Engineering video
1:10 · 23 July 2025
Junior developers often let negative feedback or failed interviews destroy their confidence, causing them to overreact and overinvest months into unneeded preparation like LeetCode or Kubernetes certifications.
Hear it at 0:00 →Senior developers know themselves beyond a single experience, developing a thick skin and their own criteria for success and failure so they can learn from mistakes and not take things personally.
Hear it at 0:34 →next junior habit taking everything personally. And the thing here is that junior and mid-level devs don't usually have a strong opinion on themselves, which is why any piece of bad feedback can totally destroy their confidence. For example, they fail a live coding interview and they decide to stop everything and go and do lead code for six months. Then they get another interview. They fail a question about something shiny like Kubernetes, and you see them going back and investing another six months into a cloud certification which they probably don't need.
That's because they overreact and when they overreact, they overinvest. Senior devs know themselves beyond a single experience. So they don't take everything to heart. They have this kind of been there before attitude. When things go wrong, you know, they try to understand the situation, write down their learnings and move on. They have what we call a thick skin. And most importantly, they kind of develop their own criteria for success and failure.
So, if people, for example, try to use the result of a technical interview or negative feedback to deny them a salary raise or a promotion, they don't give in because they know their own value, and they don't take things personally.
