Comment by AndyNemmity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AndyNemmity | Hacker News Reader

I'm 36 and learning how to be a real programmer. Was a Linux Admin, and an architect for my career. Did presales, and became an expert at a lot of different roles within the field.

Never was truly a developer, and decided I wanted to accept a job as one. I've programmed in the past, how hard can it be?

Wow, it's been enlightening. Really hard. I thought it would be straight forward since I've used scripted quite a bit in perl in my past, but being a developer is much more than writing a few scripts to automate a task.

I'm a few months in now, and I am still slower than all my colleagues by quite a bit, and the main language I'm working in has changed already, moved from Python to Go.

Even right now, I'm stuck on an issue around pointers and data structures that feels like it should be easy, and I'm just not getting it.

All you can do is keep confidence up, and keep at it. Immersing in it, and knowing that irrational levels of effort will lead to results.

I thought it would be easier though :)

Soon you will love pointers and structs and everything Go. Keep going (pun intended). Your colleagues are worried about their own work and your manager has made a long-term investment in you, not about the first few months. :)

I couldn't agree more that it is tough going when you realize a challenge is more than you expected. That plus impostor syndrome is what caused me to quit on my first try.

We are moving a lot of things from Python to Go at the moment and it has been great.

Appreciate the positive feedback. I certainly feel the management are making a long term investment, but feel my actual team is... concerned about the lack of deliverables.

Which I think is fair from their perspective, I think they expected a developer by trade to have assumed the role, and in actuality it's someone who has done a tremendous number of jobs around development. I'd be a bit concerned as well.

The great thing is, I'm learning a ton of cool technologies, and already see the major progress on a lot of fronts.

Actually knowing where you are at puts you way ahead of the curve. Many developers don't even know they are not that good. If you love it and seem to have excelled already in a similar area you just need time. Even just knowing that good development is not just writing a quick perl script or copying and pasting the tutorial code or stack overflow answer is a good sign and would probably set you apart from most I know.

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