91–100 of 173 posts
It's probably a good idea to keep your day job while you develop interests outside of work and investigate other job options. School can be good, but it can also saddle you with expensive student loans that take several decades to pay off.
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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.
If you need encouragement, try and find others stories of career change, and how they did it - there are plenty of them out there.... From https://www.ambisie.com/st/kerry-kitzelman :
"Some jobs can be like golden handcuffs. They pay well but you feel trapped by them. You are afraid to step out and make a change in case you wind up worse than before. Some jobs are like cardboard handcuffs, they pay nothing but you still allow yourself to be trapped by them because of fear of the unknown.
Making a decision to change may indeed result in your fears being realised, but facing that fear gives you the courage to overcome.
Since the day I decided to cut the umbilical cord to poorly paid employment, I have not been afraid to apply for any position I think I might enjoy and be rewarded for. It sometimes means steep learning curves and working harder than anyone else on your team, especially those that have the experience you don't. But the reward is that the world opens up to you. There is so much more opportunity than you could possibly have imagined."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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?
I think you have to constantly be reading and learning about things on your periphery. It can take a long time before your interest in something is strong enough to decide to do it for a living.
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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…
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.
* did you ever go to college for programming? if not, a lot of the 'patterns' people see were beaten into their heads in college, so that's something that can be helped :)
* have you ever done competitive programming, like TopCoder problems (the old ones. Last I checked, TopCoder has gotten WAY over my head and probably a lot of other people's heads, too)?
Doing programming problems can be a great way to flex those muscles and see common patterns in code and problems you need to solve. It might be able to really help you :)
Topcoder is the one a lot of people know, but there's others out there. I kinda liked this one, and it's used as a recruiting tool, too: https://app.codility.com/programmers/
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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…
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.
I refuse to believe that. It depends how much motivation, discipline and perseverance you have. The human mind is capable of anything! If there's something that you think it falls your capacity is because you haven't put considerable effort on the task that you're trying to achieve. And if you think you have set a truly high bar, then try achieving less intimidating tasks, even if you aren't successful for the original task you've set for the learning journey can even be more rewarding.
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…
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…
Yes, perseverance really matters, and that comes either from interest or grit. But it's not always enough. It can be a lot of fun practising guitar for 8 hours a day if, after a few months, you feel you're making some progress. It's not fun, if even after a few months of long hours of practice, you forgot the concepts from the beginning. Passion only goes so far, we shouldn't romanticise failure too much. Sometimes it just isn't a good fit and sometimes that's because of limitations.
That having been said, not trying to dismiss your point, it could very well be that the person is intellectually capable enough, but just doesn't think programming is fun. But I wouldn't take that as a given and in all honestly, it doesn't seem like the most likely case either.
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…
Thank you for this, it's a nice concise way to explain that even the experienced use Google all of the time.
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?
The coworker and the person he was talking to were both very confused by how anyone could ever want to live that way. I had a very different reaction: if I had been aware that this was an option when I was 22, I totally would have done that, but I just never considered it as a possibility.
Even almost 20 years later it still sounds like a great life, other than the soul-crushing guilt and shame I would feel...