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  I've graduated with a Computer Science degree but I don't feel like I'm even close to being an expert programmer  




I recently graduated from university, and I have since then joined a development team where I am by far the least experienced developer with maybe with a couple work terms under my belt. Meanwhile, the rest of the team is rocking 5-10 years experience.

I was a very good student and a pretty good programmer when it came to bottled assignments and tests. I have worked on some projects with success, but now I'm working with a much bigger code-base, and the learning curve is much higher.

I was wondering how many other developers started out their careers in teams and left like they sucked. When does this change? How can I speed up the process? My seniors are helping me but I want to be great and show my value now.

The interesting thing about software development is that it doesn't matter how good you are -- there is always someone better or at least different enough to still teach you something. It's also not uncommon to look at code written a few months ago and think it sucks, regardless of your level of experience.

For me, once I realized the gap between my skills and the skills of my coworkers, I started learning like I've never learned before -- reading other people's code, blog posts, books, paying attention to how my coworkers accomplished things, etc. University prepared me for computer science, but not really for software development. It's almost 4 years later, and I'm a much stronger software developer than I used to be. So, just hang in there and learn as much as you can from the people around you. It'll get better.
