16 hours in front of a computer (mostly) working 6 days a week
This is not sustainable no matter how much you love it. There is simply not enough time left to live healthy life - rest, exercise, be in a good relationship. Please do not do the same mistakes I made. I used to say what you say and I used to love my work. But I burned out. Love turned into hate. I had to quit - I just could not do it anymore. And I was left with severe depression, anxiety attacks, health problems and worst of all - loneliness. I did not have time for social life and now I have no love in my life, no sex, no intimacy, no meaning, nothing worth living for. I wasted few years of my youth that I will never get back and I just hope that somehow (with a lot of help from my therapist) I will be able to recover and enjoy life again... but it seems almost impossible now. I am in a really bad place right now... and I see you going there as well and loving it.
Exactly! I would say that complexity is the biggest problem form me. It makes it impossible to keep the whole mental model in my memory and I need to reanalyze and rebuild it constantly depending on the part of the problem that I am trying to solve right at the moment.
I don't think I am. I guess that you are probably referring to that stuff about JavaScript because that is the only part of my post where I mention something knowledge-related. But I am not talking about the lack of knowledge of JavaScript closures or functions passed as arguments - I was talking about the fact that it was surprisingly difficult for me to grasp that concept while trying to acquire that knowledge. Let me use your own words - it was 'a matter of capacity and capability'.
If you think I am wrong please explain how I am conflating intelligence and knowledge.
1) I think a lot of start-ups want to hire "smart" people.
What does it really mean to be smart? Lately I cannot stop thinking about it. I have always been considered a 'smart person'. I am a self-taught freelance developer now - it used to be my hobby and somehow (mostly because I needed location-independent work quickly) it became my profession. I get by because everybody thinks I am smart but I feel like an impostor because the more I think about myself the more I realize that intelligence is not some general ability to solve problems - it's more just a set of very different skills that corelate to much lesser extent than people usually think and you can be really good at something that people use to judge your abilities and at the same time really bad at something else that is actually required to get the job done.
I studied sociology and I shortly worked as a data analyst. It seems to me that this kind of work requires... ehm... a different intelligence than programming. You need to be good at connecting the dots, noticing things, seeing patterns. This is my kind of thinking and I have always been good at this - doubting everything, seeing pure assumptions where other people saw 'truths', permanently creating hypotheses and alternative theories, trying to spot logical fallacies in prevailing theories... basically trying to spot things.
Programing is very different (at least it seems to me - so different tat it's even difficult do describe it). I guess it's about creating stuff, not just observing stuff. You need to build very complex and abstract mental models, keep them in your head and be able to operate with them - and this is the part of intelligence that I seem to be lacking. It just does not feel natural. I try to solve some problem and I am thinking... if this condition and that condition but at the same time not that condition... and bang!, suddenly I am lost and I don't even remember what I am doing. I cannot keep it in my head. I totally get what OP was saying about passing anonymous functions in JavaScript - I had the same experience. The first time I encountered something so simple as JavaScript closures it took me two hours to get it. And the day after that I had to repeat the whole mental process to get there again because I somehow lost it over night. This is simply not how my brain works and I think I am really bad at this. Yet people pay me for this... which is just depressing (and you understand why I write this under throwaway).
I remember our 'statistical analysis 101' professor always telling us 'remember, you are not really testing hypotheses, you are only testing indicators!' - if HR department picks wrong indicators for the skills that they actually need both company and employee are going to be unhappy - and I think this is very common because our understanding of the indicators for different kinds of 'being smart' is still poor.
This is not sustainable no matter how much you love it. There is simply not enough time left to live healthy life - rest, exercise, be in a good relationship. Please do not do the same mistakes I made. I used to say what you say and I used to love my work. But I burned out. Love turned into hate. I had to quit - I just could not do it anymore. And I was left with severe depression, anxiety attacks, health problems and worst of all - loneliness. I did not have time for social life and now I have no love in my life, no sex, no intimacy, no meaning, nothing worth living for. I wasted few years of my youth that I will never get back and I just hope that somehow (with a lot of help from my therapist) I will be able to recover and enjoy life again... but it seems almost impossible now. I am in a really bad place right now... and I see you going there as well and loving it.