5 years of leetcode with no progress. I'm giving up
This all came to a head yesterday when someone on Leetcode made a post about being able to solve every single Leetcode problem in a year within a year while managing a post doc degree and having almost no programming background (link at bottom of post). It made it clear that Leetcode is a game of talent not hard work. The difference between someone like her and someone like me must be noted by the programming community. The majority of people would not ever be able to accomplish that. I dedicated myself for 5 years to Leetcoding almost exclusively and still am no where near what that person has accomplished. I have put in much more work than that person and have gotten much less from it.
I believe the programming community can learn from this contrast. The culture of always trying harder and thinking success stories apply to everyone that is pervasive in programming circles is toxic. The is reality not everyone is lucky enough to be intellectually gifted to succeed and not all hard work pays off. I am proof of that and this is the type of story that needs to be shared and heard too.
I am quitting programming out of humility and recognition of my limitations. It’s ok to give up and wise to do so when you aren't good enough for something.
https://leetcode.com/discuss/general-discussion/1108530/leet...
215 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 281 ms ] threadI've scored as low as 112 and as high as 127 on officially given IQ tests with the average being around 118. I'd be interested to know if you have any advice for someone with that level of ability.
I am very bad at networking.
I hope you find something that works for you.
> “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
It's important to be able to recognize that some skill or profession just isn't for you.
It doesn't mean you're a failure, it just means you haven't found your true calling yet.
Wishing you the best OP!
Being good enough, enjoying what you do, getting better if/when you can are more important. And of course, making money and creating things while doing it.
And some of those "genius" stories are just BS leadership cult. Zuckerberg, for example, was just a mediocre programmer compared to tons of regular 100K/year or less working programmers and insignificant compared to famous devs from Brian Kerningham all the way to Jamie Zawinsky, he just had the right timing, the right connections, and the ability to build a rudimentary service all the way through, which is basically what it took.
https://xkcd.com/386/
Is this culture pervasive in programming circles? I thought that (for better or worse) programming circles typically had a culture that hailed being "lazy" as virtue (the idea being it leads people to automate things, which is often what they should be doing).
On one hand, there's a belief in autodidacticism, the ability that anyone can teach themselves anything, through cleverly-applied effort and sheer will. Learn to code without a degree, teach yourself a coding (or verbal!) language in 24 hours, continuous self-improvement. Being able to become a great programmer, or at least a great whiteboarder who can pass any FAANG interview through sheer will and personal development, is part of this ethos. It's what the Leetcode/Cracking the Coding Interview grind promises. Universal self-actualization.
On the other hand, there's the belief in innate talent or genius, the 10x engineer, unicorn rockstar ninjas. The existence of people more talented than others doesn't contradict the previous point, but it could potentially lead to contradictory behavior- companies that pay lip service to the idea of anyone can code, yet seek only to exclusively hire the very few who are naturally great coders.
Laziness as a virtue can fall into the domain of either. You can make yourself smart enough to see everyday situations as systems to be automated and reduce effort. Or you might be inherently skilled enough to do it naturally.
It's no way to live drilling dumb little puzzles; there's this prevailing attitude that we should be grateful or it's not a big deal. But for me, it's been nothing be joyless, and I've found a lot of satisfaction working at companies that don't require these charades.
That's true.
>not everyone is lucky enough to be intellectually gifted to succeed and not all hard work pays off
That's also true.
The part about quiting programming though is a non sequitur. You don't need to have innate talent to do something, or even to do it well, you just need to get good at it.
And you can get good enough to do things without getting genius level great, or even good at the level (or with the ease) of the person with the innate talent.
Know the old adage "good enough to do some real damage" (damage meant complimentary, as in "to do stuff")? That's the spirit.
The industry needs tens of millions of programmers, for all kinds of levels, not only innate-talent-software-gurus.
I don't even know what leetcode is (I assume from this post it's some kind of education site, or a website with problems to solve to get better, like Project Euler or something).
