Here are 5 signs you are not made to be a computer programmer :
- You are not creative, enjoy new problems, or frustration tolerant. Most of the work is to solve a problem for which you don't have a solution, you need creativity to imagine a lot of paths, and tolerate the frustrating fact that most of them won't work.
- You can't follow recipes, less to write down objectively your own. To program is to give instructions to a dumb and blind obedient servant, you must prevent all that can go wrong, to not end up in a disaster. If you write or read “put a bunch of salt" it's not for you, a good programmer asks “how much is a bunch", “what if there's no salt", and “what if I have diet salt".
- You're not curious. If you have comfort in “because it is" you'll never go deeper, you won't understand why you keep getting that odd error that “should not be happening", you'll assume that metaphors are literal and won't be able to prevent errors or use a tool to its maximum capacity.
- You're not logical, you don't enjoy puzzles. That's a lot of programming work.
- You can't tolerate working alone without feedback or you can't tolerate other ways of doing things. Both things are common, most of the time it's a solitaire work, but also you need to coordinate with other “solitaire” people with his and her owns way of doing the work.
