Comment by waleedamer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by waleedamer | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely. I am almost in the same position as you. I am a college student majoring in Computer Science. I'm going to be a senior this coming fall but I have only recently switched to CS from Pre-Med so I have a long way to go, particularly from an academic perspective. I've been programming for almost 9 years as a hobby yet I still feel like I have lightyears to go. Even worse, I have nothing to show for those past 9 years. The one thing I'm absolutely sure I have, however, is the passion to continue learning.

When I first joined HN about 6 months ago I couldn't comprehend 80% of the material. I remember browsing through and thinking it all looked like Assembly code. It felt great to be surrounded by such brilliant minds, which is why I kept coming back, but I did feel like a lost puppy. Now, months later, I don't yet consider myself knowledgable enough to be posting comments (this is probably my 5th comment), necessarily, but it feels great to now be able to follow at least 50% of the content. This is the result of two things: a, Browsing HN pretty much daily and b, Programming more, focusing on the things I don't already know.

There aren't many lessons to be learned in your comfort zone. Good luck!

I've been programming for 17 years (started as a kid), and I also don't understand a lot of what's on HN. The simple fact is that CS is too broad for you to have expert knowledge of every area, and HN is full of articles that are deep dives to pique the interest of specialists.

There was a thread a while back about this exact topic, and someone mentioned that John Carmack doesn't know SQL or anything about relational databases. True masters are rarely generalists.

"I often feel bad that I have zero experience with relational databases. Big gap in my skill sets." ~ John Carmack

https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/457916010234777600

How can someone accomplish so much and not know anything about SQL/RDBMS. Pretty surprising though.

I'd argue that a lot of his success was directly related to not knowing anything about SQL/RDBMS because they were not required by his specialty.

Instead of spending time learning SQL, which he'd never use while creating a game, he only learned and practiced the skills he used for games. It's incidental that a lot of those skills are fairly universal and low-level, which gives us the false impression that Carmack is a generalist.

Why not? He doesn't need to use it for his work, why would he spend time learning it vs learning something relevant for his field? Oh, I know, to pass a GYMAAAE interview, but that is a pretty bad reason.

There's a universe of programmers that don't work in the LAMP stack (including me) because it doesn't suit what they are trying to accomplish.

Hi, I would like to encourage you to contribute when you have something to add. You are part of the HN community.

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