Ask HN: Struggling to make progress at my internship

When I first read this post, I thought it might have come from the guy I am mentoring. I actually linked him the post and he said that it's unnerving how this post totally reflects himself.

I am writing this for both you and him.

Do you remember learning how to drive? Remember how the instructor would point things out to you that you didn't even notice? "Watch out for that car", "you are drifting to close to the right", "you are going over the speed limit", "it's your turn to go" etc etc.

If you have driven for a few years you can now go on auto-pilot. Somedays you might wonder, how did I even get to my house? You remember getting into the car and presto you are now at your house.

You are experiencing the same thing with your work. Three months in an internship is nothing. It's an hour of driving practice. Even after 10 years there are still things that will trip you up. New technologies that you don't understand. Or worse depth in technologies you do understand and use daily that you still don't grasp. Hint: This is a good thing, and it will happen to your for your entire career, otherwise it means you have stopped growing.

I have some good news for you though. You really enjoy what you do, you find it interesting. Do you realize how rare that is? Depending on the statistics you look at 45-85% of people dislike their jobs. Welcome to the 20%.

So now let's discuss the source of your angst. It's hard. There are so many things you don't understand, code that makes no sense, and the silent killer...you are no longer as smart as you thought you were because you are surrounded by really smart people.

You know what used to get me? I would spend five days working on something. Flustered, angry and disappointed I would talk to a Sr Dev trying to explain why the thing I was trying to do wasn't working, and in the middle of explaining the problem he would give me an answer that not only dealt with my problem, but it was simpler, more elegant and had none of the implementation issues I was facing. There is nothing more soul crushing than deleting 150 lines of code that doesn't work, to replace them with 3 lines of code that works perfectly. That keen awareness that if they were working on your story, they would be done in 5 minutes, not 5 days. It's instances like that, that the whole 10x developer ideas comes from.

That pain is learning. Part of what we do is learning how to think effectively. You need experience to do that. You need to get stuck. To see the simpler implementation that is so much better. To see better code and marvel at its beauty. The same way reading about driving doesn't really teach you to drive, college / personal code projects are not the same as writing code for a company, especially a well established one.

Nowadays, I am on the other side. Ironically, it's the same. If nothing else, it's more complicated. My decisions now have a wider range of effect. I have to mitigate more effectively. I think both long and short term strategy. So what you learn now, will apply forever.

So here are my tips:

1. Chunk your work into smaller chunks. Create an outline of what you want to do. There is a certain art into this but essentially you want to stop the overwhelm of vagueness. When in doubt smaller chunks are better.

Ex. We create blue and red widgets. roboticsGuy create purple widgets too

...chunking time

Figure out where the widget code is

Understand what the widget is

Where is the color blue vs red being defined

Create a branch

Add purple definition

Test

Ask for a Code Review

Merge it

Then you go through your list one by one. Make notes, be it handwritten, in a document it doesn't matter.

2. Bug Sr Devs, another intern, people on the street with questions. Worse case scenario you might have to wait for them to respond. In reality I have found that most people like helping. It feels wei...

Build real relationships where you are at so that you have something to stand on when you venture out on your own.

Plus if you have people in your corner you are less likely to get fired if you fail to accomplish a task up to par. I definitely am not saying to be a kiss ass but instead to find meaningful valuable relationships with mentors and partners so that you can build a life of your dreams, and not just look at the opportunity as a job.

Blessings in your endeavours, keep praying.