Comment by tstrimple

Hard is relative. I scored a 3. My childhood would better be described as one of neglect rather than one of direct abuse. I don’t feel accomplished. I feel like I’ve been moving from one lucky break to another. But at the same time I’m able to see what I can contribute to roles I have versus my peers and have to conclude my calibration for what is successful or accomplished is very biased. It’s difficult to properly judge yourself when we have plain examples of the top 0.1% all over the internet. This sets up incredibly unrealistic expectations. If you’re able to iterate without constant guidance and able to pivot when you run into firm roadblocks you’re ahead of 90% of your peers. I’m constantly dealing with the dissonance of trying to reconcile that I’m nothing special with me being the only one capable of pushing certain projects forward.

It feels like so many people hit the first stumbling block and throw up their hands stating they don’t know how to do it. That’s where things finally get interesting for me. It doesn’t work. How can I make it work? What have I tried and what other people have solved a similar problem? 95% of the time I just find what someone before me did, copy it and move on. Why is that so difficult for many of my peers? A good portion of my career could be summed up as copying and pasting things I’ve found on Google. It objectively works. Why are others struggling?

I’ll never be a Carmack or an Asahi or any other super hacker that frequently drops incredible work in novel areas that extremely few other individuals could ever deliver. But I can follow their work. Learn from them. Apply their solutions to problems in other domains and iterate on it. But this all feels easy and natural to me so I have trouble understanding why my peers struggle with it so much.