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

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191–200 of 324 posts

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

#191

I was hired by Travelocity (many years ago) to be a designer. A few months in they had plenty of designers but couldn't hire front-end developers, so they made me a developer. It wasn't a choice. If I wanted to stay employed I had to figure it out. After several military deployments and treating programming like a hobby for some open source projects I developed a talent for it. A talent a CS degree could never provid…

How will you develop that skill again now considering you have already gone through the journey?

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

#192
post #119

I don't know if this helps, but I personally find coding interview practice sites/problems to be extremely boring, difficult, not fun, and frustrating to work on. I'm saying this as a 13-years-of-experience software engineer; I've been called a rock star or ninja or something similar in almost every company and team I've worked in (big and small), and throughout my entire career and the numerous times I've job-hunted…

+1 to this.

Similar story for me. Although I wont go so far as saying I am a rockstar I do have a reputation for building solid, maintainable, reliable code that works even though I have struggled in the high-pressure whiteboarding interviews (I'm currently at a company that is well-known/infamous for whiteboarding interviews too).

There are different roles other than "software engineer" that are programming based, even at FANG-style companies (in my personal experience). At my current employer although I spend my entire day designing/writing/debugging code using the same tools, infrastructure, programming languages, and expectations on code-standards/quality etc I am not a "software engineer" as far as my job role goes. My role still has "engineer" in the title, but the expectations for the purest CS knowledge were slightly lower and the interviews were basically a chat about work I had done elsewhere and a few general questions around experience and knowledge (salary/total comp is about ~85% what a software engineer gets)

tl;dr - you dont have to be a "software engineer" to program for a living

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

#194

Switch to being a tester for your first job. Learn a different point of view to producing quality software. If you want to go back into programming, it would less difficult. This is a path that I took.

+1 to that. I started as a QA hoping to switch to being a dev in the future. However I eventually grew to like my role and I enjoy my work very much. I am much better QA than (potentially) a dev. IT is not only programming, there are plenty of more roles there.

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

#195
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. Since you mentioned public speaking, I would also strongly recommend Toastmasters as a way to improve your public speaking and overcoming-anxiety skills. I've personally tried it, and it really helped.

I have been planning to join Toastmasters for the past 2 years but for procrastination!

If you tell yourself (and actually do, if required) that you'll only participate as an audience and not to actually do public speaking, you may get yourself over the 'thing' that may be behind the 'procrastination'.

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

#196
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah like I said in another thread, CTCI is for more of a software __engineering__ role. There are lots of really easy software developement jobs where you ain’t doing algorithmic/dataatructures, just chilling with other code monkeys , humming Katy perry tunes and stackoverflow searching 4 hrs a day, the rest is breaks and hn reading

"Code monkeys" feels pretty derogatory when talking about people just doing the job they are paid for. It's especially unnecessary in a thread like this one where OP is doubting his skills and choices, and looking for help/direction.

At the risk of mirroring pure-awesome's comment: we could say the use of the word 'just' is derogatory, but it doesn't make sense to deny the distinction it draws.

There's a difference between a mechanical engineer, and a car technician. There's a difference between serious algorithmic work, and code-monkey work. One is more demanding than the other.

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

#197
I should like to see some of the problems that take you 2-5 hours to solve. Show your solution, and text about the way you tackle the problem.

Perhaps you need a mentor, someone that can give you some tips about your coding abilities and what you should do to improve.

If you need more than 10 minutes to sum the cubes of numbers from 1 to n in python, then I think you have a problem as a programmer.

Can you point to a leetcode problem that takes you 2-5 hours to solve?

Edited: Two weeks ago you submitted a similar post and in the comments you give this example:

>> To give a concrete example of some of the above, just this morning I tried to code the brute force solution following problem: Give two sorted arrays return the median. I spent over an hour trying to implement the brute force solution involving linearly going through each array and couldn’t code it in Python.

As a hobby programmer, my ten minutes approach:

  def median(a,b):
    ...:     ab = len(a)+len(b)
    ...:     pos = ab/2
    ...:     ia = 0
    ...:     ib = 0
    ...:     for ic in range(pos):
    ...:         if a[ia] 

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

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As someone with dreadful experiences of the metal health system, I think the very last thing you want to do is see a psychiatrist. Psychiatrists are expensive and look at brain chemistry, more than likely you’ll end up on some sort of medication which you likely don’t need. By all means see a counsellor or a psychologist, but unless you have deep psychological issues where you are getting to an unbelievably unbearabl…

I don't know where you live, but generally that is applied to people who have all the other things and are still unhappy. Psychiatrists will generally try to steer you towards healthy fulfilling social lifestyles, and only then if you are still unhappy then usually you have some chemical imbalance that can be fixed, why be too proud rather than just fix it.

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

#200
It sounds like your graduation set up expectations that developing chops would be easy, but it’s not for anyone.

I’m a terrible programmer but it never bothered me because my degree is in neurobiology: just avoiding a segfault was already a success for me (when I started).

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