It's Not Easy

To those of you out there who are trying to get started with technology, or really anything, for that matter, please do not fall for these stories of "learn X in 5 days", or think you're not smart enough because someone else whipped up a flashy app in a 60 minute video, or you see bullet points of "expertise" or a mess of certifications. And frankly, looking at some of the things people whose work I’ve inherited post on LI, I can tell you a lot of it is just lies. People who didn’t know what the hell they were doing and left, and lie about it.

Doing things that are worthwhile is hard work. There is simply no way around that. I have worked with 20x coders and even THEY have to work very hard. I am not a 20x coder, and I will never be one. I am still very, very good at what I do, though, because I put the time in.

I typed in BASIC games from a book over 35 years ago and was frustrated then by things that didn’t work right the first time (yes, there books and magazines that listed game source code you’d type in, and because of different dialects of BASIC, they often didn’t work).

It’s always been like that for me.

25+ years as a professional who deals with software, and I still sit here and have to work hard at understanding and digesting the massively complex things we call “computers”. It will probably always be like that if you want to be good at this stuff. The small successes I have are like icebergs. There’s much more you do not see that goes into that little bit above the surface.