Ask HN: I'm a poor developer, what now?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22399194So with the popularity of the various "interviewing is broken" threads and with personal thoughts of the last year or so, I've come to realize and accept that I'm a bad developer. I took a look at some of the interviewing problems and was unable to complete even easy ones. Even when I can it's likely very sub-optimal.
As a quick background, I am self taught, stumbled into this stuff was I was young. Never really learned anything well, but fell in love quickly. Never went to school (partly after reading many blogs about how it's useless anyway). I've been employed for a few years, although no where near the comp levels discussed on the internet. My job consists mostly of what what one would consider CRUD: writing code that take data from one place, process it a bit, and store it somewhere else. I hate it, It feels tedious and unchallenging. Somehow, despite not much most days, I come home overly exhausted.
Since being employed, I haven't learned much new. I only really know one or two languages now, being the ones I work with. I've tried many times, to learn new things. I've tried learning new languages, paradigms, domains (like kernel, graphics, etc. programming) but I'm incapable of learning. Every time I try it ends the same way: I end up staring at a screen for an hour or so reading docs or articles I'll forget 10 min later or writing some skeleton code I'll delete or never touch again. After that, I realize I'm not learning anything and giving up to go play games or watch TV.
It's distressing, but I don't think I'll ever be able to get a role that I'd find interesting or challenging. Truthfully, I'm likely just not smart enough. Which is fine, not everyone can be, but I don't want to do that same mind-numbing work I do now. My question is where do I go from here. I've considered to moving to a something like networking or sysadmin, but without any education it seems like I'd be at a severe disadvantage? Where can or should I take my career now?