Mentally Stabbing Yourself
I remember first learning about programming. It was probably the coolest thing I’ve learned (almost) ever at school so far.
Being able to type random letters which then led to the computer doing exactly what you wanted to. Literally magic!
But that magic got killed pretty quickly for me. During my 2nd semester of school, we had this course called DPM, where we had to design and program a robot to find and pick up small blue styrofoam boxes and then deposit them at a certain location. Although hard, it was probably the most fun class we had during my whole engineering degree.
However, to get to that final project, in the first month of class, we were paired in teams of two so that we can learn all the different components of how you can actually program the robot to do everything you wanted to do. Search, move, turn, etc.
Unfortunately for me, my partner was one of the best coders in our class. Why unfortunate? Well, at first, I was really happy that I was paired with someone really good, but what happened was that he would always code on his own and would always finish our project like on the day of or the day after, leaving me to do absolutely nothing. For someone trying to just coast through their whole program, this might’ve been cool, but I was frustrated because I couldn’t do anything.
What was worst was that when we actually got to the final project, because I didn’t learn how to code, I was constantly behind, so instead of trying to code, I decided to be the “mechanical engineer” and designed our robot instead.
I was so embarrassed about feeling behind and not being able to contribute as a coder, that from that day on, I always told myself that I was a bad coder.
And it’s only 12 years later, that because I labeled myself as a “bad coder”, I effectively stabbed myself in the back.
During my whole University I didn’t bother to apply to Microsoft, or Google or all of these good companies, because “who would want to hire someone that didn’t do anything during DPM.”
This is also why during my whole career, I never thought of going back into coding. I moved forward and told myself that my skills would be better suited to jobs like consulting, project management or product management.
During my career, I thought about trying to code again, but I always put a lot of pressure on myself and also didn’t give myself a lot of time to actually learn how to code.
I think what’s crazy is I only thought about this now and not earlier. I still vaguely remember the feeling of being able to code something and it actually works. It felt awesome. I don’t necessarily miss the frustration of not knowing why something wasn’t working, but I also did love the feeling of being able to solve that problem and make it work.
Which is why I want to give myself another chance. This time, I want to give myself time to explore and code. Two years and let’s see what happens.