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Comment by csomar | Hacker News Reader

I think 1. companies are burned out with CS grads who simply can't code 2. companies are burned out from new employees just learning the job and then jump somewhere else and 3. companies are looking to on-board you as fast as possible.

A few problems you should be working on:

> nobody cares that I fast-tracked

> in terms of crystalized intelligence

> But my portfolio is rather terrible

> compared to what I'm capable of [*hint: Unless you did something that you can't show publicly, what you are capable of is nothing if what you did in terms of production is nothing]

I think you are over-confident when it comes to your skills.

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It might be true. I diagnosed it today. I had it in high school with mathematics as well. I wouldn't learn it at all and then scrape by with a 55%. And I have the same with programming.

I think I only respect things that truly seem not learnable or understandable. Anything that I can learn, I lose some respect for, because I can just use my brain and it'll be mine.

But today I told myself that's a dangerous attitude to have, because it completely devalues the fact to do a job well, which is a skill in itself.

But another part is the security courses I did at my university. When you're performing rowhammer, meltdown and all those type of things, then a lot of other forms of programming feel a lot easier. There's a ton of stuff in programming that I have a lot of respect for but CRUD apps isn't one of them. Concurrency, compilers, algorithms, AI at the PhD level or security (not a comprehensive list), those things are actually tough.

With that said, thanks for stating so clearly that you think I'm overconfident. I hope to find out ASAP if this is true.

How would I find it out?

If you don't have respect for CRUD apps, why are you trying to get a job doing CRUD apps?

Compared to most forms of programming, it doesn't give me a headache. Or at least not enough of a headache to suffer under it. I think that's also part of why I sound arrogant according to people? CRUD never made me suffer. Other types of programming definitely did. CRUD does have challenges, especially when it needs to be on a large scale and performant.

Another reason is that I'm a digital creator at heart, not a programmer. Ultimately, I don't care about programming, I care about putting whatever is in my mind into the real world (despite that I did my best to learn CS as I did find it a valuable form of knowledge). And I find programming to be the most effective way to do that. I think creating CRUD apps is quite close to digital creation.

It's less of a headache (compared to other types of programming) and more visual (if you're full-stack or frontend).

>Another reason is that I'm a digital creator at heart, not a programmer. Ultimately, I don't care about programming, I care about putting whatever is in my mind into the real world (despite that I did my best to learn CS as I did find it a valuable form of knowledge). And I find programming to be the most effective way to do that. I think creating CRUD apps is quite close to digital creation.

Focusing on this and working "value creation" in to it will come across a lot better than anything that could be interpreted as "CRUD apps are easy and I'm looking to bludge for a while before I bail to something challenging again".

Agreed.

I thought I was a really good programmer leaving university.

Now I know I was useless the first 3 years. I only became someone I would consider hiring now after 5-7 years.

I don't think I'm a really good programmer. I just think I'm capable of CRUD. I have a friend who thought he was a really good programmer because he worked on clang and created LLVM extensions and stuff and knows a lot about C++.

He came back from that a little, not much, but a little.

I wonder how you were useless and why you couldn't see that beforehand. Because I would like to be capable of diagnosing whether I'd be useless for the first 3 years.

As in: what am I not seeing?

The things I didn't understand that I suspect are universal are

1. It's not about writing code that works. That's the bare minimum. The real game is writing readable and maintainable code.

2. I had no clue that the most important thing isn't writing the code, but to work well as a team.

Also, I was just plain inexperienced. I had written a fair amount of code, but nothing like what you learn from doing in 40h/week, year after year. Raw talent is good, but it can't beat raw talent + experience.

Ah, this makes sense. It makes sense in the way that in some interviews the conversations were quite candid and they said the exact same things. Except that it was spread over weeks or a long conversation as opposed to 2 simple bullet points in a HN comment ;-)

You should have aged out by 5-7 years.

Several decades later, I keep not aging out somehow :)

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