
Ask HN: I'm a poor developer, what now? - 2232020306
 So with the popularity of the various &quot;interviewing is broken&quot; threads and with personal thoughts of the last year or so, I&#x27;ve come to realize and accept that I&#x27;m a bad developer. I took a look at some of the interviewing problems and was unable to complete even easy ones. Even when I can it&#x27;s likely very sub-optimal.<p>As a quick background, I am self taught, stumbled into this stuff was I was young. Never really learned anything well, but fell in love quickly. Never went to school (partly after reading many blogs about how it&#x27;s useless anyway). I&#x27;ve been employed for a few years, although no where near the comp levels discussed on the internet. My job consists mostly of what what one would consider CRUD: writing code that take data from one place, process it a bit, and store it somewhere else. I hate it, It feels tedious and unchallenging. Somehow, despite not much most days, I come home overly exhausted.<p>Since being employed, I haven&#x27;t learned much new. I only really know one or two languages now, being the ones I work with. I&#x27;ve tried many times, to learn new things. I&#x27;ve tried learning new languages, paradigms, domains (like kernel, graphics, etc. programming) but I&#x27;m incapable of learning. Every time I try it ends the same way: I end up staring at a screen for an hour or so reading docs or articles I&#x27;ll forget 10 min later or writing some skeleton code I&#x27;ll delete or never touch again. After that, I realize I&#x27;m not learning anything and giving up to go play games or watch TV.<p>It&#x27;s distressing, but I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ll ever be able to get a role that I&#x27;d find interesting or challenging. Truthfully, I&#x27;m likely just not smart enough. Which is fine, not everyone can be, but I don&#x27;t want to do that same mind-numbing work I do now. My question is where do I go from here. I&#x27;ve considered to moving to a something like networking or sysadmin, but without any education it seems like I&#x27;d be at a severe disadvantage? Where can or should I take my career now?
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gigatexal
That's tough. I can't say I'm a 10x dev or a superstar either.

From the post it sounds like you might not be motivated. Like perhaps this
isn't your passion? Do you just find learning how to be better boring or hard
or do you (if you honestly asked yourself) feel like dev work (or perhaps it's
just this dev work) is boring?

What interests you?

Is there a niche that you're really good at? Where things come easy? Perhaps
specializing there might be good?

Have you thought about blogging? Perhaps blogging your journey into getting
better (if that's what you choose to do) might help and could help others and
also build your own brand and at the same time keep you honest i.e if people
are expecting new blog posts it will give you a reason to keep at it.

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corvos
I've found learning new things can be very difficult and have definitely at
times felt the same way you do.

One thing that has helped motivate me was to work with other people that have
similar goals. I don't know if you have any friends or peers that you can
collaborate on projects with but a more relaxed environment where multiple
people share a common goal in learning has helped me to overcome personal
struggles.

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nunez
Maybe you haven’t found the thing you really like programming for yet!