Leetcode.com is a site that preps you for interviews like that and claims to have the interview question sets for FAANG and FAANG-like companies.
Maybe. It depends on how much innate talent you do have. Talent isn't an on off switch. It's a spectrum. It's possible to have enough talent to be a genius, to be just below a genius, to be good enough, but also to not even be good enough to reach a minimal employable threshold. It depends on the person.
>The industry needs tens of millions of programmers, for all kinds of levels, not only innate-talent-software-gurus.
But who gets the best rewards?
Being able to show up and do the work is table stakes –– and yes, I actually write efficient algorithms in my day-to-day because we process massive amounts of data. But the algos I write were invented 50, 60 years ago. My leetcode study process was to look up the solution and then memorize it through rote practice. Why reinvent the wheel? I'm not trying to win a Turing prize here.
But your intellectual mettle and day to day happiness in the company is tested by your ability to deal with people.
So? You might never go "where you want to go" (some monetary compensasion?). It might be unreachable or a pipe dream for most and/or for you.
Somebody else. Which is the case for 99.999% of the population, so?
Also if not, the fact that you went through all that effort and time is definitely worth something. You can probably smoke most non-tryhard company interviews.
Do you come from a credentialist culture/upbringing? There are many programming jobs out there where people don't care about your school, your GPA, etc. Also, don't believe some random person's post about what they do or don't do. People often lie or exaggerate. E.g. "oh man, I barely studied but I still got an A".
You seem to be suffering, so I don't want to pile on, but it seems kind of crazy to me to spend 5 years on a particular approach to getting a job. Is there something else that's limiting you? Hard-to-understand accent? Language Skills? Social skills? Resume typos/grammar? Contact list? Trying for jobs that are out of reach, when other satisfactory jobs could be in reach?
Why do you want to program? What do you want to program? Programming is a tool and a craft, like literacy and creative writing. But it is in service of some goal or just the pleasure of doing it.
lol, EDITFAIL
I have no credentialist upbringing.
There are other things that are limiting me. I have no network and bad social skills.
I don't make FAANG money, but I make really good money. It's not enough to retire at 40, but it's enough to have a pretty nice life.
Not a lot of employment options like that anywhere and in any field, outside of being an executive, pro athlete, or other one-off / superlative opportunity.
And even if you're not an E6 or "Principal" or something, the Big Name on a resume opens doors later.
EDIT N> I see I might have misunderstood your post. You've been working on leetcode while at school and at your first job? Therefore the gap between the end of your first job and now is not five years? Okay, that's great! So ignore this part...
<<< Think of the opportunity cost of not making (I assume) decent money as a programmer at the start of your career. With five years of programming experience on the job, you might have been able to land a team lead or high-level individual contributor role, with all the compensation and marketable skills that come with. Extra disposable income invested in low-risk equities like index funds over the last five years would have had a huge return. >>>
Or, for that matter with a few years experience on real projects at real shops, you would have the skills that might actually get you into FAANG now.
This is actually making me a bit angry at Leetcode for possibly misrepresenting the utility or importance of their product.
Given all that you've said, I would suggest getting out there and getting any programming job that isn't losing you money to build up your finances, resume, and network. You had one bad experience -- don't let it define you. People get fired because their manager had a fight with their partner the night before. There's a huge amount of random noise, and FAANG, leetcode scores, even performance reviews are not a particularly strong reflection on you or good estimators of your future prospects.
This school -> leetcode -> FAANG pipeline simply isn't how the real world works. Sorry!
EDIT> Social skills are learnable to at least a competent level, and the number one way to get contacts is to work more jobs. I used to be too shy to hand out my business card -- now it's super easy. A friend of mine is neuro-atypical and has massive social anxiety, but has worked as a bartender in the past -- all just scripts and social "macros".
EDIT2> Good Luck! Don't give up on programming, but take care of yourself, and maybe take a break. Maybe work on a coding project that you find interesting but that has no goal or ulterior motive.
