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

As a medical student who also happens to have a CS degree, might I suggest that a councillor is an excellent idea, and a psychologist or psychiatrist might also be worthwhile.

Firstly, how much do you code when you are doing your undergraduate? No offense, but 2-5 hours seems too long. If so, you should first brush up your basics, and let go of the thought 'I am from a CS major'. Programming is almost always self-taught, or can't really be learnt effectively through classes, only through, you know practices. Assuming your college did an OK job, you should pick up and relearn everything relatively fast, in 2-3 months or so. Algorithmic questions can be pretty intimidating for sure, so again, practice a lot, ask your friends to do mock interviews, and go interview around with less famous companies on the market, to understand the process will also help.

Anyway, self-taught is the only way here. I have an imposer syndrome when I graduated. It does make feel better knowing that one of the best guys in our class, who we assume is already a CS guru at the very beginning, actually knows nothing about programming at that beginning. He was faking it to project confidence to us, but after getting positive feedback from the environment, he actually gained the momentum to learn and understand CS as the guru we thought he was. So it is not too late to do it all over again.

Hope this helps. :)

It may be that the problem isn't you, maybe it's just that you and CS don't fit.

The others in this thread are right of course. Make sure your mental health is good. Make sure you try other approaches to finding a job in CS. And so on.

I would just like to add another thing you can try: Give yourself a break, go for holidays for the first week of thr break and then afterwards do something else that's hard. Study a science. Study electronic circuit design and build something. Read about architecture and design a building. Or something else. Just something else than CS and challenge yourself.

(I mean, don't sign up for a university course, better just read some textbooks or online resources.)

Do this for a couple of days or weeks. And try to figure out if you are good at it.

If you hate everything, then please, seriously, talk to somebody about your mental health. Maybe you are burned out or have a depression. It can happen to everyone and it can be fixed.

Maybe you also just need more holidays or don't like work in general. I'm not excluding that possibility, I think that's a totally okay feeling to have but I also don't see a reason to assume that this applies to you.

However, if you find something that keeps you interested for hours every day and where you feel like you're good at it, congratulations. Maybe CS just isn't for you. I'm not saying that you should then become an Architect or Electronics Engineer or whatever it was that captured you. (You can, of course, but that's a long term thing I'd say.)

What I'm saying is that after having determined CS as the source of the problem for you, you can now look for alterations that are fun for you. Maybe you could be a product manager? You don't need to code, but it really helps if you know the language that developers speak. There are many other options as well I'm sure.

You have pleanty of options, just to name a few:

- systems adminstration

- network engineering

- Incident response

- Technical sales

- Account management

- Intellectual property law

- hardware engineering

- project management

- product management

- IT support

- IT security

- technical auditing

- data analytics

- computational biology

How old are you? mid 20-ish I guess? It's not late to find a new job - Wallmart cashier, Uber driver, HelloFresh delivery guy, et cetera.