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Comment by funkysquid | Hacker News Reader

I think another question to ask yourself is, why do you feel this isn't normal?

If others claim they could do the task faster, consider that programmers chronically underestimate.

If you've seen others do it faster, it's possible that they are taking shortcuts, making quicker decisions that will involve more work later. From your example, you've carefully picked a library and thought through how to integrate it properly into your code - these steps can be skipped for speed, but the cost usually isn't worth it.

There are always going to be better programmers, but they're often not the ones who claim to be great, or fast, or rockstars. So I'd just check to make sure you're not making unfair comparisons of yourself.

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I had the same question. Is taking a whole day to set up an authentication system for a web application unreasonable? That's a pretty critical component and not necessarily simple. At my, erm, last company, it took multiple developers three months to set one up and we're still tweaking it.

I'm with @funkysquid. A few extra hours to properly implement and test code that is going to see months if not year of critical frontline service seems like a bargain to me.

Now if your managers are of a different opinion, or you're taking an extra long time to produce code in the end that still has a lot of issues, that's another matter.

Agreed here too. I graduated first in my class of 200-odd engineering students, then completed a Master's degree with a perfect GPA and a couple papers published (on top of my thesis). A couple years later I started web programming, eventually building a relatively successful web-based business. Nothing in the OP sounds like a symptom of slow thinking to me. Doing something reasonably complex with unfamiliar tools should take a bit of time. In fact, being able to keep focused and get something like that done in a single day sounds pretty impressive.

Sure, if you already know the library you're using inside and out and have built such a thing before, maybe you could whip it out in a couple hours - maybe - but a day really isn't that long.

if you already know the library you're using inside and out and have built such a thing before, maybe you could whip it out in a couple hours

This is the key, I think. I was in the same boat as OP not so long ago in thinking that I was unreasonably slow. I'm not; I'm just a generalist.

People who specialize in one specific area of technology can bang out something in their wheelhouse in a few hours because that's all they do, all day, every day. It makes them seem like superheroes. If you're working on a team with all specialists, it can make you look even slower by comparison.

As for what to do about it, I'm stuck between either finding a specialty, going into management, selling my own software products (ie: work for myself) or finding a way of communicating my work in a way that makes me look like a superhero too.

If you've seen others do it faster,

Also consider that they may have used that library previously.. so you don't get to see them spend a whole day making mistakes with it and trying to get it working.

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