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So a couple of things: If the first thing you failed to accomplish after 10 years was a medium complexity task, consider yourself lucky in some sense. Also, who determined the complexity level of this task, did you decide it was medium complexity, and if so is that corroborated by the team? Moreover, most "bad" programmers don't necessarily think they are writing bad code, did you come to this conclusion yourself? If you did, it seems like maybe some other factors came into play, maybe you didn't have enough time, maybe the requirements were unclear. In either case, 1 failed task seems like a lot to evaluate 10 years of a career on; having recognized this behavior in myself, you might be catastrophizing this failure in a way that's not productive for you. If you received this criticism from somewhere else, that's okay too, being "over 30" isn't some death sentence, there's plenty of time to reinvent yourself, start a new career or rebuild your skills from the ground up - if that's what you want to do. Maybe part of this is just, you aren't sure you want to be a programmer and you are using this "failure" as a kind of escape hatch, which you know, is also fine. Or, maybe you aren't sure you want to devote the effort you might think it would take to actually improve as a developer I would say, check in with yourself, and figure out what you want to do or at least what you don't want to do. I wouldn't change careers simply because you think you aren't good at this one. Being a PM, has a whole other set of challenges (but if you are actually curious, the idea that you have to be able to "code it the right way" should not be a blocker). If you do decide you want to become a better programmer, realize it's not going to happen overnight, but conversely it's not going to take as long as you think. But you do have to start somewhere. Rather than ask on HN, I would go find someone whose technical opinions you trust (you mentioned talking with people in the industry - hey developer evangelist is also a role out there for you, heh), and ask them to review some code you've written and have them articulate those weak points, and start from there. If you decide to start, just remember to start small. It doesn't have to be late night grinding sessions, 15-30 minutes a day reviewing a topic, solving a code challenge, reading a chapter of a book - can really add up after a few months. |