Ask HN: Should I quit trying to be a programmer?
I recently graduated with a computer science degree in a top 50 school and have been grinding leetcode  in preparation of applying to a job. I have no work experience and had a lot of help to get through the degree. About half of the coding assignments required for my degree I either didn’t do or was carried. I also got generous accommodations due to a disability. My in major GPA is 3.0.<p>I take an extremely long time to come up with solutions to any problems. I enjoy trying to solve problems and coming up with a high level solution, but I get stuck for hours on details or miss vital parts of the algorithm so often it becomes a drag. Personal projects take me an extreme amount of time too and I haven’t made any of note. I’m not good at organizing code and I am not detail orientated which means I tend to get a lot of one off type errors and can take hours to find them. Even problems I’ve seen before, I’ll likely forget the solution or fail to recreate it.<p>To give a concrete example of some of the above, just this morning I tried to code the brute force solution following problem: Give two sorted arrays return the median. I spent over an hour trying to implement the brute force solution involving linearly going through each array and couldn’t code it in Python. The entire time I was struggling to figure out how to increase the respective index variables given different cases, how I would ensure one of the numbers the indices landed was the median, how to differentiate which of the array indices I was keeping track of was the actual median and finally how to determine the next number I needed if the lengths of both arrays were even.<p>Many problems go the same way. I don’t know what the difference between the normal struggle associated with coding is and the sort of struggle that means it’s just not for me. I&#x27;m not looking for encouragement per se, but objective feedback on which group I belong to and practical advice on how to move forward.