How long did it take everyone to become a “good” engineer? /u/ElDumbminican CSCQ protests reddit

Ive been a software engineer intern for the past 6 months (my first internship ever, I’m a senior in college). During the summer I worked a full 40hrs/week but now I do 15hrs/week through the school year. I started off slow with a lot of imposter syndrome but slowly I was able to get the feel for the large codebases and start making changes. Yet some more time has gone by and I don’t think I’ve made any significant “leaps”. Despite wanting and trying to be independent, I can only handle the smaller stories (bug fixes, error handling, automated testing) and am completely lost when it comes to bigger ones where I need to write code from scratch as opposed to modifying preexisting code.

My company is a bit smaller, so I feel like there’s an expectation that every engineer “stands out” despite everyone I work with reassuring me that I’m doing fine and nobody expects anything and they just want me to learn. They’ve always been willing to help me when I need it but I always feel bad making them take time out of their already busy days to show me how to do something I feel like I “should” know how to do.

I want to be able to contribute more and I know I’m young but I’m scared I’m going to hit a roadblock and stop getting smarter as dumb as that sounds. It doesn’t help that the best engineer on the team is only 4 years out of college and is an actual wizard.

I’ve always been a good student, I’m an A/A- student at school and never had a problem doing leetcode or individual coding assignments, yet the real world is a lot different than an algorithms class and I feel like I’m going to end up behind. The other intern at my company (who since left since their school is far away) was a lot more knowledgeable than me despite us being the same age.

I have no prior work experience to compare this to so I’m curious how long it takes to really learn how to do your job. Also, how bad does an engineer have to be for someone to think of them as BAD. What is average? Please let me know!

Ive been a software engineer intern for the past 6 months (my first internship ever, I’m a senior in college). During the summer I worked a full 40hrs/week but now I do 15hrs/week through the school year. I started off slow with a lot of imposter syndrome but slowly I was able to get the feel for the large codebases and start making changes. Yet some more time has gone by and I don’t think I’ve made any significant “leaps”. Despite wanting and trying to be independent, I can only handle the smaller stories (bug fixes, error handling, automated testing) and am completely lost when it comes to bigger ones where I need to write code from scratch as opposed to modifying preexisting code.

My company is a bit smaller, so I feel like there’s an expectation that every engineer “stands out” despite everyone I work with reassuring me that I’m doing fine and nobody expects anything and they just want me to learn. They’ve always been willing to help me when I need it but I always feel bad making them take time out of their already busy days to show me how to do something I feel like I “should” know how to do.

I want to be able to contribute more and I know I’m young but I’m scared I’m going to hit a roadblock and stop getting smarter as dumb as that sounds. It doesn’t help that the best engineer on the team is only 4 years out of college and is an actual wizard.

I’ve always been a good student, I’m an A/A- student at school and never had a problem doing leetcode or individual coding assignments, yet the real world is a lot different than an algorithms class and I feel like I’m going to end up behind. The other intern at my company (who since left since their school is far away) was a lot more knowledgeable than me despite us being the same age.

I have no prior work experience to compare this to so I’m curious how long it takes to really learn how to do your job. Also, how bad does an engineer have to be for someone to think of them as BAD. What is average? Please let me know!