Ask HN: Year old CS student. Should I continue?

You’re 17 - don’t just think about paying bills. Not yet. If this interest stems from money and ambitions then you’re trying to build your foundations in sand.

It’s not really about what you choose but how you do the thing you do. How well you can apply yourself to it. You want to find work that gives you flow state.

My 0.2c as a cinema studies/filmmaker turned PM - there are so many soft skills I acquired pursuing a totally different dream. And yet they all turned out being exactly what I needed.

HN is filled with squares hyper-optimizing for sensible logical choices. Advice is older folks give each other is more conservative and about capturing trends because that’s the safe thing to do. We have kids, deteriorating bodies and brains. At 17 you should do opposite: maximize risk for the next few years - you will regret not taking advantage, not developing character, not using your youth to it’s full potential (especially spectacular failure).

If building things on computers is what you want, no new trend will change the fact that you will build great things.

In fact, the opposite!

> In my experience, in both business and academia, bullshit intolerance is a severe career limiting trait.

How very well said.

I've craved a book describing the alienation of the engineer, how strange it is to be so well connected to such self-speaking details, to be such a hyper-critical beast on the hunt for issues, a monster at scoping out problems & understanding their bounds, at evaluating possibility. And being trapped in a world where so much around us can feel like bullshit, like a removal of information, only making things vague. Where so many goals & intents seem detached & decoupled.

This simple phrase rather puts a pin on some of the difficulty of life as a developer.

I don't have many recommendations to explain or explore The Most Important Life Aspect Of Being A Programmer, which you've so very really captured imo. Ellen Ullman's Close To the Machine (`97) is a relatively-early memoire that has some very nice capturances of this weird world, of the life of being a machine-speaker, a truth-finder, apart from the rest of the adrift weird world. Haven't picked it up but her new book (Life In Code, `17) yet. I really crave a lot more discourse on this. This is the most undersung reality. Programmers & would-be/could-be programmers should know. The world should know.

> But if machine learning can take my code, create a builder pattern based off the current constructor, make a config file that allow programmatic defaults, that's a huge time saver of manual labor, not at generating boilerplate, but at helping me shift around what I have.

I encourage you to try this in ChatGPT. Give it some code and ask it to refactor out a builder pattern. It won't be perfect, but if it's like anything I've tried, what it gives you will save you some time, and may offer you an insight or two.

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On an entirely unrelated note, I also encourage you to keep your frustration in check -- an aggressive response to a perceived contentless message says more about you. Equally effective without being condescending or aggressive would have been "Could you say more?"

I chose to interpret your message in this way; others may not be so kind.

I've had some success asking ChatGPT to write some simple Terraform for me. That's useful.

I asked it to do something a little more complex. In three tries, it got about 75% of the way there, then just...ground to a halt. Each time I asked, it took a completely different approach. I mean completely, ranging from wrapping native APIs to spawning a process to run commands.

If you like to write code, keep going with it. I look at ChatGPT like Jarvis from Iron Man, or SolidWorks for mechanical engineers.