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

It would be even better if you could find someone who is a programmer / developer in a day-to-day business who could talk to you regularly about it and maybe help you out / support you.

It sounds like you're having trouble getting started in this career. Trying to get a first job in this area out of school can definitely be difficult, competitive, tiring and/or scary. It's perfectly normal to feel those things, I think (I know that I have). One can believe that, should you choose to continue down this path, when you find the right place, you'll know it because they'll give you a chance and support you.

Perhaps you could seek out an internship first - try to find somewhere with less pressure for success and more room to grow - if you can afford it. You have one thing going for you that I didn't have - a CS degree (my story is a different one though and I wanted this reply to be about helping you).

You don't have to be a perfect l33t coder on day one. You will find that, programming problems can be vexing headaches like you describe - and not being able to solve them can be extremely frustrating. If you chose to keep going down this path, you might come to learn that this is more normal than not, and as you gain experience - when you hit those brick walls, you learn to go around, or under them. Or you might work really hard and break the brick walls down. Or you might invent a new kind of concrete and realize you don't need brick. I'm not waxing metaphors, I am serious and I'd ask other developers to chime in here if their experience matches this. Eventually, honing this skill actually becomes a reward - but it certainly takes honing and practice and time.

By the way, graduating with a CS degree is no mean feat, so congratulations for being capable of doing that!

I hear you asking about other career paths. I can't answer that question immediately, but, some others on this thread have suggested there are a lot of tangential jobs - like project management, product management, really, there are a great many number of possibilities. Within information systems and technology, you can be a database engineer/developer and work with ETL, data and SQL. You could become an system infrastructure person, for example - doing cloud architecture with AWS/Azure/GCE/etc. or even managing physical hardware. You could work in IT support. You could work in technical sales or solutions. Those are all possibilities that are maybe less hard programming intensive. Perhaps there are too many possibilities without some direction / feedback from you about what you like.

It is entirely possible that you may want to do something other than programming or technical in nature too. What are your interests? For example, some people who thought they would enjoy programming, really end up enjoying cooking and might work towards becoming a chef. You can spend a little time exploring what other options you might find exciting or interesting, and then write down pros and cons / compare and contrast for those things and for working in some sort of programming capacity. Don't give up immediately, but don't necessarily settle if something else really calls out to you.

You also just went through a lot working finishing school and graduating. Maybe you're a bit tired - and need a break (top rated post by whack suggests something similar). That's a great recommendation. It's hard after going through something difficult and stressful to jump right into another similar thing. Don't take a break for too long, but be willing to take a break. We all need them from time to time.

You can think of the kind of skills you gained programming in college - focus on the skills not the programming - problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, being analytical, etc. and see what other careers or vocations need similar skills.

Another final thought - find some places that you can interview without caring about the outcome, but rather simply to gain experience interviewing and see how it goes. Find something that interests you, but isn't necessarily good or bad if you were to get or not get the position. Try to interview, even for a job you might not want but is at least involving programming - if you don't feel comfortable or they give you some horrible programming task, you don't have to finish the interview. Find a way to turn this into an experiment.

You could think of it this like a minimum viable product for a startup, where you are the product, and the goal is to see how you fit in the market. Be willing to experiment, make hypotheses, and try them out. Be willing to fail and learn and take opportunities to grow too. And remember, the difference between science and screwing around is writing it down!

Best of luck to you. You have already shown you care by asking questions - so keep up the good work. Ask more if you think this is helping!

This is what interviewing is like in 99% of other sectors, even engineering. You might be asked some competency based questions at a larger organisation but the whole “dance like a monkey in a high pressure environment while we watch” whiteboard/coding test feels like cruel and unusual punishment to me that is nothing like the job of actually programming.

Business analysts, project management, tech sales, testing, support, etc

Choose an industry-focused company (banks, oil & gas, telecommunications) instead of a tech-based company.

Exactly this. The way this game works that you and the interviewer have read the same book. He or she asks you a “difficult” question, you pretend to think about it, then rattle off the answer you memorised from the book. The interviewer is then satisfied that you read the same blogs and follow the same people on Twitter as them, which is what this is really a test for, and you pass. There is zero correlation between any of this and actually working in the industry

My advice is, don't try to solve all the leetcode problems, you won't succeed. Focus on one area, one area only: strings, backtracking, recursion, etc. and master it. Live and breathe those problems. Watch videos. You learn programming by doing, not watching or reading and assuring yourself you'll know when the time comes. No copy paste ever!

Pramp is also a good peer interview platform, use that as a test.

I have faith in you. Don't give up on CS.

Also you can checkout the PM route - as "PMs who can code are gold"