Ask HN: I've realized I'm a bad software engineer and I'm over 30, what's next?

Give yourself more time to iterate and fix problems, give yourself some time to iterate this code and fix the basics.

For things of medium difficulty, I've found it good to prototype things outside the codebase, inside a jupyter notebook until the bit of code I'm working on looks right.

For some things, stepping away from the keyboard and making a list / diagrams can definitely help.

Just try to carry on improving, it's all you can do.

Once you've done any project it's easy to think of ways you'd do it differently / better a second time.

If you don't really like what you do, it's perfectly fine to try out project management. Management involves its own skill set, but being a good developer is not a requirement. Knowing how to write a little code yourself and being able to empathize with your team is a rare and useful ability in project management.

A big part.

There were a lot of good suggestions from others. But just from this, it sounds like your true skill is sales.

Just put two and two together, taking the facts in your post as a given. You're a (supposedly) bad coder, but always had customers as a freelancer. In other words, you were doing a great job selling a mediocre product, without even realizing or trying. That's the mark of a salesman.

The good part is that you don't have to completely waste your technical skills by switching to this route. There's plenty of jobs for sales engineers or sales positions that require an engineering background. Maybe you're not the best at building software, but you certainly understand it well enough to know the products.

One way to transition may be to find one or two "good engineers" to team up with. There's a lot of great coders out there, who'd love to work for themselves, but unlike you can never get enough business. Maybe it's a consultancy. Maybe it's a startup. Either way, they can handle the engineering side of the business and you handle the sales. A partnership like this can be extremely lucrative for all parties involved.

For example: one large professional skill you have is this: "I've been able to always have work on my desk because I'm always moving and talking with people in the industry" combined with this: "I've always managed to solve the problems in front of me but in a 'hacky way'."

Those to things together say to me: "This person is able to communicate with others in order to solve problems" which is really one of the key differentiators between a more "senior" software engineer and a more "junior" software engineer.

I have some questions: Are you still at the company? If so I think you have a great opportunity ahead of you to improve some of your software design/engineering/crafting skills while leveraging some of your strengths.

If not, I think you should consider another medium sized company and not worry about this most recent experience as being the end of your software career.

Next question: The code that was filled with hardcoded values, wrong structure, difficult to debug bugs... was that your code or the existing code? If it's your code, then you're in a great position (like others have said) because you've already identified problems and so that's your list of things to work on next.

What does "failed to accomplish it" mean in terms of the task? The thing about software, especially at a company that's not going to go down in flames because of a problem you've failed to solve is that... you can try again. You can keep taking swings at the task until you figure it out and eventually knock it out. So that doesn't seem bad.

"I'm thinking about looking for semi senior roles but I'm afraid it'll look weird..." As a hiring manager who's been interviewing people in this industry for more than 15 years it never looks weird. And if it looks weird and you have something to offer and the company can't see past whatever "weirdness" that's their loss -- you sound like a thoughtful, introspective employee who's got an impetus towards self improvement. That's gold.

You could transition to PM, you could "take a break" -- but I'd want to think carefully about the answers to the first few questions if I were you because it sounds to me like you are interested in software development and are interested in self improvement in software development and if so it sounds to me like you have a great opportunity in front of you.

If you are still feeling lost, and actually make it to my message, hit me up at the email in my profile -- I would be happy to talk about it further in more detail.