I am pretty sure there is something you like to do. Get good at a tiny small particular thing first before you extend your interest to other things. If it helps, I used to be a test engineer who was tasked to run test cases manually. You know what I did? In me spare time I wrote an extremely dumb and simple executor that did my job. Management realized the potential, they let me write a better tool now with their approval. This was 10 years ago. Today I still struggle with Java and sometimes with Python but I found a handful of languages that I really like and I am focusing on getting better with those, kind of ignoring what is mainstream. I regularly fail job interviews (the last one few days ago, using codility) but I keep interviewing so I can do those better over time as well. I do one interview per week as a minimum. I try to contribute things to open source projects. Even stupid simple things like this (
https://github.com/cloudera/hue/pull/68) it is not even code, it is configuration, but we needed that few jobs back.
I don't think I am particularly talented, but I spent so much effort on this (learning how to write software) that I can say today that I am a mediocre software engineer. Again, just think about it. I spent 10 years on this. In the meantime I did everything that I could, being Linux admin, systems engineer, data engineer, just to keep myself running. Almost forgot, I never received any formal education in computer science.
My co-workers run circles around me when it comes to programming, yet my persistence helps me to outperform them.
I guess what I am trying to say is:
- don't give up
- expect success over time (1-2 years as a bare minimum)
- try to start with a simple thing, as simple as it gets (QA, DevOps, anything where you don't need to flip binary trees on a whiteboard :) )
This was my story, I hope it helps.
I don't think I am particularly talented, but I spent so much effort on this (learning how to write software) that I can say today that I am a mediocre software engineer. Again, just think about it. I spent 10 years on this. In the meantime I did everything that I could, being Linux admin, systems engineer, data engineer, just to keep myself running. Almost forgot, I never received any formal education in computer science.
My co-workers run circles around me when it comes to programming, yet my persistence helps me to outperform them.
I guess what I am trying to say is: - don't give up - expect success over time (1-2 years as a bare minimum) - try to start with a simple thing, as simple as it gets (QA, DevOps, anything where you don't need to flip binary trees on a whiteboard :) )
This was my story, I hope it helps.