The 5-year plan to 50k posts - part douche

Here's another way of looking at it.

Programming is a trade like carpentry or plumbing. Imagine somebody asked you to set up the electrics in the Empire State Building and you'd only changed and few plugs and light bulbs. Well that's similar to your situation. Looking at programming for four solid years in your apprenticeship stage. Read a dozen books on programming, data structure and business. Then take part in a dozen or so coding competitions, work as a junior programmer for several companies for several years and then you've past your apprenticeship.

From then on every day is a day of learning, you never stop learning.
 
I can relate to the OP. I went through a similar thing with coding. The problem I had was while I find the idea of coding and computer science fascinating, if you want to get good at it then there's a serious amount of grind, and that's alongside the day to day grind of working a regular job. I'd imagine a lot of programming jobs at entry - mid level are quite tedious as well; for example refactoring someone else's crappy code sounds like my worst nightmare to be honest. So in the end I've largely given up on that plan.
The thing is, life is largely about just staying afloat. Some people are lucky enough to find a way of making a good living which they truly enjoy, but most don't. There's a lot of luck involved in success, even though most of the time there's also a lot of hard work involved. E.g. anyone who basically gets paid millions for being famous such as Hollywood actors, they were just in the right place at the right time. I've just started streaming on Twitch (nearly always to no viewers :D) as a hobby, and even if you've got a really good stream, you still need a lot of luck to really grow your channel and make good money from it.
So my advice is just be thankful for what you've got, work hard to stay afloat and try out new things to find out what you enjoy. Mostly your hobbies will stay as just that rather than actually making you any money, but that's alright.
 
FoxEye said:
But also my upbringing. As a (young) kid my teachers all said I had ability but not drive. They said "He just needs to apply himself." And I never did :( Seems like a squandering of a life if I just keep taking the easy way out.

Also as a (young) kid I thought I'd be a game dev. But I was wrong, I just liked vidya. Today I don't even have a passion for vidya :p I'm more enthusiastic about passing my dinner than playing games these days.
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The key question is do you actually enjoy programming? If it is just something you're doing because you're a bit geeky and think that you ought to be good at it and so ought to learn to program in order to earn a decent wage then yeah, you're doing it wrong and perhaps would be happier finding something else instead. If not then perhaps focus on the fundamentals - take a look at a degree perhaps - you could have gotten a BSc and MSc in your spare time, in the time since your original thread - you'd be exposed to other students and you'd perhaps find you're not as bad as you think or indeed maybe you do decide it isn't for you but you at least have a degree and some more exposure and perhaps can get a different IT-related job. Learning to code doesn't mean you need be a full-time programmer either - plenty of careers out there where people need to know how to code a bit but it isn't necessarily their full time job.

Anyway this was my original post in the original thread you made 7 years ago, emphasis again on finding something you enjoy:

dowie said:
I don't think trying to pursue something purely for the money is a smart thing to do but if you really wanted to and were motivated then you could probably get to your goal within a year or so. The main area you could look at if you are purely money driven is sales. Without qualifications the two you could specifically look at are becoming a recruitment consultant or an estate agent - its quite feasible to earn well over 50k in either of those fields and neither requires any qualifications. Perhaps IT recruitment might be semi-relevant... the thing is though these sorts of roles can be very stressful for lots of people and you might well find yourself not enjoying the work - you'd have to ask yourself if the money is worth it.

Perhaps look at some sort of professional qualification.. ACCA will pay reasonably well eventually though will take you a few years to get through the exams. Would take less time to qualify as an IFA though again there is a sales aspect to this role - could be a good thing as you'd be able to earn well fairly soon in your career.

Still these are just random suggestions and none of them may be suitable - overall I think its a bad idea to look for a career like this and a much better idea to think about what you'd actually like to do and explore careers related to that - sure you can then look at which options maybe offer better prospects etc... but the main thing is you ought to be enjoying what you chose to pursue. Earning 50k isn't going to make you happy... in fact you could have a pretty ****ty life if you spend the next 30-40 years stressing over some job you hate but which you need to keep to maintain your current lifestyle, mortgage, wife/kids etc..
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If you've been beating yourself up over several years trying to learn to code then perhaps it might be better to try something else, unless the issue is say motivation or that you've only scratched the surface, learned some syntax and done some simple problems then have decided to jump into some big project and been like "ah ****"...

They might be a bit sus but perhaps paying for a psychometric test and getting some suggested careers could be an idea here, even if it requires a bit of further study (for which there are so many opportunities to do remotely/part time these days) it's perhaps better than just spinning your wheels for another 7 years in a job you're not into.
 
[FnG]magnolia said:
^ No, There is everything to be done.
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This is how I live life, for better or worse. I have had to change my mindset that there is everything to be done, just not in the next 5 minutes. You can't do everything all at once, especially if you're trying to focus on the wrong things, or are doing the right things for the wrong reasons.

