
And everyone was in on it. We were all trolling, and being trolled, and perfectly well aware of what trolling was. But now people deliberately target and exploit the vulnerable on the internet.
As for security, that was always an issue. Malware, denial of services attacks, etc aren’t a recent phenomena. And hacking was so prevalent that even Hollywood caught wind, hence the slew of hacker movies in the 80s and 90s (Wargames, TRON, Hackers, Anti Trust, Swordfish, Lawnmower Man, and so on and so forth).
The problem isn’t that internet etiquette has gotten worse. The problem is that there is so much more online these days that the attack surface has grown by several orders magnitude. Like how there’s more road accidents now than there was in the 70s despite driving tests progressively getting tougher (in most countries). People aren’t worse drivers, there’s just more roads and busier with more vehicles.
Early 2000s, public channel on a LAN with ~3k people in a post soviet country – say something stupid to a wrong person and you'll find yourself with a broken nose, because the guy/gal is a friend of the admin.
I was just responding to the generalisation made by the GP.
I typically have busy but important channels muted with a carve out for @mentions, watercooler channels are just muted but I check on them a few times a day.
There's nothing new here, there's no problem to solve. Doesn't matter if you're anonymous or publicly identifiable. 90% of people don't contribute, they just consume. 9% contribute occasionally. And 1% are regular contributors.
The 1% or 90-9-1 rule is pretty well known.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
I think this is merely the shift from doing this as a hobby, to doing this for work. Random coding problems mixed with banter I posted or answered on IRC back in the day? Purely hobby stuff, things I done after school instead of doing my homework. No stakes beyond the community itself, I could disengage at any moment, nobody would care - there was no commitment of any kind involved.
Today? Even if we switched back from Slack/Teams/whatnot to IRC, the fact remains, the other people are my co-workers, and we're talking about work, and it's all made of commitments and I can't disengage, or else I starve.
That changes the dynamic quite a bit.
Smartphones changed that with Youtube and Facebook. Youtube incentivized you to use a Google account, and Facebook wouldn't let you use it anonymously without an account. Because you could use one account to log into multiple places people could track you across websites. People could make archives, screenshots, and transcriptions of anything you had done with those linked accounts. With this change there was no safe corner to hide if you said something stupid. And because so many people were foolish enough to tie their real identities to these online accounts with their real names or pictures of themselves, it gave a way for particularly unruly people to track these individuals even offline. There was now a real danger if you said something stupid, because instead of just getting your post deleted or starting a derailment in the thread people could harass you at your home, get you fired, and even send the police to terrorize you in the middle of the night via SWAT raids. It's no longer just one person calling you out. It's now hundreds, maybe even thousands, all armed with information.
And this is why I say it's stupid to require phone numbers and real names to sign up for insignificant things like being able to view someone bake a duck shaped cake live over the internet.
There's not need for 'not sure' or 'somehow' - when average IQ is 20-30 points higher, life is better.
I certainly hope that was a tongue in cheek joke.
It’s great to be open about gaps in what you know, but it’s also important to follow through and close those gaps. Especially if you’re interested in writing about a topic to help people understand.
A good reminder that everything we say/hear/write/read exists in the unseen context of all the things we believe we should not say.