Ask HN: Got a CS degree, but I’m unable to be programmer. What can I do?

First, I would forget about interview-prep.

Second, I would try to get better idea about actual work, call friends from university that already work, and talk to them. I did learn this way that the day-to-day work in i.e. big corporations in a well run department is not really stressful, especially compared to a white-board interview. Some friend might even have an opening. Going through a referal is much better than just applying.

If you don't have friends with jobs already go ask on twitter. I think people around i.e. @sehurlburt form quite a friendly developer community and Stephanie herself often retweets i.e junior CVs.

Third, I'd figure out what position suits me. I would do this after I have realistic expectations about my work-environment. If programming itself is that stressful, I would probably advise-against doing ops-work, because baby-sitting servers can be even more stressful. But there are many positions that might fit you.

Manager - even though in many corps, people view getting to management as a promotion, there actually are junior managment position. Requires mostly people and organizational skills. Having a CS degree should help you stand apart.

Technical writer - mostly means writing documentation. If you have good writing ability, having a CS degree should be a plus.

QA - mostly software testing. Skill requirements can vastly differ, i.e. my boss expects me to be a decent coder, with some ops-experience. A friend of mine has 101 Javascript under his belt and in different corp mostly produces test-case documents in Word, another friend mostly clicks through a web portal based on a giant checklist. All of us have the title QA in their org.

You still might want to be a programmer. There are many levels of skill/stress/benefit ratios available.

If getting a job over a beer/coffer with a friend whose department/company has open position is not an option, I would go to a job-fair, or if I'd have a company I actually like, I'd wait for when they have an open-house, or something like that. I would talk to a recruiter there. That is how I got a job at RedHat as a QA more or less :-)

As other people here have asked, do you enjoy programming as a past time? Do you write stupid little things for youself? Have you made N websites for yourself? Have you compiled the Linux kernel just for fun? If the answer is "yes, I like doing things like this in my past time", then you're on the right track to be a programmer. If no, then maybe not. In that case, you can still be a good programmer, google "cal newport follow your passion is bad advice".

In any case, if you decide you don't want to be a programmer, a good parallel path you could go into (which friends of mine who aren't really interested in programming have gone into) is Data/Analytics/DataScience. Essentially you can make roughly equivalent money by helping companies make decisions based on their data. There is a stack of roles here, from infra, to data engineer, all sorts of analyists, data scientists, and so on (the division is not clear). If you want, you can have a very rewarding and successful career here and just do SQL if you go into the Analytics/Data Science region of the stack, you don't even have to write Python on an everyday basis.