You need to speak with your doctor first. You may be out of shape, you may have a vitamin deficiency, you may have something complicated. The answer is in a doctor's office, not HN.
Diabetes will also affect mental clarity and vision.
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#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I feel strikingly similar to the OP I'm glad you said that. If you feel comfortable doing so, could you share an anecdote? If a few people describe this from different angles perhaps more will come out of the woodwork and offer some solutions. I think the person you were replying to was gently suggesting to see a psychiatrist.
Sure. This is an extreme example. I'm just starting my third of university software engineering and I've been dreaming up a moderately ambitious (but technically straightforward) CRUD web app since early in my first year. Since then I've flipped and switched between countless frameworks and languages, shelved, reassessed, unshelved, reshelved, and scrapped many basic prototypes. Only recently I've made some progress…
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#23>They don't make a pill for slowness
They do make a pill for slowness. Several, in fact. In subjective order of strength, modafinil, methylphenidate (Ritalin), and amphetamines (e.g. Adderall aka speed). Not that I'm suggesting these, but it's not called speed for no reason, yeah? It is not just for ADD people; the benefits to everyone else are immense (well except potential heart problems and psychosis.)
You should definitely follow the other suggestions, like verifying that you're truly operating slowly (it's difficult to accurately judge oneself). And making sure you're healthy, etc.
The stuff you are describing though, it sounds more like unfamiliarity. If it took you three hours to debug something, why was that? Are you following a scientific approach in debugging? Analyze and get feedback on how you're missing things. I spent hours debugging an app that I wrote and it all came down to a one-line fix. I was just unlucky.
Edit: You can check erowid out. From developer friends, I've seen them: 1. Read hundreds of pages of material in a single setting, at a fast pace, far beyond normal ability. 2. Ability to do math/calculations increases several fold. 3. Output soars once focused on a problem. 4. Grand-scale ideas (sometimes even workable.)
The big downside and why not all devs should be on it all the time is the tendency to lose sight of the big picture. Like spending all day optimizing for TLB-hits... in PHP.
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#25You need to speak with your doctor first. You may be out of shape, you may have a vitamin deficiency, you may have something complicated. The answer is in a doctor's office, not HN.
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Earlier posters have mentioned getting enough sleep. If you are affected by sleep apnea, you may be getting enough hours of sleep but it won't matter due to the affects of sleep apnea.
All the reputable medical websites have good articles about sleep apnea -- certainly enough for you to have an informed conversation with your doctor.
Most insurance plans will require a doctor to refer you to a sleep disorder specialist, followed by a home sleep monitor test, then a overnight sleep lab study.
If you ask around, you'll probably be surprised about how many people have been diagnosed with sleep apnea and are probably using a CPAP machine at night to address the problem.
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#26I would get assessed by a psychologist if you really think your slow. You might get surprised and just find out your actually not. Or your smart and meticulous (more accurate, but slower), something pretty common in software engineers. Software requires high preciseness, being loose and sloppy quickly gets filtered out.
The example you cite sounds like a lack of experience with the library set. The reason it's a 10s fix is because he's seen that shit before, not because he's smarter. The engineer is applying a heuristic, the heuristic was correct and thus they solved it quickly. You start to notice general error patterns in computers from experience, and certain error patterns in certain libraries or programming languages.
For example, I notice a stutter in a UI application. My guess when I see that is something is probably being processed on the main thread that takes too long, because I've seen that before in my own programs. I've just reduced my search space significantly. My heuristic might be incorrect, and my search time becomes larger.
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#27I would get assessed by a psychologist if you really think your slow. You might get surprised and just find out your actually not. Or your smart and meticulous (more accurate, but slower), something pretty common in software engineers. Software requires high preciseness, being loose and sloppy quickly gets filtered out. The example you cite sounds like a lack of experience with the library set. The reason it's a 10s…
I'm a lot like OP myself. I take a lot longer than others to get something off the ground, but when I do, it's very well executed, and I understand all the moving parts inside. But then again, I'm obsessive about every small thing.
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#28I think another question to ask yourself is, why do you feel this isn't normal? If others claim they could do the task faster, consider that programmers chronically underestimate. If you've seen others do it faster, it's possible that they are taking shortcuts, making quicker decisions that will involve more work later. From your example, you've carefully picked a library and thought through how to integrate it prope…
I had the same question. Is taking a whole day to set up an authentication system for a web application unreasonable? That's a pretty critical component and not necessarily simple. At my, erm, last company, it took multiple developers three months to set one up and we're still tweaking it.
I'm with @funkysquid. A few extra hours to properly implement and test code that is going to see months if not year of critical frontline service seems like a bargain to me.
Now if your managers are of a different opinion, or you're taking an extra long time to produce code in the end that still has a lot of issues, that's another matter.
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#29I am exactly like you. I have been doing this thing from about couple of years, and I also think I am not getting anywhere. I have lost most of the interest that I once had for programming, and I just sleep and take meds for my ADHD now. I don't program a lot these days. So, thanks for asking.
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#30>They don't make a pill for slowness They do make a pill for slowness. Several, in fact. In subjective order of strength, modafinil, methylphenidate (Ritalin), and amphetamines (e.g. Adderall aka speed). Not that I'm suggesting these, but it's not called speed for no reason, yeah? It is not just for ADD people; the benefits to everyone else are immense (well except potential heart problems and psychosis.) You should…
I have been on Ritalin since last 3 weeks when I got diagnosed with ADHD. I used to be a dysfunctional developer before this, and things are not very different now. Earlier I used to be able to write some stuff up, but I now I just let it slip up and ADHD seems like a good excuse.