I am going to have to live until I'm at least 120 though...!
 
Nitefly said:
Don’t beat yourself up @FoxEye - some walls are impossible to climb, at which point you either need to find away around them or start climbing a different wall..
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I'll add another... learn to smash the wall down / go through the wall.

Nitefly said:
I have found myself ‘floundering / treading water’ for years because I’ve been of the mindset that I wasn’t quite ‘good enough’ to progress faster. Actually, I now think it’s been the environment that’s holding me back. The wall is unclimbable... for me, at least not without gross sacrifice.

In these situations, I think one has to think outside of the box.
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Despite landing senior roles and so on, I suffer regularly from "imposter syndrome" - I think most people do to a certain degree. It's not unusual, it's sobering - but also good to challenge yourself. I think even the world's best experts need support from people. Life gets challenging, and sometimes it's easy to give up, but actually the sense of accomplishment when you've "beaten" something is really rewarding.

You just need to find a way around the wall.

Life is full of forks, and dead ends, but life does go on, so it's just knowing your way back to the fork in the road from a dead end and give it another go. Also making sure you learn from things is important.
 
Nobody gets out alive, just accept your lot in life as one of the plebs like the rest of us, and pop off quietly at the end without a fuss, unremarked and quickly forgotten. :p
 
FoxEye said:
It's about quitting when things get hard. I don't know /why/ I do this. It is obviously the worst thing to do. You'll never succeed (duh, obviously) if you quit. But pushing through the hard times just seems impossible. Or conceivable. And then I have the voice in my head telling me, "Even if you learn to code, the market is full of people way better than you, so why bother? You'll only ever be sub-par. And old; your average 14-year-old will be way ahead of you. At 40+ you'll never land a coding job. Why bother? It's hard AND you'll never get anywhere with it."

And I have no idea how to break out of that mindset, which is pretty crippling. How to embrace difficulty and challenge. They seem like hostile things to be afraid of.
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I think I've said this to you before, but this is your biggest challenge, conquering this inner monologue that tells you that you're not good enough, will never be good enough.

Its the same challenge I had, I was convinced I'd always be a pure numbers guy, I'd never land a job on a board, my salary would cap out at a certain level and that would be that.

Therapy helped me, the truth is that if somebody else told me that I wasn't good enough I'd most likely tell them to jog on and then work to prove them wrong, so I had to stop listening to that voice.

The change I made was simple, I took on jobs I was woefully unprepared for. There was little to no support, there was no formal training, either I figured it out or I'd fail, and both were very real possibilities. Most of the time it wasn't fun, it was stressful, frustrating, I had days / weeks of thinking I was going to fail, but after a while I came through the other side... and now I don't listen to that voice. I still take on tasks, I often take on too much, but since I made that step outside of my comfort zone the world has really opened up for me.

FoxEye said:
But also my upbringing. As a (young) kid my teachers all said I had ability but not drive. They said "He just needs to apply himself." And I never did :( Seems like a squandering of a life if I just keep taking the easy way out.
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This was also me. I was the brightest kid in my school by a long margin, I cruised through school without getting out of 2nd gear. When I got to college and actually needed to apply myself a little bit I came completely unstuck, because I hadn't developed the work ethic. The result of this was failing miserably and spending 10 years in a dead end job selling mobile phones.

You need to make a decision, you either accept your lot or you work to change it. Sitting there and beating yourself up about how you've ended up here won't accomplish anything. You need to think about what 50k, 75k, 100k, whatever means to you - is it worth the sacrifices it'll take to get there?
 
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sigma said:
No update?
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It's been 4 days (since you looked at me, cocked your head to side and said, "I'm angry").

Not a lot has changed in the last 4 days. If you're referring to that other thread, I'm still in the same job as I was back then, give or take. My employer is great and so are my colleagues, and in that regard I'm lucky.

I just suck at many of the things I need to do, and my accomplishments are getting fewer and further between. Mostly because I'm trying to do that coding stuff I mentioned earlier and I suck so hard at it. Either practice will make semi-competent or I'll just have a complete meltdown at some point. Toss a coin!

The idea of a total career change seems pretty impossible as I have zero idea what else I'd do. When you fall into a succession of (related) jobs and never actively explored other things you could do, you kind of do just feel grateful to have a job at the end of the day.

"I have no idea what I'm doing" could basically be my life motto :p
 
FoxEye said:
...snip...

I just suck at many of the things I need to do...

"I have no idea what I'm doing" could basically be my life motto :p
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Do you feel like this about your day to day work? If so, why? You say your employer and colleagues are great so I assume you must be doing something right. Generally people who aren't pulling their weight wouldn't necessarily have good working relationships.

As someone I think mentioned earlier, your self belief and confidence seems really low. Have you ever considered CBT or some form of counselling?
 
