You just do what you are supposed to do, learn, grow.

There’s nothing you can or should explicitly do about imposter syndrome feeling per se.

But what you describe doesn’t sound like this. So it’s a good move to first identify the problem correctly with help of others.

Unfortunately only Ruby on Rails world seems to systematically care about devx and infra friction. Others just got used to throwing more money and people on it.

> unless you are good at marketing.

Sorry to (not)disappoint, but it was _always_ like this.

If you analyze closely, every single solopreneurial success is based first and foremost on a successful marketing/sales. Whether by luck, hard work or being in the right place at the right time. The dev part and the product is never a main dish.

Controversial point - many problems of today's IT industry stem from people taking their job too personal.

Do you know many plumbers or doctors who are so connected to their work that they do plumbing or doctoring as a hobby?

I personally try to avoid such Programmers when possible, they usually overengineer everything they touch just for the sake of engineering. Without even realizing there is a problem.

This seems like an analogy in bad faith. How would plumbing as a hobby even make sense?

Compare to jobs like writers, scientists, carpenters, mechanics, etc that are much closer to programmers in spirit and do have a lot of people doing them in their free time.

> This seems like an analogy in bad faith. How would plumbing as a hobby even make sense?

Exactly!

> Compare to jobs like writers, scientists, carpenters, mechanics, etc that are much closer to programmers in spirit and do have a lot of people doing them in their free time.

This is your bias of equating programming to an art form. And that's the core of the problem.

I'm pretty sure many doctors see themselves as being a doctor by identity, not just a person who works as a doctor.

If there is prestige in the profession, it seems to often become an identity.

There is a middle ground: programmers who want to program as a hobby and do something else for a job. They tend to want small, efficient code that is easy to understand and debug. Unfortunately, most find themselves writing code for a living.

> They tend to want small, efficient code that is easy to understand and debu

In my experience it’s quite opposite. Majority of both hobbyists and professionals have strong tendency to engineer as the main mode and a goal of itself vs shipping the value.

This (elderly) is the ultimate UX test that most products and apps and websites fail miserably. Modern UX is a joke.

I wonder how we got so low from standing on the giants shoulders in the early days (I still miss my Sony Clie Palm OS organizer as being superior in its main goal organizing than any ios app I've tried after that).

Were we working for too long inside our comfy IT bubble echo chamber?

Or is it just a general quality problem and 2% law? With design just being more sensitive and more overlooked area (there is not much opportunities for innovation there to hype and inflate your CV with).

> With design just being more sensitive and more overlooked area

My take is that design stopped being for the user. It's a rat race on who will make it look the most fancy or closest to whatever new trend AirBnB starts as quickly as possible. More animations, more colors, darker, lighter, let's make this transparent. Noone really thinks about UX anymore, it's all just portfolio-driven-design.

Great phrase “protfolio driven design”, together with “cv driven software engineering” they contribute to “metrics (not even profits) driven businesses”.

Did end users ever had any leverage or it was always like this, I wonder

One thing I know for sure - this thing benefits mainly builders and renovators, not end users.

Would you rather trust your life to a doctor or some AI expert?

What about a million dollar instead of life? A fate of your startup?

Your point breaks pretty quickly when it comes to real deal, not anecdotes and journalists’ stories.

How can a tree fall in the wood where nobody there?

In other words, if we believe what the CEOs of the AI companies claim, we are setting ourselves up for disappointment.

To be fair with OP, the hype about what the tool is "supposed" to be doing ("your accountants will rebuild the ERP over the week end, you don't need programmers, etc...") is setting a dev up for frustration.

Personnaly, I'm trying to learn the "make it write the plan, fix the plan, break it down even more, etc..." loops that are necessary; but I haven't had a use case (yet?) where the total time spent developing the thing was radically shorter.

LLMs make wonders on bootstrapping a greenfield project. Unfortunately, you tend to only do this only once ;)

> LLMs make wonders on bootstrapping a greenfield project. Unfortunately, you tend to only do this only once ;)

This is why LLMs look so impressive in demos. Demos are nearly always greenfield, small in scale, and as long as it launches, it looks successful.

I bet some manager came up with a perfectly reasonable explanation why it couldn’t be done in this release ))