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

81–90 of 173 posts

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

#81

Post by maps7 »

notduncansmith wrote: post #46
Mirioron wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd find it more strange if something did interest people for over 40/50 years. Trains for example - that's a long time to be interested in trains!

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

#82

Post by thaumasiotes »

bachmeier wrote: post #76
throwaway88p wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I'm stupid, but I do believe that most people have a sort of "ceiling" in regards to their capabilities, intellectual or otherwise. I'm mostly curious about what to do when those something they're interested in 's fall outside of your capability.

You wrote "writing and maintaining simple CRUD apps, and to be honest I hate it. Its mind numbingly boring and I certainly dont want to spend my life doing that". This has nothing to do with hitting the ceiling of your capabilities. You don't like the things you're doing. I don't even see any reason to say you don't like programming, just that you don't like what you're doing now.

> You wrote "writing and maintaining simple CRUD apps, and to be honest I hate it. Its mind numbingly boring and I certainly dont want to spend my life doing that".

> This has nothing to do with hitting the ceiling of your capabilities.

He also wrote "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 in some applied method."

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

#83

Post by joshvm »

cschep wrote: post #38

It's possible, though I don't know you, that you're too smart to be a programmer. And maybe "programmer" is the problem. Be a _____ who can also code. Zed Shaw said it best in the final pages of learn python the hard way. Programming as a career is rarely fulfilling to anyone. But being a teacher/doctor/librarian/entrepreneur/warehouse worker/farmer/etc. that can code is a super power. I'm basically talking to myself…

Well the flip side is that being a programmer can get you access to a lot of interesting fields, especially fields which don't have an abundance of technically savvy people. These also tend to be fields that have strong humanitarian impact, or utility. I like solving people's problems and I can do that through code.

Lots of people work as software consultants. It's really no different from physical trades - you know your tools, people come to you with problems, you solve them.

I do think a big factor is choosing what you work on though. It's a lot less fun if your projects are dictated to you, unless you happen to really enjoy your field.

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

#84

Post by prostheticvamp »

notduncansmith wrote: post #46
Mirioron wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Speaking as a mental health specialist:

No that is not. We treat disease. Pretending we can fine-tune personality traits is quackery, and no respectable mental health specialist would lay claim to that.

But don’t worry - quacks abound, and they even take your insurance.

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

#85

Post by brailsafe »

Certainly smart enough to do the vast majority of work in professional software dev which is basically CRUD, and smart enough to realize that it is easy and boring. I'd go back to school anyway and see of there's not some research in any other field you might be interested in.

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

#86

Post by metroholografix »

burntoutfire wrote: post #50

If you're employed as a programmer and not being fired for incompetence, then you are actually smart enough to be a programmer.

In more than 20 years of programming, I've never seen an incompetent programmer get fired.

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

#87

Post by asknthrow2020 »

geocrasher wrote: post #51
cschep wrote: post #38

It's possible, though I don't know you, that you're too smart to be a programmer. And maybe "programmer" is the problem. Be a _____ who can also code. Zed Shaw said it best in the final pages of learn python the hard way. Programming as a career is rarely fulfilling to anyone. But being a teacher/doctor/librarian/entrepreneur/warehouse worker/farmer/etc. that can code is a super power. I'm basically talking to myself…

This. My own suspicion is that you the OP is highly intelligent and recognizes all of these weaknesses due to his own intelligence rather than a lack of it. I can relate to some of these things in a way. When I was 15 I tried to teach myself TC++. I got hung up on pointers and thought that I just wasn't smart enough to understand them. Many years later I had somebody who helped me understand pointers and I realized t…

On the other hand though, could you say that someone's interests are to a degree dictated by their capabilities? It seems to me like the distinguishing factor between someone who is interested in a challenging field vs. someone who is not, is that the person interested often understands the material to a degree that maybe the other person is unable to. For them studying and doing the work may take substantially less effort and thus their interest continues, even when things become difficult.

This is probably why many programmers are uninterested in your chosen field of teaching.

TLDR, isn't "disinterest" often a cognitive bias driven by some subconscious estimation that we're unable to do something?

I think this affects everyone, a lot.

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

#88

Post by bawana »

blahbhthrow3748 wrote: post #21

This sounds like depression to me. You're having trouble finding activities that interest you and feeling pessimistic about the future. It's easy to get stuck thinking that everything is hopeless or you're going to feel like this forever. Try taking some time off to decompress and talking to a psychologist. It's a slow process and it can be very challenging but with time you can start getting excited about new challe…

+1. Depression affects 25% adults at some point. I am not talking about ‘sadness’ but a more profound condition whose symptoms are subtle at first, but pervasive and protean. And get a CT of your brain as well.

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

#89

Post by ssss11 »

I had friends drop out of CS degree or IT career - they each went on to become successful at health & safety, physical education, statistics and formal project management. Theres limitless options but narrowing down your next move is the hard part... what aspects of work do you enjoy and perhaps go from there? dont kick yourself over choosing the wrong path, hindsight is 20:20

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

#90

Post by fencepost »

Do you actually suck at this or do you have a great case of impostor syndrome (perhaps a pattern you're failing to recognize?)? You might be surprised at where you'd rank compared to the general population.

As far as retaining things, there's an awful lot of stuff where you don't need to remember the details - knowing something exists lets you go find details when needed, and the more useful items will stick with you after you start using them regularly. I'll use trees as an example - there are more different kinds of trees and ways to implement them than you can shake a stick at, but most programmers aren't going to need to implement any of them ever. Do you need to remember details about balancing, etc? Probably not.

Post reply on HN