EDIT N+1> It was typical when I graduated to do anything and everything to get 2 years of professional experience, and then to go for your desired job. The experience outweighed any other concern w.r.t hiring. So I definitely wouldn't give up after one bad experience. Also, I suggest you recalibrate your expectations to work up to FAANG by getting jobs at other companies first. It's almost certain that real on-the-job experience will count for much more than scores on some programming site.
I am interested in your story as well though. I am not autistic, but I think I have the similar defects that could be resolved with similar solutions. Could you give me an example of such an institution?
So, I was really surprised to find out that they had worked as a bartender. I can't give specific recipes, but there are forms to a lot of small-talk. That's what I mean by "macros". Of course, misfiring can lead to the hilarious/awkward interactions like "Happy Birthday! Thanks, you too! Doh!"
Things like looking at areas of the face that aren't eyes sporadically can help with making at least intermittent eye contact, if that's uncomfortable for you.
This seems to get better with age, although not to go away. You just develop more habits and skills. As I said, I used to be too shy to hand out my business card at first, but it just becomes a habit. You can practice it.
On the one hand, viewing social skills as skills to be learned can help, but it can also lead to IMO anti-social behaviour like PUA. If other people see you as trying too hard or being formulaic, that's a turnoff. With PUA, there's a nasty undercurrent.
Sorry, I don't have anything more concrete. Maybe this -- take small steps to get out of your comfort zone, almost like desensitization training. Don't do it all at once so you don't freak out, and don't beat yourself up too hard if you get embarassed about how you think others are reacting to you. If people are actually shitty to you, then hang out with better people.
After COVID, I think I'm going to try to do some standup comedy. The thought of bombing in front of an audience is terrifying, but also kind of delicious. I love those incredibly awkward scenes in TV shows or movies where you're dying inside for the characters. Maybe you can just go meta on awkward/embarassing situations and pivot from awkward to hilarious.
EDIT> What about framing the problem as writing scripts / playbooks for a chatbot, except that chatbot is you. Do little teeny tests, bit by bit, expanding your comfort zone / social envelope.
That should tell you the problem.
If you have the grit to stick it out, you could consider working with legacy code too.
I think you should quit then. Just give up. It's not going to happen. Certainly not the way you're going about it.
I have the same goals. I've been reading every "how to be a CEO" book I can find and I've written to every Fortune 500 asking to be their CEO. I have no interest in what any of these companies do. I have so far not received a single reply, so I guess it's time to make a post whinging about that on HN.
1. Graduate from a top school
2. Work at non-FAANG companies for several years and develop strong software engineering skills: attention to detail, deep knowledge of one language, writing and maintaining unit tests and integration tests, giving and receiving code reviews, being oncall, sitting in on requirements meetings with customers, spending months implementing features, seeing some of them fail in production or fail with users, and deploying and owning a small service and being the go-to person on the team for it. This takes several years. Almost nobody can get a FAANG job without this experience.
Grinding leetcode is something to do for 2-3 weeks before your FAANG interview to brush up on algorithms. Leetcode cannot give you software engineering experience that FAANG interviewers look for.
It's really good that you recognize your bad social skills. You can improve them with effort.
Good luck!
or if you're good with people a solutions engineer is a good options, because you are mostly the "nerd in the room" during the sales process: leveraging technical acumen to demo, build hacky prototypes, and solve the potential customer's problems.
Solutions engineer also sounds interesting. Thank you for mentioning it.
here's a unicorn list (all private companies with at least $1 bil market cap) https://www.cbinsights.com/research-unicorn-companies
Pick one and look at engineering roles. For example, I would assume this role at Brex (no affiliation, chose from list) pays at least 180-200k. https://www.brex.com/careers/engineering/4946341002/
of course, public tech companies (e.g. FAANG, Twilio, etc) will also pay that.
So get a FAANG manager position.
With that attitude towards your chosen profession you can do all the leetcoding you want and still don't get a job.
