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First of all, thanks for posting this. That takes bravery and you've started a really interesting thread. I have a couple of suggestions as someone who is self taught in various fields, and the world of programming and music have some bizarre parallels. First, you might be wrong. You may be fine, and just need to back to fundamentals. This is very common in many complex fields. I have gone through multiple rounds of taking stuff back to beginning level. I'm doing it all over again right now in programming. I highly, highly, highly recommend reading "How To Design Programs". Putting time in to truly and deeply master the very basics as well as you can is the road to mastery in anything complex, and it's never too late to do this. Second, you may not be totally wrong, you may be slightly off target on how you like to think best! There are a lot of people out there who like computing and programming, but discover that really, they are better off as someone in a related field, or that they like a different kind of coding. In my experience, the best low-level coders are often terrible architects (very high level software design), because they can't imagine being wrong! Also, some people naturally gravitate for whatever reason to sysadmin/dev-ops style stuff, or security testing, or embedded electronics. Or perhaps you have better than average ability to understand how people make software and would be an excellent development manager. So my advice is to take a two-pronged approach: A) Go back to fundamentals and learn new languages, both high and low level. B) Experiment with related areas and see if one of them makes you say "ah damn this is what I should have been doing". And C) give yourself like a good year or two to figure this out. It'll take some time. |