Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Not smart enough to a programmer, where to take my life from here?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 173 posts

Re: Ask HN: Not smart enough to a programmer, where to take my life from here?

#41

Post by _9hey »

godelski wrote: post #4

I may be off base here, but it sounds to me like you just aren't interested in the subjects. One of the biggest factors to learning is how much interest you have. There are tricks you can do to get yourself more interested, but it does take a fair amount of work and isn't always effective. But if you wonder why sometimes we can remember silly details or whole complicated plotlines from stories but can't remember a si…

Agreed. Interest breeds talent and competence. Interest may come from a deeper sense of purpose. The truth will set you free.

Re: Ask HN: Not smart enough to a programmer, where to take my life from here?

#42

Post by samatman »

thomasmeeks wrote: post #13

My intuition is that you’d get more out of therapy than a career change right now. This sounds more like burnout or a lack of interest to me. But framing it as a lack of intelligence says a lot about how you view yourself, which could make a career change much harder than it needs to be.

I'd like to elaborate on this, and strongly urge OP to see a psychiatrist.

The answer to your dilemma might be a new career. It might be cognitive behavioral therapy. It also might be an SSRI or modafinil.

I have my guesses but they aren't at all interesting, the point is to get in touch with a professional who can help you figure this out.

What you're experiencing isn't normal, or inevitable, and it doesn't mean you're not intelligent. Although hey, you might not be, how would I know? I think that's the least likely explanation out of all of them.

Re: Ask HN: Not smart enough to a programmer, where to take my life from here?

#43

Post by nogabebop23 »

I think I see a lot of people in the potential career changes who have a similar attitude, which unfortunately continues the (probably not untrue) perception of BAs, sales and management who don't know shit. Please don't add to this by saying "I don't like development and don;t think I'm very good at it, so instead I'll become a manager of developers".

Re: Ask HN: Not smart enough to a programmer, where to take my life from here?

#44

Post by bbrree66 »

Firm but necessary feedback:

When I read this I see me me me me me me me me me.

Think of things in terms of how you are helping others instead of so selfishly about yourself. The world doesn't exist to serve you. What are you expecting, some amazing job to fall down from the sky that is all about you and everything you want? Doesn't work that way! You need some career capital. What value can you provide in exchange for these things you are asking for? If you want an interesting and fun career you need to be skilled enough at something to counter balance the value you receive.

More concretely: there is a fantastic book called "So Good They Can't Ignore You" by Cal Newport. Give that a read and it will provide guidance and a new framework with which to see the world.

Re: Ask HN: Not smart enough to a programmer, where to take my life from here?

#45

Post by pengaru »

farias0 wrote: post #11
godelski wrote: post #4

I may be off base here, but it sounds to me like you just aren't interested in the subjects. One of the biggest factors to learning is how much interest you have. There are tricks you can do to get yourself more interested, but it does take a fair amount of work and isn't always effective. But if you wonder why sometimes we can remember silly details or whole complicated plotlines from stories but can't remember a si…

Yeah, I guess the real question here is "do you love programming?" If you do you can make it work, it's a matter of not giving up and instead tweaking your learning system, practicing more and better, etc. If you don't you need to find another area. Programming is a very demanding trade, and I don't think you can do it just for the paycheck, you need to have some degree of passion for it. If someone disagrees with me…

> Programming is a very demanding trade, and I don't think you can do it just for the paycheck, you need to have some degree of passion for it. If someone disagrees with me about this I'd love to hear different takes.

There are more people writing programs as a daily grind for a paycheck than as passionate artisans practicing their craft, and it's only getting more so as "CS" becomes an increasingly blue-collar field.

What you said strikes me as a rather dated view of programming. It was certainly more true back when just to operate a computer required significant resources, skill, and perseverance. It used to be such a horribly tedious, time-consuming chore to program them, that it often required something like passionate interest to stick it through.

Re: Ask HN: Not smart enough to a programmer, where to take my life from here?

#46

Post by notduncansmith »

Mirioron wrote: post #36
t-writescode wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you hit the nail on the head here. This person tries to get us to believe they're stupid; but, if they believe that themselves, truly, then they're going to create self-fulfilling prophecies. They need to find something they're interested in to work on every day. 8 hours is a long time each day to be doing something, it's better if you're interested in it, so that at least some of those hours are fun. And I w…

Here's the question that inevitably pops up from this: what do you do if nothing interests you in this way? There are interesting things, sure, but those are usually fleeting. You'll be interested in something for a month or two and then lose interest in it. You can't earn a living on that. What do you do then?

That sounds like a job for a mental health specialist. There are psychological reasons underlying the initial interests and the subsequent fading of interest, and the right specialist will be able to identify those and use them to guide you down the path to sticking to something.

Re: Ask HN: Not smart enough to a programmer, where to take my life from here?

#47

Post by madhadron »

My advice in this situation is:

1. Keep your job for now. This is a good time to have a paycheck. Think of it as chores to pay the mortgage. Maybe you'll get a dishwasher later, but for now the dishes gotta get washed.

2. Find a psychiatric or clinical psychologist and have yourself evaluated for mental illness. This is actually really important. Unlike physical problems where it's sometimes obvious ("I can't read the billboard by the road, I probably need glasses."), mental issues can make subjective impressions unreliable or misleading.

> I fail to understand, fail to recognize patterns, am too slow to understand simple concepts and never retain anything. Occasionally understand the individual concepts of something but then her completely lost when they're all combined

Too slow compared to what? Fail to recognize based on how many exposures? Taken together this feels like a learning disability that makes you slow to internalize material in the standard way, and you're not building up the mastery of the fundamentals enough before trying to combine them. Again, psychological evaluation is the way to go.

Also, don't look for work where you love it all the time. No one's going to pay you for that. What you're after is work that you can do and feel some basic satisfaction when you put it down for the day instead of being cast into a downward spiral by it.

You also are allowed to have other stuff that provides the meaning and enrichment for their lives. In fact, you should.

Re: Ask HN: Not smart enough to a programmer, where to take my life from here?

#48

Post by throwaway88p »

codac_mac wrote: post #25

I often worry about this myself, and I highly agree with what some others are saying: find a problem/task that interests you or is worth solving - and work on it until it's solved, regardless of how difficult it is or inadequate it may make you feel by not understanding it at first. If you can't find a challenge, then maybe try going out of your way to add new feature /functionality to your CRUD apps. The challenges…

> find a problem/task that interests you or is worth solving - and work on it until it's solved, regardless of how difficult

I guess part of the problem is that those problems tend to be rare. The way I feel, is that if I have a problem, it's likely already been solved (in which case I'll just use that solution), or people much more intelligent than me are already working on it.

Another issue seems be be is that as time goes on, the problems I take interest in seem to become much more difficult to solve. This may be because they are technically complex, but can be for other reasons too. Often I don't even know what I need to be learning / researching to solve a problem, and that basically halts me.

Post reply on HN