Let me tell you something: hard work DEFINITELY plays a big role. I'm not saying "talent" isn't a factor too, of course. Other than sharing this, I'm not sure what kind of advice I could have. At least on paper you've done as much as you can.
If you allow me to guess something about your person with no basis at all: is it possible you just don't enjoy it? I know that for myself if I enjoy something I spent a lot of time thinking about it, even "down time" when your mind just wanders. I've always enjoyed little problems, and I can get lost in them for hours. If you do that a lot it's impossible not to get better at solving little problems. I think this possibly one overlooked aspect of "do something you enjoy". It's not _just_ that you'll get more enjoyment, it's also that you'll be better at it.
Good luck.
I do enjoy it. I just am bad at it and constantly get stuck and go blank. It's not fun if you're not competent enough to engage with the material. When I do easier problems that flow, I enjoy it just fine.
Switch to less challenging content and master it before moving on again.
For example, I've seen those who are interested in leetcode, algos, and the like. I remember this one time where management wanted to have JS/front-end devs answer questions about C and b-trees. They couldn't find anyone to make it through the whole interview process. The problem was that people who could handle the C and b-trees couldn't cut it at the JS questions that came later. The JS devs never got passed the C/b-tree questions.
There is a culture of elite knowledge and a club around that. Some are into the school people have degrees from and that kind of thing.
There is another side of it that's about the ability to use code to problem solve. I remember meeting this senior engineer that customers used to constantly request by name. He was one of the most senior levels at the company. I later learned that he had no degree. He had a ton of hands on knowledge and understood the technology from years of working. He learned it like a skilled trade and he was valuable to everyone involved.
There are places where both types of folks can thrive.
I personally go after the problem solving type situations because I don't like forms of elitism and I really like solving problems.
Don't look at the leetcode space and Google mentorship as the whole realm of software jobs. There is a lot more out there and many very successful people doing other types of stuff in software.
I used to be like this as well, till I noticed the people solving the types of problems I wanted to work on we’re either guarded behind these leetcode type interviews or something much more difficult to “fake until you make it”.
I don't like this idea. I prefer the idea of mentoring and people constantly learning. Faking it is kind of like deceiving until you figure it out.
People should be mentoring and teaching each other. This levels up the people around us.
> I noticed the people solving the types of problems I wanted to work on we’re either guarded behind these leetcode type interviews or something much more difficult
This is a real thing.
Sometimes you need a foundation in a hard problem that is often taught in some university courses. There are some hard problems here and people look for that. Sometimes it's math skills or specific algorithms.
Sometimes the people working the hard problems artificially add levels to their processes to keep clubs exclusive.
Most software isn't these hard problems. 99.9% of software is not these hard problems.
Chasing money is not going to get you far. Focus on skills.
Notice how nothing in this thread is your fault. Every single problem is on another person our outside force. No one will pity you, doubly so in a highly technical team. It's just not part of the culture. Take it or leave it.
In the states, pick any Series A or farther along product-based startup and chances are they pay 110k+ for mid level roles and up. Not sure why you think those numbers are FAANG specific. If you’re going for 200k+, ok then you need the big players.
The best coder I’ve come across in my career once told me he attempted to solve some leetcode and was stuck fairly early and gave up. I was surprised to hear that he even cared to try.
What made him a fantastic engineer was his meticulous work ethic, his track record of never having missed a deadline, him spending 40% of his time designing before he even wrote a single line of code, writing extremely human readable code, his obsession with unambiguous and simple APIs and his extensive unit testing.
He was humble, loved to crack jokes and was always fun to solve hard problems with.
None of that is captured by leetcode. This is probably my personal bias - but the only people who work hard at leetcode are people who want to prove something to the world. I’d rather work with people who like the profession and don’t feel compelled to prove anything.
Not the world.
Hiring committees.
