site banner

Wellness Wednesday for February 14, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

1
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I finished Intro to Python and then some Data Structures so I can't really comment on your position, but it certainly strikes me as analogous to medicine.

What is the human body but a bunch of asynchronous microservices, with doctors forced to interpret tea leaves poor proxies for what's actually going on.

Error Code: Patient turned yellow

But I did get over most of my imposter syndrome, though to be fair my clinical knowledge was severely lacking compared to my peers because I was depressed and phoning it in through med school. But I did get better, and can even plausibly claim to be above average (in my peer group), despite, like you, having no innate love for the subject. It took a lot of grinding and periods of utter despair, but eventually some of the shit sticks.

I second the other suggestions to look for jobs where you don't have to bash your head at a wall doing something you hate. It might be a bad time to be a programmer looking for a job, but from what I know, it's an innately cyclical industry and the odds of you being unemployed and uncomfortable are low. Maybe brush up your LinkedIn and open up to recruiters?