I like coding but I hate coding
I've been coding on and off since I was a kid. I'm twenty-nine now. To be frank, I'm not that good at it. I'm not bad at it, but I've never invested the effort to get really good, because I never cared to be. I like making things and solving problems, but I don't get exactly get a thrill out of learning a new framework or spending hours debugging a single function.
Writing code, as you all know, is incredibly frustrating and often stultifying work. For me, it's rewarding to make something, and I've enjoyed building many small projects in the past. That said, the process sometimes seems like more trouble than it's worth.
I'm not sure what I'd be doing if market forces hadn't steered me to deploying my (limited) tech abilities, but as it stands, I've been working as a data scientist for a little while. I'm not that great at that either. I've invested some time and money in skill-building—I just graduated with an MA in a quantitative subject from an Ivy League university—but I'm nowhere near the level of competence of many of the data scientists on the job market now.
And I don't think I want to be. I don't want to spend my whole day writing ETL pipelines or optimizing ad prices. Ideally, I don't want to spend my whole day in front of a computer. But I do want to make enough money to go on vacation occasionally, and I want the flexibility and mobility that it seems like only the tech industry is offering these days. Millennials, right?
So I feel sort of trapped. I'm not sure what I want to be doing, but when I scan job listings, I find nothing interesting to me. I feel like I have lots to offer, like I'm a real generalist with a lot of interests and a lot of aptitude, but the only thing a hiring manager will see is that I can code--and that I'm not very good at it. I can't be the only person who has had this experience.