FoxEye said:
"I have no idea what I'm doing" could basically be my life motto :p
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You think you're laying a funny and new line there but you're not. The hard or difficult part in the film is when you nod at the hardships and move on to better things because (1) they're almost certainly next to useless, and (2) I'm getting my own **** together, and it looks a little like (3) : Plan.

We're all rooting for you babes. You need to put some work in though.
 
Dear @FoxEye. Thank you for sharing with us all. Here's my brief story. TLDR: I'm a reasonable coder earning good money.

I've never applied fully myself until I was at University. Firstly, I thought I was gifted with IT skills and secondly I thought I could brown nose my way to the too of the corporate tree.

When I got to University, I realised that there were people who were just better at all of this stuff. And yet rather than apply myself and say, learn, I thought I could 'wing it'.

I finished University with a 2.2. I started in IT Support and through luck, met the Development manager. We got on and he gave me my first chance to learn C# / .Net Framework 1.1 back in the good old days. I moved into a developer role.

And I've been coding ever since. I'm not the best at it. I'm good at logic and problem solving. I'm good at prototyping and explaining what I'm trying to acheive to management.

Two companies ago, my eyes were opened on how Development 'could' be done. A team of 13. Developers, QAs, Product Owners, A Scrum Master. Sprints, review meetings, planning meetings. Automated building and deployment. Scalable hosting, serverless computing. It was coding poetry.

Three things happened here. Firstly, I become a Development Manager as I knew coding, but I also had good people skills and I was in the company at the right place and time for promotion. Secondly I fell in love with cloud computing as we hosting our site on Amazon Web Services. Thirdly, there were two guys that were just coding machines. They could program in many different languages, protype stuff over a weekend, built the foundations of what we were working on. I couldn't compete, but I had to bring what I knew to the table. And I did.

Pre-covid, I attended the Amazon Summit at the Excel centre. The message I got here is that they are thinking 10 years into the future. When you're company decides they need an autoscaling, replicated database. It's only a few clicks away on Amazon. Once again, don't rest on your laurels.

And here I sit now. A web development manager, Agile/SCRUM/Kanban and cloud computing evangelist. Am I going to employ 'can't do' moaners in my team. No! Am I going to employ people who want to learn and get what we're trying to achieve, yes!

Here are my takeaways for you:-
  • It takes all personalities to make a diverse and successful team
  • A little luck does help along the way
  • You have to take managed risks
  • You can't stop learning. Imagine being a smug in-house DBA and then Amazon shows you up in a few clicks
  • Use the technology out there. Horses for courses. My favourite tools are LinqPad, Resharper, Docker and Notepad ++
  • Visual Studio Community is free for personal use. It shows you have to have a website up and running in 5 minutes! There are no excuses
  • There are 100s of programming languages and 100s of frameworks. If you can't find 1 of each that 'works' for you, then there is no hope
  • Utilise 'meets', developer meets, online meets, webinars. it keeps you sharp when you mingle with the crowd you want to be a part of
  • People have developed websites where you code in your browser and follow tutorials. If you can't spend 10 minutes a day doing that, then there is no hope
  • It sounds like you need a mentor. Try and find one. There could be local Dev-Meets or just reach out in Developer circles
  • Nothing I will ever do in life will be as successful as the Baby Shark song
  • I can't imagine any of this is easy as you're based in Cornwall. Trying to smuggle a computer into the county would have you burnt for heresy

Good luck!
 
FoxEye said:
It's been 4 days (since you looked at me, cocked your head to side and said, "I'm angry").

Not a lot has changed in the last 4 days. If you're referring to that other thread, I'm still in the same job as I was back then, give or take. My employer is great and so are my colleagues, and in that regard I'm lucky.

I just suck at many of the things I need to do, and my accomplishments are getting fewer and further between. Mostly because I'm trying to do that coding stuff I mentioned earlier and I suck so hard at it. Either practice will make semi-competent or I'll just have a complete meltdown at some point. Toss a coin!

The idea of a total career change seems pretty impossible as I have zero idea what else I'd do. When you fall into a succession of (related) jobs and never actively explored other things you could do, you kind of do just feel grateful to have a job at the end of the day.

"I have no idea what I'm doing" could basically be my life motto :p
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You have had 4 days worth of good advice. A thank you to some people or an acknowledgment would be a start.

Nobody is expecting you to change a lot in 4 days.

You keep saying you suck at programming, do you expect to become an expert without effort and learning? Why do you assume it will be easy to learn? What efforts have to made to not suck at it? Why does it suck? What can you do to make it suck less?

You say you can’t do anything in 4 day but you can get your code reviewed. Probably even on this very forum... minimal effort...
 
I’d seek help for depression. You demonstrate many of the signs. Fix the head first, then come back to the rest of it.

If you don’t you will fail with greater consistency for sure and you seem fairly consistent at it already. Your head is full of noise as your ramblings here show. You need to declutter that first.

You can fix it, I fear not without help. A web forum is merely a place to ramble and add clutter, not to help.
 
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