5 years with code: the most important lessons that change how you think about being a web developer

The first years of commercial work in IT are an intense period of learning, not just technology, but most importantly how to function in a team and grow in the industry. During 5 years of working with code, I’ve come to understand several things that genuinely change how you think about projects, writing code, and team collaboration.

You are not your code

Many programmers (not just beginners) treat feedback about their code as a personal attack. They often take a defensive stance, closing themselves off to potential comments that would help them improve their code. On one hand, this is understandable – after all, they often spend hours on a solution, and then someone else comes along and starts pointing out its flaws. But these aren’t flaws of the programmer, they’re flaws of the code itself.

You are not your code. Code can always be changed, fixed, improved. It’s a product of your work, not your personality. That’s why it’s worth changing your perspective and looking at code review and its feedback a bit differently – it’s one of the most effective tools for every developer’s growth. Someone else is taking their time to analyze our code, point out potential problems, and suggest better solutions. This is pure mentoring, available with every pull request, for free! Constructive criticism of code isn’t an evaluation of the programmer, just an opportunity for growth and learning. Through others’ feedback, we learn different perspectives, discover solutions we wouldn’t have thought of ourselves, and learn to anticipate problems before they become critical. Every comment is a chance to grow faster than if we had to discover everything ourselves through trial and error.

You have the right to make mistakes

Really. Even the stupid ones, or maybe especially the stupid ones, because those teach most effectively. Fear of making mistakes can be paralyzing, especially early in your career. The worry that your code will cause a disaster in production, that you’ll accidentally introduce a critical bug, or simply write something that doesn’t look smart enough, can effectively block you from taking action and experimenting.

The reality is that every experienced programmer has a history of more or less serious mistakes – from accidentally deleting important data, to deploying a critical bug to production (or even completely bringing down a service), to creating a “little monster” that scares other programmers (not just at night). I won’t even mention going over budget due to underestimating code complexity and your own abilities. Despite all this, these people still work in the industry, and many of them are really good specialists.

Mistakes aren’t proof of incompetence, just a natural part of the learning process. They will accompany you for the rest of your career, so it’s worth learning to approach them calmly, draw conclusions from them, and treat them as part of growth, not a reason for worry or shame.

Share your knowledge

Keeping knowledge for yourself won’t make you a better developer. Hiding knowledge leads to information silos that lower team efficiency and create critical dependency points. When only one person knows how a critical part of the application works, the whole project becomes vulnerable to their absence. The team loses the ability to collaborate effectively, and the atmosphere becomes less open.

Sharing knowledge strengthens the whole team and creates a culture of mutual support where everyone feels comfortable asking questions. What’s more, explaining something to others forces you to organize your own knowledge. Often, only when trying to explain a concept do we realize our understanding is superficial and we need to fill in the gaps ourselves. Teaching others actually helps us develop our own skills too.

The stronger the team, the more pleasant it is to work and the faster everyone can grow. It’s a positive-sum game – by helping others grow, we gain better colleagues and learn more ourselves.

Soft skills can determine your career

The tech world has seen many talented programmers who didn’t succeed due to lack of interpersonal skills. Knowing the latest frameworks or having perfect code architecture isn’t enough if working with that person is torture for the whole team.

A popular saying goes: “Hard skills get people hired, soft skills get people fired”. Reality confirms this principle. Arrogance, unwillingness to listen to others, treating every discussion like a battlefield, inability to receive feedback – all of this can negate even the best technical skills.

Working in IT is also working with people, not just code. It requires the ability to communicate clearly, resolve conflicts, give and receive criticism constructively. Programming is largely a team activity. Code is created through the combined efforts of many developers, problems are solved as a team, decisions are made through discussion. Without collaboration skills, your career has limited potential, regardless of technical level.

The knowledge paradox – The Dunning-Kruger Effect

This phenomenon is a cognitive bias where people with low knowledge or competence in a field tend to overestimate their abilities, while true experts often underestimate their own knowledge and capabilities.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is particularly visible in the IT industry. At the beginning, after mastering the basics of some technology, it’s easy to feel like you’ve got it all figured out. A simple project working on a local environment can give a false sense of competence. Only working on real, complex systems reveals the true depth of the field. Suddenly it turns out that beyond the basics, you also need to handle databases, care about application performance, write tests, ensure accessibility, think about security, and understand CI/CD processes – and that’s still just a small part of what a modern web developer encounters. The list of things to learn doesn’t shrink over time, it grows at an alarming rate.

The more we know, the more clearly we see the limits of our knowledge. This is actually often how you can recognize a junior developer – the less experience, the more confidence. Meanwhile, experienced programmers are usually the most humble. They say “I don’t know, I’ll check,” admit mistakes, ask others for opinions. This isn’t weakness, but a sign of professional maturity and awareness of your own limitations.

Real confidence isn’t pretending to know everything, but being aware of what you don’t know while having no fear of admitting it. Humility enables continuous growth, because only a person aware of their gaps can systematically fill them.

Impostor syndrome – every developer’s silent companion

The feeling that you’re in your position by accident, that you don’t deserve your achievements and soon someone will discover that you actually don’t know anything – that’s called impostor syndrome. And while it might seem like an individual problem, it actually affects most people in the industry, regardless of skill level.

Juniors feel like impostors because they “know so little,” seniors because they “should know more by now”, tech leads because they’re “not good enough to lead a team”. This pattern repeats at every career level.

Impostor syndrome can be managed to some degree, though it will probably never completely disappear. Talking about it openly helps – often it turns out other people on the team have similar feelings. Keeping a list of concrete achievements lets you remind yourself of real proof of competence in moments of doubt. Understanding that it’s a normal psychological phenomenon, not an objective indicator of ability, also brings relief.

The key is learning to function with this feeling without letting it block your growth and taking on new challenges.

Communication as the foundation of every project

The best-designed system, the most elegant code, the most efficient team – all of this can collapse due to lack of proper communication. Misunderstood requirements, passing incomplete information (or not passing it at all), independent, unconsulted technical decisions – that’s a ready-made recipe for project troubles.

Projects don’t fail just because of poor technology choices or a lack of technical skills. They fail because of miscommunication – situations where everyone acted in good faith, but lack of communication meant everyone was going in different directions.

That’s usually when it becomes clear that several developers are working on the same problem, each in a different way. Code conflicts appear because common standards weren’t established. Some functionality is implemented twice because no one communicated they were already working on that feature. And the architecture starts falling apart because technical decisions are made in isolation instead of as a team.

Effective team communication goes far beyond dailies, standups, or planning meetings. It’s about creating a culture where information is shared openly, questions are encouraged, and problems are raised early. It includes documenting decisions, writing clear code comments, and providing detailed pull request descriptions. It also means listening to different perspectives and being willing to compromise.

Good communication helps reduce misunderstandings and makes the development process more predictable. In teams that value clarity, potential risks are easier to spot, issues can be addressed faster, and projects are less likely to drift in different directions.