Ask HN: Got a CS degree, but I’m unable to be programmer. What can I do?

I think many engineers would love to have a scrum master or project manager who at least understands what they are trying to do. Your challenges position you to appreciate the difficulty of engineering at the highest level. Use your demonstrated (in this post) communications skills to help them cut through the bureaucracy and be effective!

You have more to offer than you realize!

Programming isn't for everyone. Now, before I answer your question, let me echo what most other people are saying. Unless you were already a good programmer before you started, or you spent your university days holed up in your room coding for fun, the chances are that you will be absolutely crap when you graduate. You have the advantage that you already know it (most people, including my young self, are considerably more deluded). You've got more than 40 years of a career to become uncrap. It's too early to give up.

Having said that, my first sentence is still valid. Programming isn't for everyone. If you don't enjoy it and you don't want to do it, you don't have to do it. First, don't constrain yourself with your CS degree. If you don't want to do that kind of work, then don't do it. There is an entire world out there. Yes, you've spent 4 years and a metric tonne of cash, but that's a sunk cost. Do what you want to do.

I will have to say that as someone who has mentored a fair number of people in your situation, I can guess your next statement. "But the thing is, I don't know what I want to do. I don't really want to do anything." If I'm wrong, then I'm happy because you can just ignore this next part and get on with your life. If I'm right it's only because it's stupidly common.

Here's the thing. If you don't know what you want to do, then don't stress about it. You can be a programmer for a while and suck at it. In fact, you might as well. Just give yourself permission to suck. It's OK. It's just the time you are taking to find out what you really want to do. I mean, you can work at Taco Bell instead if you want and I won't think any less of you. But programming pays more and you did already pay that metric tonne of cash for the degree. Might as well take it out for a spin around the block.

But if you are afraid that you can't get a programming job, or if you kind of like the technology sector, but want to do something else, you are in luck. There are lots of jobs. I'll list many, but there are many more if you look.

QA -- there are less of these jobs around because it is not as popular an activity as it once was, but you can still find it. Best to look at older, established large software companies.

Sales, pre-sales and sales engineering. A friend of mine gave up being a programmer and got into sales. But he sucked as a sales person. Luckily, his manager noted how good he was at explaining the technology to the customers and he was moved into sales engineering. The cool thing about sales is that you can get a job anywhere and get experience. Expect your ass to be fired about a billion times before you get good at it though. Luckily nobody cares if you were fired as a sales person.

Support and/or technical (or even non-technical) documentation. Maybe you aren't good with solving logic issues, but you are good at explaining stuff. Then this is a good bet. I have a friend who moved from programming to technical documentation basically because he was forced into it (they were desperate for people who understood the system to write docs). Eventually he grew to love it and is now in super high demand.

Project management, etc. It helps to spend a few years as a programmer before you move into this field. It doesn't matter if you are the worst coder on earth before you move. If you write on your CV, "I've been a programmer for the last 3 or 4 years, but I really want to get into project management", you may have to take measures to protect your physical safety as people rush to grab you (programmers, as a rule, do not want to do this job, but their experience is necessary).

System administration. This is really a special skill (well, not unlike everything else I've mentioned). It takes a particular mindset to be a good sysadmin. You need to be a self starter and self reliant. However, the job is more about handling the complexity of the systems than handling the complexity of code bases. It's also got a lot more short term stress as opposed to long term stress -- it's better for some kinds of people. These days you can run the gamut of some guy who pulls wires through buildings all day, to guys who administer networks, to operations specialist all the way to dev ops. Sorry if I'm pidgeon-holing some of this stuff -- I don't want to imply that these jobs are equivalent or even similar. It's just that I don't have infinite space to write about it.

One last anecdote. I had a friend who got a degree in CS at a bad time. He couldn't get a job to save his life. He ended up working as a janitor at a local high school. Whenever there were problems with the computers, he would wander in and fix them. The school made him their full time sysadmin and eventually he worked his way up to be in charge of the computer labs for the whole school board (after which I lost track of him).

Your path in life is not fixed. You can tread any path you wish to tread. I know it is insanely stressful (for some bizarre reason, I tried to be a theoretical physicist at one time in my life -- didn't last long...) As the saying goes, the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. But, there is another less well known part of that saying: Which of the steps is the most important? The first? The last? Some innocuous step in the middle? Even if you don't know it, the small things you do in life are just as important as the ones that stick out in your memory.

Good luck!

>Doing these sort of puzzles has very little to do with 90% of what programmers do.

On the other hand, it's not a waste of time for a young person to just go through a few of these a week as they are job hunting. And you really do get better at them as you do more and more. Certain patterns repeat, and the tricky ones usually have nice explanations that you can certainly learn from. They are also FUN if you do them in a stress-free situation outside an interview.

You’re thinking rather short sided here. There are a lot of ways to find out if someone can think critically and also has the appropriate level of skill at programming. I prefer to give them a set of much more real world type scenarios to see how they will handle things. Often I do this in a paired programming scenario. We both sit down. I drive they navigate and we spend 20 - 30 minutes trying to build something. The something is never anything that is going to go into production. Just code that is real and useful and can show me how they think through a problem and whether they can catch mistakes in code as they happen in real time. Lately I’ve been a fan of making a shopping cart (since the software I build doesn’t have a shopping cart).

I keep it very short. I try to make it low stress. I try to make it fun and funny. Why? I really want to know if the candidate can work with me and how they will work. I don’t care one bit whether they can remember the big O notation of a red-black tree search or whether they know how to reimplement a complex datatype. I care how they will work with me in my environment.

You might say “you’re method is just too simplistic. People can game it and get through.” It’s been accused of that before. And frankly, I can memorize algorithms and game that interview. Try gaming me while we pair on some code and I try to toss in a few roadblocks. Try to game me as I try to see how you will react as we work together. It’s hard, and my methods have been quite successful for me.

As for the pay, I don’t pay people what Amazon, Google, and Facebook pay. But I pay very well and people stick with me so it seems to work out.

If it helps, I have a CS degree and about 15 years experience now. That experience started not in programming but in IT support and then system engineer/infrastructure work for corporates, followed by IT management and Project Management roles. These are all achievable with that degree.

I also know others who mixed it with some short courses on stats or other things to diversify into data science, marketing, business analysis and other areas.