I think that's crossing the wires of humility and confidence. You can be confident but humble. Confidence is your ability to come up with solutions and feel like they are the right solutions, and that they are good or excellent solutions. Humility is your ability to come up with solutions and realize that (1) they might not be the _absolute best_ solutions, (2) some solutions that look like they're better are actually better (and identifying these).
I think it interacts well with the concept of “strong opinions weakly held”. Have a strong opinion that you've built a great thing, but hold it weakly so that in the face of clear arguments or evidence that it is in fact not great, or that another solution is better, you can admit it and adjust. This, to me, is the right balance of confidence and humility---in programming, as in life.
I agree with you in principle, but again, I don't think that's a winning strategy.
A humble, competent woodworker creates a piece that's beautiful, visually rich, has a solid, study feel to it, and can be appreciated by most. The software engineer, who checks in a fix on the back-end service that pre-empts several bugs that had yet to be discovered, goes relatively unappreciated.
So can one be humble and confident? Yes. Will it be understood and appreciated from the outside? Probably not. Is it a good strategy? Probably not.
I'd say a person has three options:
1) work for people who are technically competent enough to understand the true value of your work. In my experience, this is pretty rare out in the real world.
2) become a salesman and sell yourself at all times. This seems fundamentally opposed to dominant personality types in software.
3) stop being so humble and be proud of your work. This seems like the most logical choice to me.
Our industry is rife with imposter syndrome, legends of the 10x engineer, impressions that everyone else is succeeding flawlessly thanks to polished blog posts and GitHub portfolios [1], and endless pontificating on things that often boil down to fashion and code style. I don't think we need anything telling us to be more humble.
You may be a completely average engineer writing CRUD software for some local bank. Yeah, maybe that guy blogging about his work at Google would do a better job than you. But he's not here, and your the best you company has found. You're valuable and capable. Be proud of what you've accomplished!
[1] - people have written recently about how Facebook causes negative feelings since you seem to see others only at their best. I think this is normal folks finding out what tech types have experienced for decades, but nobody has ever talked about it.
While “pride” is often used as the opposite of “humility”---which I think is maybe what you're getting at here---I don't think pride is always the opposite of humility. In particular, I think the word can mean many things, and the meaning you're using isn't the one that's often used as the opposite of humility.
Fundamentally, I agree that you should be proud of what you've done, even if 10X awesome dude at Google could have done better. For one thing, 10X awesome dude at Google is surrounded by other Google folks, and by 15+ years of Google technology. There's being aware that there are better possibilities out there---indeed, being interested in them and even thirsty to learn more about them---and there's being embarrassed about what you've done. You can be interested in the crazy things some people do and want to learn more about those things while still working at a smaller, more limited scope and being proud of what you achieve with what you've got. The latter is how you get confidence, the former is how you get humility.
In short, I think we're probably saying the same thing. When you build a thing, you should be proud of that thing---unless you deliberately cut corners for some other tradeoff, in which case you should be cognizant of why you did it and satisfied with the tradeoffs you made. But that doesn't mean you have to think there's no better way, nor even that you have to avoid looking into those better ways. Often, I think these things (thinking there's no better way, not looking for improvements) are what people mean when they refer to folks who aren't humble. Certainly, that's what I mean.
I think it interacts well with the concept of “strong opinions weakly held”. Have a strong opinion that you've built a great thing, but hold it weakly so that in the face of clear arguments or evidence that it is in fact not great, or that another solution is better, you can admit it and adjust. This, to me, is the right balance of confidence and humility---in programming, as in life.