[zmmmmm]

Thanks for writing something like this.

I've come to feel that while I love reading HN, it's quite toxic as well. It's like the instagram of coding - every person is so smart, so authoritative, such breadth and depth of knowledge they are all making $300k/yr+ and profess how easy it is to find such a job. It can be really demoralising and even depressing for people who are struggling to be exposed to such potent concentration of things like that.

So it's great to hear someone being vulnerable and owning up to struggles.

I would say, my approach when I hit the types of feelings you express is always to drop down a layer to fundamentals. If X is hard, why is that? It probably means your knowledge isn't sound at some layer below the one you are working at. It sounds like a huge amount of your learning approach has been based on online learning and the issue with these is that they are usually very shallow. They teach you a direct skill but nothing underneath it. So drop down a level and just take time, to properly fill in those gaps. Steadily unravel what is going on one level down. Don't keep battering at the level above constantly getting frustrated. Build your knowledge at the level below. Learn the joy of patiently establishing a sound basis and a complete knowledge of the underlying principles on which something works.