[johnfn]

To put it very directly - if you are OK with being good but not exceptional at your job, this is totally fine. If you want to be exceptional you will probably need to put in the extra work. Not everyone is OK with this tradeoff and it's totally fine to "just" be good and care more about having outside hobbies and a social life and etc.

[hncoder12345]

I had a period of time where I really wanted to be exceptional. I spent many hours studying and working on side projects but it just never really clicked. I think I'm decent at what I do for work but more complicated topics (graphics programming, low level memory management, etc.) just seem to not stick, no matter how many hours I put into studying. Sometimes it feels like I'm forcing this career but after this many years it's hard to give it up. I do still enjoy it but I don't think I'll ever really get it.

[stephendause]

Your story sounds similar to mine. There are some parts of programming at which I know I will never excel. I also don't have time in my life to spends lots of hours outside of work developing my skills. I think it's important to realize that the median software engineer is probably not doing these things either. Maybe the top 10% are? Something like that would be my guess. It's okay to not be in the top 10%!

[hncoder12345]

This is refreshing to read. Sometimes when I come here and look at the posts and comments it seems like lots of people are doing lots of things that are confusing to me. I'm recently coming to terms with being okay about not being able to learn everything that I don't understand and outside of work I've started pursuing non-programming related hobbies which led me to make the comment I did.