Ask HN: Which role in software engineering is the best for average person?

I've helped ... maybe close to 70-100 people over the years, some for only a day, some for months, some for a year. (helping them with coding, business stuff, etc). I have a lot of solid reference points of what all different wakes of life are capable of.

Take ADHD for instance... my first business partner had extreme ADHD and also used it effectively to earn a net worth over several hundred million. He started by selling drugs and poor (just to diffuse any ideas he was born rich like your other comment). He just had a bunch of ways to deal with it effectively and channel it.

My other business partner mainly does jujitsu a lot, and has a lower innate focus level, but he's done all sorts of combinations of activities and sleeping patterns and supplements and whatnot to generate the best possible method for focusing, and has done it. We both work together all day long. For example he has to work in silence, or have certain music playing.

I also have 2 half brothers that are not from the same dad (where I get my mental genetics from, as I am identical to my dad). My one brother works at a dispensary and has never worked his brain harder than literally pushing 5 buttons in order on the screen, was JUST talking to me about this extensively. I took him on a 'deep dive' coding session with me over the period of 6 hours and did that multiple days in a row, and he had a panic attack (sort of) about how intense it was. He felt bad for several days because of the stark realization how he's never used his brain that hard in his life (hes wanting to know code, and I brought him right in on a screenshare where I made him program extensively on deep parts of the app, diving right into the deep end, where he got total information overload). His reality in a sense was shattered, and he had literally an "awakening" of sorts because it made him realize where he's at, and what he's been doing, what he's NOT been doing, and gave him a reference point SO far outside his comfort zone that it caused all his remaining reference points to "recalibrate" to encompass that outlier. I didn't talk to him for a week to let it digest, and he later said he naturally started watching videos on his own and said it felt "really good" to use his brain like this. He's been doing it more and more, flexing it more and more.

This is the process through which one can do that, of course you're not going to do 15 hours of coding right away, but just by flexing it repeatedly and having moments of self awareness and self clarity, is it possible. I KNOW it's possible because I've seen many people do it (not to the level I do, but absolutely to the level where you can achieve great monetary success).

The problem is, most people will never GET that moment of self clarity becuase they don't have someone like me being harsh and telling them they're a loser and it's time to wake up. Everyone around them is an enabler telling them its in their genetics that they can't do it, that the other person is "lucky", or hand holding and coddling them into a continued sedated state of self deception.

However, in the end I chose not to do anything with that knowledge and that interest, and work relatively simple back-end jobs. Why? Because, no matter how hard I try, I can't put in more than 15-20 hours of hard focus per week. If I try to push myself harder, I just crash (sometimes even after two days - I get intense headaches on day three and my experiment is concluded). I've tried it probably dozens of times, and the results were always similar - if anything, it got worse with age (I had more energy in my twenties than now in my fourties).

"I like engineering/design and making usable things" => Make usable things. I don't make unusable things because its waste of time, I make things that give me what I want most (freedom), which also correlates to money. I just really enjoy programming as that process of doing it

"However, whatever I do is never enough for "others" while it is really okay for me" => I literally give zero fucks about others, I'm sure thats obvious by now. I literally couldn't give a flying asshole hair about what someone's opinion is. Seriously though, I picked a business partner I got along with, and we built things, and made lots of $, and had lots of fun, and I wake up every day excited for what the day brings. I work very very hard, but it never feels like "work." Thinking of "others" is so far from my realm of reality that ... well, even when I worked for someone at my first job, I didn't care about that. I care about what I value above others.

"I move on to the next project or venture. There is no introspection from what I built." => Hmm... I have some of the most painful failures in some projects you could ever imagine. I have 2 stories that come to mind, where it was absolutely soul crushing. Think of that guy who sold his shares in apple for $4000. its kind of like that. Even for these projects I dont really feel introspection, just reference points to expand my experience, and make me battle hardened. I don't think much of them, or lament about them. I also dont have any major epiphanies of introspection about them. They just happened, and thats that.

