1155 I'm A Developer And I'm Not Good At Design, What Should I Do? - Simple Programmer Podcast
05:35 Share

Welcome to the Simple Programmer Podcast. Making complex programming simple and fast. With everything from career advice to philosophy. It's the Simple Programmer Podcast.

Hey, what's up? John Sonmez from simpleprogrammer.com. I got this email from Fred and Fred wants to know, "What if you're expected to do something you're not good at?" Fred asked in his email essentially he's not really good at front end design type of work and what if you're expected to be a full stack developer, what do you do? I'm not really interested in web design.

I have to say, Fred, I've struggled with this myself because I'm not very good in design. I never really devoted time to it. It's always been on my back burner like, oh, I should learn design because then I could really be a full stack developer but I never learned the design part. Here's the thing.

I'll try to give you kind of specific advice in this case. If you want to be a full stack developer who can build something from the ground up you're going to have to just—you might not like design but you're going to have to suck it up and learn design, right? If you want that, if that's your goal. Here's why, because if you just keep on like cobbling together stuff and just like

Knowing that you'd be better if you could design this or just throwing up your hand and saying, well, that's the best I can do. I suck at designing, but here you go. It functions.

You're not going to be happy with that and you're going to be wasting a lot of time or you're going to be trying to do design and it's not going to look good and you're going to spend a lot of time doing it. Just suck it up and learn it if that's what you want to do. Otherwise, change your goal. Don't say, "I want to be a full stack developer that can design." Say, "I want to be a full stack backend developer."

or I can hook up the front end but I can't do—I can be—someone can give me a design and I can implement it full stack from the design. You got to define what that is, whether you want to be able to—I mean if you want to be able to build up your own kind of cool tools and stuff and you don't want to hire someone to do the design then you got to learn that. You got to just make that choice. I think that's the first thing. Then just in the more broad general sense what do you do when people expect you to learn something that you don't know or that you're not good at?

Again, you have a choice there. What's up, guys? John Sonmez here from simpleprogrammer.com. I want to tell you about my free blogging course that you can sign up for at simpleprogrammer.com/pblog. This free blogging course is going to tell you how to create a blog to boost your career. It's something that you definitely don't want to miss. Thousands of developers have already gone through the course, the free course that you're going to get by email and have learned how to create a blog

to boost their career, to make more money, and even to grow their own side business. It's something that every single developer should do, especially if you're a web developer, you should have your own blog. I'm going to show you exactly how to do it, how to be successful, how to get traffic, everything that you need to know about creating a blog and even making money from it. Just go to simpleprogrammer.com forward slash pblog to sign up now. Once again, it's simpleprogrammer.com forward slash pblog.

You have to decide whether that this is the environment that you want to be in. If you want to succeed

That's the environment that you're in. You've got to learn. You've got to suck it up. I've learned a lot of things that I don't want to learn because I needed to in order to be able to do my job or to be able to be as effective as possible. I've also drug my feet a lot not learning things that I should have learned and sort of muddling my way through it. That's the most uncomfortable feeling. When you learn something then you're confident. You know what to do. When you have this headspace

half-assed knowledge of a thing. I'll give you a concrete example. For a long time I was using N-hibernate and I never learned the thing. I just had a rough idea how to cobble things together. I could basically—it's like my solution was we'll just add some flushes there, flush, flush, flush. If you've ever used N-hibernate sometimes when things don't work you just start adding flushes.

It was slowing me down. I was like, "I don't want to learn and hibernate. I'm not really interested in that." The thing is I was doing my job and we used it at the job and because I refused to learn that thing it was just slowing me down. Every day I was struggling with it. I was spending hours fighting defects because I didn't understand what was going on. Finally I was like, "Look, John, just learn and hibernate." I did. I got all the books I could on it.

I spent some time going deep into the knowledge and became an expert on it and then my life was so much easier. You got to choose. Do you want the hard road? Do you want the easy road? Or do you want to choose a totally different road? If you want to do what you want to do and it requires you to learn something that you're not good at, you're just going to have to bite the bullet and get good at it.

Otherwise, you're going to be muddling through. It's going to be like an encumbrance, a dead weight on you that's going to drag you down. Believe me, I know it because I felt it myself. There's probably some of those in my life right now that I need to just suck it up and learn the thing. I can think of a few. Anyway, I hope that helps you, Fred. If you've got a question for me, you can always email me at john at simpleprogrammer.com. Keep it short. Keep it simple. All right. Take care.