Ask HN: Can't seem to remember basic things, should I give up on computing?

I'm not a programmer by trade, but I can relate. I'm the first chair French Horn at my school, and have the ultimate responsibility for my section playing right, sounding good, and blending in. However, I frequently find myself asking my peers what the fingering of a note is that I've played just fine hundreds of times before. Does that make me a bad player? No, it just means that it takes me longer to master things, and that I have to practice a lot more to maintain proficiency. Should I give up? Heavens, no- I didn't come this far just to quit because I keep messing up my damn B flats. Should you quit your job? Absolutely not.

It's almost like you're human and that your brain slowly removes things over time to make way for new information.

How are you doing physically and mentally? I've found that doing sports (getting out and jogging, doing yoga, etc.) or something physical really helps me stay focused and positive, and that going to bed at a sane hour is more important for me than getting extra work done- because if I stay up late, I'll be tired and sub-optimal for the next two or three days.

If you're the slowest and worst coder at your firm, then there's probably at least somebody who's knowledgeable enough and willing enough to help you out and talk to you. Find them, and when you ask for advice, write it down somewhere so that you don't have to go back asking the same thing. If you can, befriend them, though that will take time.

You didn't come this far just to quit. You can do this.

No one cannot possibly know what happening in your mind, to find what is wrong with it, based on this short description. But I have a guess.

Mostly people do not try to remember this things, they do it the other way. For example, I'm learning what is two's complement. I'm not trying to remember math representation, this representation is not something to rememeber, it is just one more way to explain what happening. It is a way to clarify things, in case when textual explanation was not enough. What I'm trying to do, is to find a way how should I think, to reinvent two's complement when needed. I'm trying to understand what original inventor of two's complement was thinking: why he did it this way, not the other? And I'm trying to find a visual representation of two's complement.

It is the best way to deal with math and technology. Even if you learn social science, you can learn how some author thought, instead of remembering his books by a heart. If you learnt how to think like others, then you would need not to remember their thoughts, you would be able to generate their thoughts yourself. It reminds me: https://hackernoon.com/how-not-to-memorise-mathematics-98fef...

My history teacher in the school claimed, that he didn't remembered any historical dates except two or three. He managed to calculate all the other dates, using these as a reference. I never learned to do that, but I believe that it is the same thing, as I do with math and CS. He learned to think like history, and to generate dates like history did, instead of remembering them.

Your memory is not like computer's one, your memory is generative, your mind is a compression algorithm, that can represent data by smallest possible about of remembered bits. As a funny consequence, your memory can generate ideas, that no one have found before, and sometimes you cannot tell is the idea you found is novel, or you read it somewhere. It is because generating new ideas and remembering old ones actually the same process in a mind.

(With two's complement, I confess, it is easier for me to remember, because if is modular arithmetic, it is ring of integers modulo 2^n, I dealt with them a lot while studying math.)

I feel that I have more difficulty remembering things when I'm a little sleep deprived. Have you tried increasing your sleep time by one hour?

> I need to keep on relearning basic concepts I should have at the top of my head.

Who says you should? As an engineer you are a problem solver and not a hard drive to store every step of an algorithm. You seem to know what pieces fit together but struggle with the details, but that's fine. It's not a negative thing, you are just a bit hard on yourself. If you don't use a concept regularly, you are naturally bound to forget it. I can now confidently write xmlhttprequest and fetch without quick googling :)

> When I compare myself to my colleagues

Don't do that, that's a way to depression and anxiety. They are probably suffering too you just don't notice it.

I live without internet at home now. It's amazing how much more space there is in my brain after reducing that single input.