Comment by chipuni | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chipuni | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who says either "Coding is right for you" or "Coding is not right for you" doesn't know the truth. ONLY YOU can figure out whether coding is the right field for you.

The questions you should ask yourself:

1. How willing are you to keep on solving a problem? How do you react when the first five or ten times you have a problem, your solutions don't work?

2. How good are you at writing extremely detailed instructions? A good check: Write your favorite recipe, give it to a friend, and ask them to cook it. Afterward, ask them how difficult it was to cook. (This test is EXTREMELY valuable when your friend says that they don't know how to cook.)

3. How do you react when you work very, very hard on something -- then someone who has never touched it says someone else "could have done it in five minutes"?

4. How do you react when something that you've studied and practiced for five years goes out of fashion?

Thank you for your response.

1. If I'm completely stuck, I try to get away from the problem for a short while and return to it again, because forcing myself generally doesn't help in solving it faster. I found that this generally works better, at least for me.

2. I'll try this.

3. I'd probably think they either don't know what I've done, or they are very proficient at it.

4. I don't believe that software development will become a less valued skillset. The hype around it might die, but then again I don't really about that. I enjoy tech as an observant consumer who pays attention to detail, and believe that I'd be capable to translate my observations to a new product/tech. What I currently lack to do so is a technical toolset.

How would you evaluate my answers to the questions?

1. I would pick up other techniques for getting myself unstuck. Stopping and doing something else sometimes works... and sometimes, it just makes you later. Favorite ones for me include googling (you'll be doing a lot of this!), rubber duck debugging ( https://rubberduckdebugging.com/ ), and occasionally the Creative Whack Pack ( https://creativewhack.com/product.php?productid=64 ).

4. Although software development won't become less valued, each individual technical toolset has a natural rise and fall. Older technologies move out of favor. Think about how you deal with studying something for years, then learning that particular technology -- although it's still very good -- is just "not popular", so companies no longer want to use it.

Good luck, no matter whether you move into coding or not!

Thanks!

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