Code illiterate
I had an experience on both Exercism and Code Crafters that threw me for a loop. For years, I've laboured under the assumption that I can program. Sure, I'd find some things difficult, and it would take some mental gymnastics to wrap my head around something, but ultimately, I'd end up with a few dozen to a few hundred lines of code that did what I wanted them to.
On a parallel path, I'm falling head first into my fifties. I work in infosec for a fintech based out of London, in a role I am not entirely sure I can describe to myself, let alone someone else. It's information security, but equally, ISO/IEC 27001:2022, PCI DSS, DORA (EU) 2022/2554, EU Data Act (EU) 2023/2854, privacy, GDPR, client security and compliance questionnaires, and somehow, dollops of IT support (I suspect that I might not be that bright...🤔) Regardless of my apparent limitations, I did figure that as a leader in this org that I owed it to my team, and myself, to figure out where the ceiling on my abilities was.
Hence Exercism and Code Crafters.
After a few weeks on both of these platforms, I am categorically forced to admit that I cannot program for shit. Even Guido's Lasagne was a challenge. Build your own DNS server? Ha! More like:
- read RFC 1035 section on DNS header construction
- understand RFC 1035 instructions
- be completely incapable of expressing that in Python.
At this point in my career (which has dragged on for longer than some of the people who report to me have been alive), I have wasted God knows how many hours failing to be any good at something I thought I was relatively competent at. It was a sobering realisation. It was, in fact, utterly demotivating.
As I sit here and write this, I am equal measures angry and disappointed. A life wasted in a career that has cost me more hours of overtime, stress and fights with my SO that I can count on all of my digits, and for what? So that I can write answers in a spreadsheet to a prospective customer explaining that we have an ISMS?
What a waste of a career.