Ask HN: I'm not a good programmer, but I keep acing interviews

In the movie Moneyball, we learn that the Billy Beane character, when he entered baseball as a young player, was judged as a potential superstar by scouts. But he turns out to be a bad performer in the real game. He gave up other opportunities to play Major League Baseball. So those baseball scouts actually ruined his life.

I think I'm a lot like him. How can I break out of this?

I happen to be very good at a-ha problems, which show up often in interviews. I know a lot about how to optimize algorithms. I can talk learnedly about the tradeoffs between various paradigms. Interviewers are often very impressed.

The problem is, the job has nothing really to do with the above skills. It's mostly about slogging through poorly documented Java framework code, and getting some masochistic buzz from it. The desire to craft perfect code is an obstacle. Know how to do it better? Congratulations, you will be permanently dissatisfied.

And let's be clear, most of the job, even under the best of circumstances, isn't about coding. At best it's about communication and careful risk management. At worst it's cutthroat office politics in an industry that has too much money to ever treat people in a sane or humane manner.

I get depressed about this, and then those same people who judged me a potential superstar start collecting evidence to fire me.

So I'm in a job search right now. I just aced another interview. It's a company that wants to pay me way, way too much money to work on updating their legacy app. I have money woes right now but I'm considering turning it down. I am sick of being a disappointment.

I think it's more about finding a good fit. I took "the good money" at a place recently. Sure, it was good, but I came home everyday burned out and questioning my career path. (Luckily I'm in 3rd interview stage with a company much more inline with my career goals).

I say a company has no loyalty to you, so why should you have loyalty to them. I have had patches of burning through 3 or 4 jobs over a few months. If your not going to be honest with me about your project from the get go and I discover that my skills have no place on your team, I walk. Without even a second thought.

This may just be imposter syndrome getting the best of you. It runs wild on me sometimes. Then I remind myself that when 10 devs are sitting in the room 9 of them are probably going through the same thoughts I am and just laugh about it.

If programming is what you love to do, you'll find a place. Don't be afraid to keep looking.

I wish I was you. I can get shit done but I'm terrible at interviewing.

First of all, I'm willing to bet that you are, indeed, a good programmer. I say that as a programmer who is in all likelihood a pretty average programmer (I don't have a huge amount of comparative experience to know for certain).

You're almost certainly average at a minimum, based on what you wrote.

Second, I feel like you're...overthinking it? I don't play office politics, but I'm not gunning for a promotion or even a "senior" in front of my title. I don't care about any of that. I complete the work assigned to me and go home to my hobbies.

I've always worked at small shops. There's no room for cutthroat office politics. Maybe that would be an okay move for you. I've yet to have a bad interaction with another coworker and it's been years at this job. (I do have an occasional bad interaction with a client, which is to be expected).

I'd take the job and do my best to avoid getting wrapped up in it to the point of depression. If corporate culture is depressing, aim to find a new culture.

>I think it's more about finding a good fit.

Part of what is considered "life experience" is stumbling through things until you figure out the circumstances where you can do your best work, and where you turn into "doesn't meet expectations." In that journey you realize what trade-offs you're willing to make to be in the circumstances where you can do good work.

I have a friend who is a brilliant developer, but he just got tired of doing what you typically do in a 100% development role. He eventually landed in the educational org of a software company where a large portion of his role is help develop the infrastructure backing their learning system. He gets to develop, has a ton of autonomy, and gets to work in small groups with sane deadlines since they don't sell the infrastructure, they sell the course content. He's much happier now than when he was in a 100% technical role.

You've got to find out what works for you.