What you are saying would be kind of like someone saying "I knew an athlete who could do a mile in under 4 minutes, but one time he got on a bike, fell and then never cared to try biking again. Therefore, the ability to ride a bike has nothing to do with athleticism." Which is technically true, but misleading. It misses the key idea that the main factor is the person not taking the bike seriously as if he actually decided to take the time to learn how to ride a bike, it's virtually certain he would be better at it than 90% of people because the underlying traits that make one exceptional at running would also make one good at biking.
It also sounds this person had a good temperament and personality which worked in his favor. That wouldn't matter though if he didn't have the cognitive ability to never miss deadlines and correctly design out code in his head and on paper before writing it as you say.
The bicycle analogy is interesting, it us more like getting someone on a time trial bike and checking if they can hit 25 mph. That counts for almost nothing when doing a downhill mountain bike course. Can you communicate to people clearly? Can you convey expectations? Can you write simple and easy to understand TESTS?? Leet code is part of a cottage industry for interview styles that faang employees for lack of anything better.
I did one faang interview and omg I bombed so badly. A week prior, I did another with the same company and they couldn't stop calling me asking me to stop interviewing and work for them. The hiring manager wrote a love letter of how much I'd enjoy it there. It's crao, half of the senior engineers at that company can't pass their own interviews, it's a broken system. You can't know if a dev us good until at least 3 months after hire, if not 6.
This reminds me of an old anecdote:
Beginner programmers pump out 100 lines of good code a week. Journeymen programmers do 1,000. Master programmers do -100.
It's the same sentiment as the famous Churchillian quip: “I am going to give a long speech today; I haven’t had time to prepare a short one.”
But I think you are doing your now not_future_colleagues a solid by giving up. If you are that square to think there is only one way to reach the "prestige, benefits and pay of Google" and that is by excelling at some Leetcoding pissing context: I see you not solve issues that are exciting to solve which is exactly what I like to see in programmers.
Good enough for what, exactly? A person's value as a dev has little to do with how good they are at leetcode problems. What matters is whether or not you can deliver working software and communicate effectively with your team.
Sure, there are some positions where having a truly exceptional ability with algorithms is a significant benefit. Things like graphics and simulation, HFT and squeezing every last drop of performance out of hardware. But, be aware, that's a relatively small subset of work that developers do.
I'm sorry to hear you've burned yourself out on programming as a whole by tunnel-visioning on leetcode problems. Whatever you pursue next, I encourage you to try approaching it from a more holistic direction.
A FAANG-type eng job. IMO you're right that LC is not a predictor of success as a SWE, but it is for better or worse (I think worse) a gating factor for landing the job. We could talk for hours about how lazy it is to use LC-style problems as the gatekeeper, but the reality is that's what it is (ref: the guy who wrote Homebrew failing Google's interview loop).
OP seems to be conflating LC success with SWE success. LC is not what you need to be a successful and productive engineer, rather it's the prep you have to do if you want to play the FAANG interview game. What OP might be missing is that FAANG isn't the only show out there, and plenty of great non-FAANG companies don't interview this way.
Medicine/MCAT, Law/LSAT, PhD/GREs, Undergrad/SAT, and for all of the above you need a high GPA, which is not a good measure because it's localized to the school and is not weighted for class difficulty.
My own story: I was pre-med at a deflationary school, I did very well on the MCAT, but my GPA was below average, so I got 0 interviews on 11 apps (thousands down the drain and years of effort too), and decided research was a better field for me than medicine.
Here's an anecdote from myself. I have been a software engineer for 15+ years. I was a computer science major like you in college. My first job out of college was at Intel where I also only lasted less than 2 years. While I didn't get fired for performance issues, my first annual performance review was also a performance improvement plan and I was the bottom of the pack (i.e. did not get a raise). I had issues coming from years of education-focused mindsets that I thought passing exams was all it's about, and I often did not "get" what it means to be productive in a company as an employee. It took me time over the years to "get it". After Intel I worked for a friend's web dev shop for a year. Then I finally landed at a startup (which became a unicorn later), which was 2008, and the rest was history -- I was promoted several levels in said startup, and later cofounded my own funded startup (which didn't work out at the end), and I went on to work as a staff engineer at my next two companies. And finally, I probably wouldn't be able to solve any leetcode problems (maybe above the easy ones).
