Ask HN: Am I thick? What advice would you give me?
I'm 39, have a PhD in CS from an older university in Cambridge, MA (not MIT). When there, I never published much, a couple of top-tier publications with collaborators and a ton of mid-tier publications.
I spent 7 years as a Post Doc doing research in an area which I didn't care about and where there wasn't a lot of scope. In this time I graduated 7 students (who have gone on Facebook, Google, etc) and started two companies -- a direct one which I shut down because it was not successful and helped a friend to start his as co-owner but didn't put in any intellectual development. I did a lot of contracting and consulting work for a company my PhD external supervisor started that makes a niche MIPS CPU but doing software work at the kernel/application layer.
3 years ago I joined the company full-time. I got the job because he knew me and we are friends (I am absolutely convinced I would have failed an interview). The agreement was I'd do system architecture for hardware.
I was in a world I knew very little about. CPUs are complex hardware devices. While I had done Computer Architecture and am very comfortable with the hardware as seen from a software level, I started spending my time doing more hardware system architecture work.
I love this field. The challenge means it's satisfying. I wish I'd done a degree in CE instead.
Three years on, I'm having a hard hard time. The problems are:
* I don't know enough -- every time we have a meeting or a new project comes up, it's like drinking from a firehose. PCIe, Memory technologies, the internals of ALUs, caching subsystems -- all of it is a field in and of itself. The complexity and runes and domain specific knowledge means I'm always running behind never able to quite keep up. Even where I have done things before things move fast so keeping up is hard.
* I can't think fast enough -- I'm actually known as "recorder" in the organization -- I record all meetings and go back and listen to them, trying to understand, stopping, taking notes, researching so I can actually follow what's going on. This helps but is hard.
* I have a different style of working -- company style is to come into a meeting and freestyle, throw up ideas, brainstorm, etc. I can't do that. I don't know enough and can't contribute because most times I only know about half of what is going on. I am able to come up with solutions and designs alone but I am slower because I alone, learn, design and get feedback afterwards.
* My instincts are wrong -- My dimensioning, calculations, core design principles often overlook something or are just not right. It's to be so OBVIOUSLY wrong. At least when it's pointed out most times I see it immediately.
* Don't have the detail -- Not understanding the runes or not following through on all the possible side-effects that may happen mean things can never work. I just delayed tape-out because one return value was 2b offset between busses.
* Can't seem to abstract and think clearly -- I can't seem to reason about cause and effect clearly enough. In software I felt I always had a good working model in my head. Here it's just gaps.
I desperately want to get good the art. I stay because it's a challenge but I feel thick. I'm wondering whether I'll actually become good enough to be comfortable and master this.
A part of me wants to quit and go join the platforms division of some company or the other but I kind of feel I'm likely to see the same things in software even if I think I'm better at it. Ultimately I'm not sure if I'm just not clever enough . I just spent the holiday break reading a 1000 page architectural standard to come into the new year prepared, spent this week in a workshop where I just couldn't keep up even with the prep and am deflated and disillusioned.
What advice would you give me?