Why Learning to Code Is So Damn Hard

I somehow stopped my learning process before I hit 8th grade (around the same time I discovered that the opposite sex exists). When I picked it up again recently, the sheer number and complexity of frameworks and languages itself was daunting.

I can't imagine how hard it must be for someone who hasn't had a lick of coding experience. I could at least build a good looking website in HTML, CSS and simple JS before I started learning how to code.

It's damn tough and it has given me newfound respect for top coders. I work in marketing in my day job, and honestly, you could teach someone to replace me within a few weeks

Designing a nuclear submarine, however, requires a lot of interconnected disciplines that rely on an understanding of each other.

To a lesser degree, it's similar to setting up your own ESXi cluster at home. You need to know more than just VMware--you need to understand networking, storage, flashing and configuring the host BIOS... AWS is quite a bit easier than managing your own physical environment.

Which may relate to why we see more younger people getting into coding than infrastructure/operations (regardless of the money).

I considered myself a good programmer, but during my first job as an intern, I was confronted to million of lines of barely documented C++ code (a C compiler for some obscure micro-controler). Most of my time was spent trying to understand what this code was doing, and praying that I didn't break anything. The days were long with no distraction and I had a lot of pressure from my boss. It was horrible.

Second job (still as an intern) was the opposite. I was supposed to design a prototype website for a bank. There were a lot of boring meetings and nothing really interesting to do.

I didn't feel I could be successful or happy in such an environment (and I ended up in academia). On the other hand, I had schoolmates that weren't passionate about programming and that learned it much later than I did, and did quite well (being persistent with good social skills).

I always wonder if I could have had a better experience in different companies.

Digging into someone else's code base to understand it well enough to fix bugs and add features without introducing unintended side-effects is, at least for me, quite a challenge. It takes a tremendous amount of persistence, the ability to build a mental blueprint containing substantial amounts of logic, and - most importantly - the ability to swap into the mindset of whoever wrote the app, rather than the way you would have written it.

You know, a lot of us have studied tough things - I was a pure math major and I was a PhD student for a while in a very math-ish engineering department at Berkeley where most of the day was spend on proofs about stochastic systems or convexity. This sort of background isn't unusual here on HN, yet many of us would say that while code itself contains a wide range of challenges and difficulties, the field absolutely has monumental challenges that will push very smart people as far as they can go, maybe farther.

I once (about 15 years ago) got rebuked (gently) by a researcher at Sun Labs once when I dismissed a potential project as "easy." A museum was looking for someone to help build a search engine for their art collection. I said "a db search across some metadata, that's not a huge challenge." The researcher replied, with a mild smirk, "oh, I didn't realize you'd already solved all the issues in image search."

So then I backpedalled a bit and talked about the specs the museum had mentioned, "oh, well, they're just looking for search on some metadata". He replied, "well, maybe that's the only way they understand the problem, but you don't need to accept those limits".