In the psychology, there are four stages of competence.

Unconscious incompetence

You must get out of this zone as soon as possible. Here you are just a jerk and nothing else. If you want to progress at anything in your life and truly be somewhat competent, you should spend enough time on a practicing the skill to get out of this.

Conscious incompetence

This is where you open your eyes and see the big picture about your craft. Here you know how much you don’t know about the topic. This is sweet spot for getting your feedback. In this point you are making mistakes, but you also learn from them.

Conscious competence

In this phase, you are able to grasp how much of the skill is under your belt, and you can even help others to level up in what you’re doing. Also, good point for seeking feedback from more experienced.

Unconscious competence

This is true mastery of the skill. Ultimate goal. You are ready for whatever is thrown at you. This is sometimes called “10 thousand hours” of beating your craft.

All of this is applied in software engineering. Whether you’re grinding alone and learning to program, or working professionally, you should seek feedback from people which are more experienced than you. This is the only way to measure your competence in the field. There was some great advices which I’ve received in my feedbacks about my work, and I’m really thankful to people which was open enough to point out my improvements.

Even if your company doesn’t follow the culture of gathering feedback for review process, I would encourage you to request at least 2 times per year from your peers. Feedback can come in many different forms but the basic one looks like this:

  1. What are my strengths?
  2. How can I improve?

If you get answer to those 2 questions you can:

  1. Get great tips on improvement
  2. Expose your weak spots (Arnold Schwarzenegger quote from movie pumping iron)
  3. Pivot your learning, maybe even your career path if you exceed in some area of your job.
  4. Be proud of yourself

People, often see feedback as something bad, because it’s a form of criticism. Good feedback shouldn’t be written in negative tone, but if you receive that kind of feedback, just ignore the tone and extract the point where you could improve.

Part of becoming a better version of anything you’re doing or working is the feedback. Seek for it, it’s your friend.