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

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

#121

Post by duxup »

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?

At least as far as jobs go, there are plenty of jobs you can do ok with ... and not actually be interested in it.

Programming is just a really hard one to do if you're not interested, possibly only because of the number of people who ARE interested (or at least some point were and they got to the point they could actually just surf along).

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

#123

Post by cambalache »

throw3848yui wrote: post #32
xf1cf wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing in this comment that strikes me as real. Not only was it completely unnecessarily to condescendingly talk about how allegedly smart you are, the points you gave sound like they came straight out of a wantrepreneur youtuber's vlog.

I think OP struggles with concentration, this could fix that. Not sure what was condescending. And I am smart, my mother had me tested ;)

As it was said elsewhere, you present yourself as the stupid person version of a smart person. Maybe it is true, maybe it is not.

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

#124

Post by vijucat »

What subject excites you that doing a course on Coursera or Udemy, for example, doesn't make you feel like, "Groan, 6 hours a week x 6 weeks?!"? Do that course + talk on the Coursera forum with other students and reach out to folks in the industry who'd value seeing that certification on your resume / LinkedIn.

About feelings: you have to feel your feelings, but productivity is difficult if you're always feeling down. Don't beat up yourself, which adds a 2nd layer of sadness to an already sad situation. Get enough sleep and work on things that excite you.

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

#125

Post by spyckie2 »

just to add in -

you're not slow, you're probably average. When you start working, all the things you can learn in a weekend quickly evaporate within 1-2 years of your working career. The only things left to learn are those that take 3 months or more.

These things take the right mindset to learn - continuing to think about them, tackle them, ignoring failure and coming back to it over and over because that's the nature of 3 month learning projects.

You may think you're stupid but you're probably average for a programmer. I do agree with the rest of the thread, you're lacking the spark - the thing that other people have that allows them to persist despite the challenge to figure it out.

Take a personality test, like MBTI, and use it to figure out your preferences. Introverted Feelers are usually smart enough (NFs) to do programming but hate it, it could describe yourself.

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

#126

Post by probably_wrong »

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?

According to my father, the business world in my country is currently experiencing difficulties finding talent because, in the words of his bosses, "young people today are too soft and quit when things get slightly difficult".

While there are many other factors here that I don't want to get into (such as loyalty being a two-way street and so on), I often wonder whether the idea of "this is not a hobby, it's a job" might have a bit of truth in it. At the end of the day, honest work is better than no work, and we all have to be adults at some point at start pulling our weight.

Would I prefer everyone to have UBI and work only if they want to? Definitely. But not everyone can be passionate about what they do (is anyone really passionate about packing items for Amazon?) and I guess sometimes you draw the short stick.

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

#127

Post by PinkMilkshake »

The only fun I've ever had programming was making video games.

You don't have to be super smart to make games and I don't think you even have to like them. It's more the rich visual feedback that makes it fun. A game engine is like a giant virtual playground for your code.

And in video games there isn't really a "right way" to do anything. There are always weird problems to solve and hacky solutions are fun and even expected. It's the only programming where I've had some laugh out loud moments, like "why are the trees inside out and spinning around?"

There are some great game dev postmortems where you learn about the beautiful horrors going on behind the scenes to make a vision a reality. Game dev is forgiving like that. From the book 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development: "If it looks right, it is right".

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

#128

Post by MandieD »

personaenon wrote: post #73

Can totally relate. 25 years as system administrator and I DO NOT want to do DEVops nor SRE. Not sure where to go myself....

Learn how to do systems admin in the cloud your current employer/industry favors - as a longtime Microsoft platform admin who picked up PowerShell over the past decade to do AD/Exchange/Lync (Skype), Azure was easiest to slide into. Learn how that cloud’s networking works, especially with existing on-prem stuff, and do so in its command line interface. Learn how to do those things in Terraform and Ansible.

Be a sysadmin for developers. Help those bright young kids who are network-blind figure out why their stuff isn’t talking to other stuff. Help them when they can’t work out how to deal with the corporate web proxy or why their cloud bills are so high (did they check how many cores their database instance really needed? Did they pick a good VM size, or should they have gone with something with a higher RAM/CPU ratio?)

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

#129

Post by solar_perplexus »

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…

Also, you raised a point that is very relevant - you couldn't understand pointers when you were 15, but now you do.

There is some level of cognitive maturity required to understand new ideas. I understood pointers somewhat from school, but it really made sense to me once I learned about computer architecture in more detail.

Sometimes you need to see the whole picture to understand why an element is present there and usually that happens only if you stay long enough with a problem/concept.

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

#130

Post by silveroriole »

Hey. Kind of same here. I’m a good programmer but not motivated enough to really get to grips with the difficult and low-paying fields I’m interested in. Here’s a lazy solution: cut down your hours. Work 4 days or less. If programming’s already so boring, then there’s not much downside to picking a boring well-paid field to offset the salary loss. Use your time to do things you care about instead.
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