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Comment by tomashubelbauer | Hacker News Reader

I don't disagree with what you say, but I would be surprised if it was any sort of secret sauce and not "just" an incredible amount of grinding, the seemingly zero-cost energy reservoir you can tap into as a young adult if you really like what you're doing and possibly an enlightened parent or a role model.

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> possibly an enlightened parent or a role model

This is typically the 'secret sauce'.

I was once asked how I got to where I am, where others in my situation might not have, my response was: “Parents that gave a damn”. It wasn’t about pressuring me, it was about recognising my interest in computers, and fostering that interest as much as was financially possible given our circumstances (which were often dire). My parents aren’t technical, but they did what they could, and I wouldn’t be the engineer I am without that.

I grew up with a foster mother that actively "suppressed" what I did on the computer, banning me for a month if I didn't get changed immediately after school.

Now I've become a senior engineer, but I'm kinda shotty at it, chaotic good in solving problems, but issues with authority and process.

Who knows, maybe I would've became a "run of the mill" engineer if she helped.

As an engineering manager I see problems with authority and process as something usually positive.

This usually leads to more things getting done “right” than “wrong”. IME.

Having the same issues/traits I’m not sure how that gets formed - my upbringing was limitless in many ways.

It's not grinding though. My highschool years were also super productive when it came to programming-related things, while I have seen most of my peers, aside from select few, really struggle despite their willingness. So maybe there is some secret sauce that can help others to get good a this. Maybe it's a mindset or attitude, etc...

I don't know. I definitely did grind programming a lot as a teenager and for a few years as a young adult. But the grinding was effortless to me. It was as if this type of activity was replenishing my energy reserves instead of making me tired. I rarely needed to take breaks and indeed frequently forgot to eat or sleep when deep in my sessions. So it wasn't a struggle at all, but it was still a grind I would say. Or maybe I am misunderstanding the word and it would be better to say it was a lot of time spent, at the very least.

I don't think anyone can do this, I think you need to have that connection with programming where it is harder resist it than it is to do the work. But it doesn't mean people like the author of the article have a secret sauce and them recounting their experience to their peers to inspire them isn't worth much to them as a result I would expect. It's the "draw the rest of the fucking owl" type a thing I think.

BTW I don't mean to say I was a super duper genius as a teenager for whom programming was like breathing. I refused to study anything, I only enjoyed discovering things myself and I had no direction in my programming knowledge collection at all. A more disciplined person would have beaten me easily, and many have. Despite the ease with which programming came to me I didn't do that much productive stuff. I was mostly just having immense amounts of fun and joy. I do feel a bit sad sometimes about not getting a bigger edge now, but realistically, when push comes to shove, I wouldn't change it anyway.

Willingness is almost antithetical to having the motivation to grind in my mind. In order to do something persistently, you need to trade something for it, and often times you need to ignore the fact that the trade isn't worth it, or not have anything else competing for that attention in the first place; in otherwords, some level of compulsion as well as willingness.

It's the same with skateboarding, or any other interest that is difficult, time consuming, character building, and that requires obsession.

The defining characteristic of programming, as opposed to some others, is that it's complex and only intellectually demanding, whereas the others are some combination of physical and mental stress. People don't know how to navigate that from the beginning, but the ones who have the disposition to simply throw themselves at it regardless of failure, repeatedly, figure it out eventually.

The ones who actually succeed in a career of it are probably the ones who figured out how to dial it back as an obsession, and stop when they're 10hrs in to take a different approach.

"just" is doing a lot of work in this construction. Regardless what a person's constellation of privileges is, it always takes an incredible amount of grinding and that's pretty damn cool / laudable / praiseworthy all by itself.

The secret sauce has never been secret

That's my point.

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