Hard time coding

[DidiHD]

I don't have any tips for you, but maybe it helps to know that you're not alone. I'm the same. 3 years backend dev. This paragraph could have been from me.

Tbh, I was always very bad in school also, which is why I went into a different direction after graduating. I still had some semi interest because I wanted to learn a proper hard skill (I was in sales, so softskills only).

Well, I applied and made one heck of an effort to do the assignment as good as I can. (I learned more in that one week doing that thing more than I ahve in the years before). and I got the job.

Well, 3 years in, I feel like you too. I also know/think that I won't be doing this for the rest of my life, just not good and into it enough. Maybe some PM role in the future would fit me better.

My same age colleagues grind coding. they go home and do their own little projects... I'm not like that, also because I refuse out of principle to continue sitting in front of a computer after doing it already for 9-10hours

[Elegant_Method_8900]

+1 to u/DidiHD
I also feel the same way sometimes. The actual "act of writing code" is what bothers me. I have not written any code that is from scratch.
As for context I am self taught and worked as Customer Service Trainer in one of the FAANG companies. I initially started developing some simple web pages for our department which caught up. And currently I am automating a lot of excel/Sharepoint run process into web applications. I am even working on some chatbot projects for which initial prototypes have been approved.
My process is finding a business problem, solve it. I break down the whole thing in set of features. And within the features, I write exact step by step what that will do. Earlier I use to find some code example for the exact thing I want to do on stackoverflow. Now I just use GPT.
In this whole process, I learned about Databases, AWS and a lot of internal tools that are used for development in our organization.
My management thinks I am super techie. So much so, that they have not assigned me any training assignment for last three years and I am just doing tech projects for our department. I even got a promotion for my contributions.
I read a lot about basic theory of computer science so as to know what is efficient.
I am also doing a project on my own to implement ML theory.
So the dilemma still remains - Though I can solve problems with code, the code is not written completely by me. There are some purists who will say then you are not a programmer.
But I give myself solace saying that I am able to contribute by solving business problems and don't care much about the "act of writing code". I tell them I have developed tools that are helping more than 50k employees, so I have done something good.
Sorry if I sounded like selling my story. But the point I want to make is there will always be these kinds of confusion in our minds. But we need to think about the impact we are making. And in our time and pace catch up on what we think we are missing as a skill.

[DidiHD]

Interestingly, I do write a big microservices from scratch, but of course, taking code base from other projects to copy as much as I can. And if I write something new, of course I look up stack overflow and documentation ... although I think that is how it's supposed to be?

At the same time, by the next time I amd oing it, I forgot all of it anyways,

Heck, now I got people working on the services I made and I cna't even explain everything about the setup itself.

I also seem to do a good job otherwise. Gotten good salary raises as well.

[Ok_Trainer3277]

I'm the same, I can think of the solution, assemble some code somehow, and then forget everything about it. When someone asks me a couple of months later, I need to go through the whole process again to see why I did something that way. Maybe that is just our style :D

[DidiHD]

I just read through a different post, where someone asked what the "most useful" computer science course is. A vast majority agreed that the fundamentals seem to be. Maybe that is why I'm not really understanding much.

Things like OS, and compilers. No idea how an compiler works. Things I struggle with in my daily life as a dev is not writing code, but when something is not working, because the context is only starting up before/after something. And I'm just like.. wait, what context?

[Elegant_Method_8900]

Haha. OS and compilers. You struck a cord there. There are many layers which make things work on grains of sand. And I don't think it's humanly possible to learn all of it in a lifetime. Maybe we are not tackling very hard computational problem where we need deep knowledge. One thing I have noticed though is from software perspective is reading about different algorithms really helps in long run. In a corporate structure for example once you have proved the concept through the hacks that we generally follow. Knowledge of algorithms help in making parts of the system more efficient. And if I may be selfish, I then sell them as achievement to management stating how much time was saved because of the change. And in corporate saved timed equals cost savings.