Ask HN: Should I quit trying to be a programmer?

Granted it does take a knack to be a good programmer, attention to detail a feel for what's wrong when tracking down a bug.

But every problem will be a struggle the first time but as you get more experience things will get easier and easier and your programming intuition of what to do and what's wrong will become better and better.

There is a wide variety of jobs out there. Maybe test out a few frameworks and see what you like.

I always recommend learning Rails or Laravel because working on web applications is always interesting and both frameworks have great communities and learning resources.

Don't give up if you enjoy it. I think you're making it harder than it is. Your degree just gets you in the door. You're going to learn and do so much that wasn't covered in your classes.

Good luck.

There are few prodigies in the field. Most people make it through sheer work ethic and self-belief. Do everything you can to hangout with other passionate people (if they're more skilled than you even better). The best way to do this is just get your foot in the door somewhere. Do whatever it takes. One year in a work environment gaining real world experience is priceless and your skills will skyrocket if you challenge yourself and step outside your comfort area.

Best of luck to you (whether you continue pursuing programming or something else)!

PS: For what it's worth, just understanding the above problem you described is half the battle. The other half is getting comfortable implementing different algorithms. For this, you can seriously just copy paste someone's solution from stack exchange and execute the code to observe the effects of your tweaks. It's kind of like how most people need to practice solving the math problems before being able to grasp the concepts behind the solution.

There are lots of jobs that are coding adjacent. Technical SEO is an example. A mate of mine does installations of software inhouse.

You don't have to code, per se, you can likely find a job where coding knowledge helps but is not specifically what you do.

There is a lot s scope in IT beyond coding, and I'd consider exploring that.

It's easy to get sucked into a coding problem and fight with it for days like it's a personal challenge to your abilities. That can turn into a habit. It did for me. Screw that. Admit you have a problem and then get over it.

The goal of working is to produce something, and not necessarily, or even very often, to invent something new or even invent a new way of doing something. Coding is no different.

The truth is for most of us coding is more often akin to assembling something even when you're designing and building something new. That's how I approach it anyway.

When I switched from coding mainly Perl to Javascript I learned (the hard way) to start searching for answers first instead of banging my head on my desk for hours (even days) over what were often times really just syntax issues or things that already had boilerplate solutions publicly available.

Learning to search for answers first made a huge difference in my productivity and in how much I enjoyed coding. Getting stuff done provides a sense of accomplishment and we all need that to inspire us to keep working.

And it's made me a better coder too. I have learned so many new and better ways to do things, as well as how not to do them, and found great explanations on the "whys" and "hows" in the process. And I learn them when they're relevant to what I'm working on too, not in some abstract way that is easy to forget or dismiss.

The truth is there is way more to learn about coding than we can possibly learn already and that gap is constantly expanding. That's really a great thing though because learning on a need to know basis makes it so much easier to get stuff done. It lets us focus on one problem at a time and not worry about what comes after. We can learn what we need when we get there and by then there might be a new and better way.

When I first started making a habit of searching for answers and example code for how to do something I was amazed a few times to find an answer. Now I'm more surprised when I don't find one easily.

To me, that's what a "hacker" is in the truest sense. You find and write and hack together code. There's nothing wrong with that. It's why we have "open source" code and in fact it's truly awesome.