[the_only_law]

> That's why part of me does not consider myself a programmer since I'm just building out applications/basic server admin but I'm not worrying about nLogN or memory management. Unless something is really just blatantly bad/noticable lag/bad performance. I only recently started to learn about BST but personally have not had to use it yet.

There’s a comment I found from a few years back[0] that touches on something related. There are some oversimplifications in the latter part refuted and expanded on in the replies, but the general idea struck me as probably mostly correct.

At this point I’d kill to just get out of the industry entirely, but there’s no desirable path out.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12079697

[taylodl]

You're focused on delivering solutions. I've been programming for 35 years now and I know all this fancy-schmancy CS stuff - have a degree in CS and mathematics to go along with it - and you know how often I need to worry about this? Especially these days? Hardly ever. So don't worry about not considering yourself to be a programmer.

Build solutions, delight your customers, and call it a day.

[jcun4128]

Yeah I mean I still get paid/can't complain. I just feel concerned when people rattle off these algorithms and what not and I don't use it day to day... maybe it's FOMO.

[taylodl]

Yeah, I've found there's two kinds of programmers: those who consistently deliver value, and those who pontificate over which algorithm to use and miss deadlines! :)

99.9% of the time it makes no difference whatsoever and when it does, Stack Overflow is only a click away!

[jcun4128]

Yeah I'm definitely currently in group 1, I'm working towards 2 regarding robotics/vision but I also am aware that I am not good at math even if I try. At the very least I can take part in group 2 as a hobby.

I also wonder to what extent can you consider yourself good/bad regarding resourcefulness/desire/aptitude to learn. If you took a developer and had them learn Post/ghostscript while having not worked with printers before, how quickly should they be able to learn it? That's a thing I'm dealing with now, it's not as easy as just pulling a popular library from GitHub and plugging it in.

[MrGilbert]

[0] really resonates with my "feeling" about it. Thanks for the link!

Although I wonder if I would want to get out of the industry. While I admire the works of Torvalds and Bellard, and every once in a while dip my toe into low-level works, I feel happy about end-user feedback and making someone's life easier by providing a useable UI to a dataset.