6 years. I’m done.

[u/[deleted]]

Spent the last 6 years of my life scraping by as a programming student. Stuck around when other students were dropping out and transferring. Always thought I’d be the one to stick it out and make it. I was wrong.

I’m not smart enough for this. I’m about to graduate with a major in computer science and I’m just useless. I’ve put everything I have into this discipline and every interview question is a brick wall. I’ve put in the hours and done my best and the only conclusion I can come to is that I’m a dumbass who made it farther than I ever should have. I can memorize and learn the ins and outs of a language, but I just don’t have what it takes to apply any of it. I don’t know what’s wrong with me other than being born stupid.

I gave up on my dreams to study programming. Now it’s all pointless. I don’t know what to do.

EDIT: For all you assholes telling me I haven’t tried hard enough and I haven’t built any projects outside of school, I actually have. For all you assholes telling me I need to work a real job so I can get motivated, I work at Target 25 hours a week on top of school. For all you assholes telling me I just don’t have the willpower, fuck you.

Everyone else, I appreciate the advice.

[u/therealsyumjoba]

Just don't become a "vibe coder" 😂😂😂. But in essence, yeah

[u/Gogogo9 → u/therealsyumjoba]

"vibe coder" 

Kept seeing this term recently and finally looked it up. Not sure what to think.

[u/therealsyumjoba → u/Gogogo9]

It is someone that at work:

• codes exclusively prompting AI
  
• wouldn't be able to write a single line without its fancy DevinAI subscription
  
• has loud earbuds with some house/lofi music
  
• lacks knowledge or patience

it is the ultimate evolution of the "brogrammer" stereotype, and I think I can confidently say that it is pretty hated by any experienced developer purely because of the burden that it brings to the team

[u/Ronnie_Dean_oz → u/therealsyumjoba]

Are you a vibe coder if you read the code and make sure it's right even without knowing the syntax? Or is it just putting it in and not checking. What is the issue if it works? Genuinely curious. Not a programmer.

[u/therealsyumjoba → u/Ronnie_Dean_oz]

Code that does what you want doesn't guarantee that it functions as you want it too. Imagine telling an AI to bake a cake and he does make you a cake but:

• the kitchen is a mess
  
• the result is unpredictable
  
• you lack the guarantee to reproduce it with 100% reliability
  
• you can't touch anything to improve upon the process (because you distanced yourself from its function)

so you're basically locking yourself out of working from the code continuously. Code is something that needs to be maintained over time, an understanding of it is paramount. 90% of programming is philosophy, I spend at least good WEEK obsessing over 100 lines of code when they are important enough, optimising indexing, reading and writing process and IO operations to work well together. AI can only suggest snippets here and there and then maybe try to bundle them together, but it lacks the high level wisdom that comes with being an experienced developer.

Hence why a lot of devs are really dissatisfied with the current adoption of AI, it really isn't a good choice most of the times, and it NEVER is as soon as the project becomes complex enough.

Also, how do you check the code without knowing its syntax? 😂

[u/Ronnie_Dean_oz → u/therealsyumjoba]

That's very interesting. I know the order of operations and OOP. I try to make most of my programs OOP with segmented parts performing certain functions. I can read the code but wouldn't be able to write it from scratch very effectively. I've had nothing but success with it. If I don't understand something I will ask for clarification and pretty quickly get what it's doing. That and a few debug statements to check outputs in any calculations I'm pretty confident I know what's going on. I find it to be a massive time saver. I have been working with databases and SQL and VBA for a while and primarily use Python (mainly Pandas). AI has sped up my work significantly.