Good with algorithms & horrible with technology. Please help me • Hacker News Board

Post by swelly127 » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 7:16 PM UTC

So I'm a sophomore at a ivy league school studying CS. Recently I've been doing a few interviews and most of them have been pretty impressed at my ability to find anagrams in strings quickly, or whatever. The thing is, I can't understand technology at all. I love algorithms - I write python scripts for my math homework... and run them in codecademy labs because I can't figure out the unix compiler.

How do I get over this? I want to join a small high growth startup and live the exciting startup life but I'm afraid I might fail. I'm pretty ambitious and I have no problem working really hard for long hours but I feel like even if I learn heroku or xcode or RoR or whatever it is, new technologies will keep coming out and if I am fundamentally bad with technology I will not be a great developer.

When I tell people about my problem they say, oh you're good with data structures - the hard part is over. I completely disagree. Programming in real life is much harder than any algorithm. Things crash for no reason. And where do I even start typing?

Any advice or help? Would really appreciate it.

somebackground: have some experience in web dev but had to be walked through it step by step. here is the only thing I have ever made by myself (with a friend who helped me get started): jessicashu.com

Post by codonaut » Mon, Oct 21, 2013, 8:53 PM UTC

Take out the "ivy league" part and that post describes me pretty well. In school(just graduated in May) I excelled at the algorithmic and mathy side of computer science, but was horrible at the technological side. This really bit me in the ass when I got to a class like Operating Systems where I had to do a lot of C programming.

Anyway, from what I can tell there's really no substitute to doing a hell of a lot of programming. I've also had the thought of, "I know I'm smart, but I think I might be just inherently bad with technology", but now that I've been working full time for 6 months, and have stubbed my toes on more technologies than I did in all of school that thought comes less and less. There are still gaps in my technological knowledge, but by reading hackernews, digging more into Linux, and making projects from the ground up I've been steadily filling in those gaps. Go code and prosper!