"because they are just replicas nothing more" => Again this is like a Ti/Te thing I think. For my own code, I treat it like art. You might think if I care about things as a "tool" then I dont care about code quality or how it looks. Quite the contrary, I think my type is extremely creative characteristically, and I am also extremely creative. I like to draw and paint as much as I like to code. I embody both extremely logical and extremely creative processes, so I treat my code like art. The best solution to me is an elegant one. So I also would be bothered by creating hollow replicas of things IF I didn't have something else more meaningful to me. My neovim config is something dear to me. I've refined my vim/neovim config for my entire professional life, and it feels like my "essence" as weird as that sounds. Its very meaningful to me. So I channel my positive creative energy into things that DO matter, while I can also throw up a cheap replica I did in a day and not think that it hurts my identity. If I didn't have those other meaningful things though, it WOULD hurt me for sure. I channel my soul and being into most code I write, and thats part of why big failures hurt me so much, it feels like a part of me is gone. I used to apply my energy to anything and everything in 20s, and now Im far more deliberate about what gets that "soul juice". the rest of the time, other things get a dilluted form of my energy that doesnt take away from me.

"The problem here is I can't afford the luxury of time because of other aspects of life. I get an hour of free personal time at max" => This is probably one of the largest problems I see here. Out of the entire post. Is this something you can fix in any way possible? Is it because of school? Are you sure its a real problem that cant be fixed? When I started I did freelancing for 8 hours a day and then spent the whole rest of the day learning and doing my own personal projects. When I had my first job, I worked 8 hours a day coding at a company, and another 5-8 hours building my own first app. Ideally theres a lot of time you can make, if you cut out TV, going out, etc.

5.

"The whole idea of finding an average job was to finish it within 4 hours (because I don't have to put effort) and later use the remaining time for myself. This is the only way in which I believe I can make substantial progress in self-improvement" => I think you should read the stuff I put above, I think it might answer this better than I could. It sounds like you might have an "energy" problem to resolve.

6.

"I want something easy because I am genuinely tired." => Ask yourself what you want. For me, I value freedom. And money means freedom. I want to be able to wake up, do anything I want, buy anything I want, travel anywhere I want. It doesnt mean I'm always doing it, but thats what I wanted.

When I started, I envisioned it like candles. Id think of a "fallback" about if i could do this ONE thing for the rest of my life, I would be happy. I really love traveling, and theres a whole field of "vegabonding" where you travel for as little money as possible. For a few thousand a month, I could travel the world with a laptop. I KNEW that I COULD achieve that, and so I always knew in the back of my mind "if I lose everything, and fail at everything, I will always have that". This allowed me to get that fear out of the way, and then naturally something bigger came along through applied effort. And then I replaced that candle with a brighter candle (a big project doing well, etc). I always kept replacing my "worst case fallback" and upgrading it, knowing if EVERYTHING I do fails, I will always have "X" to fall back on. Over the years, that has just grown to bigger (and multiple) candles. It has been a gradual process over the years.

I suspect though all of that will be fairly meaningless to you or not helpful as IF you are dominant Ti user then you might not think like that (but I hope it helps!), but perhaps that INTP book would help if I did not. I do know lots has been written about "life purpose for INTPs" who seem to struggle with it.

"So, I am not living up to my potential, I am not getting hired because I don't have "experience" for entry-level positions in the field I am interested in." => For this, practically speaking, this is why I work for myself and not others. Theres an entire other world most people dont even know about. Theres a HUGE amount of money to be made through being an entreprenur. My immediate friend/business group is made up of all very successful, very rich entrepreneurs, none of which were "born into money" like lots of people are always talking about. Some of them own some of the largest networks of certain industries in the entire world. These people are everywhere, this world exists if you look for it. Marketing/entrepreneur groups are a great place to start, as while I dont agree with most of what they say (I am techincal they are not) theyre great for meeting or interfacing with potential business partners. My facebook is full of tons of those movers and shakers, like the media buyer for a FAANG company who owns an agency, or the largest mover of product X on facebook etc, theyre constantly wanting to create joint ventures with people. You dont HAVE to work for someone if you do not want to. And, there are lots of very complex problems to solve if youre smart enough to do that. Theres no limit to how much you can use your brain.

The headaches themselves are from coffee (ab)use. But, without the coffee, I would succumb to fatigue earlier.

Right now, it doesn't matter that much. Luckily, through some smart choices (always aggresively going for the highest paying work I could get) and through frugal living, I've FIREd and now live a life of leisure, which seems to fit my disposition quite nicely. Not everyone was made to be a star.

Conversation with Exuma has made me realize he only learns when he absolutely needs to, while I learn when I feel like learning.

Then I can't also put focus. Because of inefficiencies in other aspect of life. I can't optimize because I am just paranoid on most things. I would love to work for myself but I do not come from a background (because of work, energy and time) where I can sustain it. Maybe I should think of ways to do it and try to find ways.

However, do you think putting 2 hrs a week on a single project for extended time will take me to places?