It's your personal decision to stay or quit programming, but if you had any willingness to stay at all, I would encourage you to simply ignore this leetcode stuff and interview at companies that don't do leetcode whiteboard interviews and try to work as a software engineer at a new company, so you have a sample size of more than 1 company in your work experience. And when you do so, try at it from a standpoint of understanding the business, understanding what makes an impact and drives the business forward, and do those things. At the core level, that's the most important thing about working as a software engineer.
I joined a FAANG at 44 and had to do the Leetcode evaluation. TBH, it wasn't so much a grind as a bit of re-learning how to ride a bicycle. I have the "benefit" of being old enough that solving those kinds of low-level problems was work I actually did in my younger days before all of these fancy libraries existed. I spent about 10 hours over the course of a couple weeks just "refreshing" myself on ways to identify the brute force vs. clever solutions to some basic CS problems of array manipulation and graph traversal.
It was pretty low effort, but it was the side show to my decades of experience. For younger folks with only a couple years experience, I can see how it becomes the "everything" because it's the majority of their evaluation.
Unless you work in some cutting edge project, optimization or framework development, most of your work will consist in performing api calls, copy pasting and glueing boring pieces of code together.
So, my recommendation is, instead of becoming an expert in solving code challenges, be an expert in implementing real world solutions. Learn some useful framework and try to build something useful with it.
Can you follow a recipe? If you're missing an ingredient, can you employ a substitution? That's what an awful lot of programming is like, except using keyboards instead of stoves. Now, it still takes some talent - a talent for computer "recipes" rather than literal cooking recipes - but it's not as out of reach as leetcode leads you to believe.
Do you have evidence for this claim? Specifically, that the skills and talents that make one good at Leetcode are not correlated and predictive for being a good programmer.
I actually never heard of Leetcode before this thread but I highly doubt that. This seems to be a puzzle site like Codewars or Codingame. While puzzles like that are fun, they are only one small part of being a developer. Design, architecture, UI/UX and communication are a lot more valuable than being able to write your own Sudoku Solver.
I've spent my entire career solving real world problems, but it always comes back to tricky logic puzzles or deriving best case runtime complexity on paper with these interviews even still, and even for non-FAANG companies. I regret not just reading cracking the coding interview every couple of years and passively leetcoding at this point because I still might fail this technical screen. And that does suck.
What worked for me was taking on an internship way back when as a web developer, which I turned into a part time and then full time job, which ended up getting my foot in many doors, and I credit it to bootstrapping my career in tech. The landscape is different now though, this was just before coding boot camps were a thing.
Most people here will probably disagree with internships on principle, but I think they’re saying that from a position of entitlement given that they already made it.
Your outlook sounds bleak, and you said you gave up already, but if/when you decide to pick it up again, you need to focus on getting in with actual people as well as just having raw technical concepts under your belt. Maybe. It’s all a crapshoot too, so don’t weigh any one bit of advice too heavily.
Not everything is a Silicon Valley darling that fits the echo chamber template we constantly see on HN (This is an incubator / startup funds news feed after all!!).
To OP: You got in to this for a reason, and are likely good at it. If you need perspective, now might be a good time to check out what other options you have, gain some perspective, spot some holes in whatever fields those options might exist, then start filling those holes in with your coding ability. Now you're working for you (at least partially), might be able to turn that into income (if it's novel enough), and still get to indulge your passion of writing code.
My two cents are, unless we're talking about very high aptitude in a domain (say the top ~0.1-1%), most is reachable through deliberate effort for most people.
The important thing is that time spent and effort are not the same thing. To get better at anything, you need structured, high quality, deliberate practice. Just doing leetcode for five hours a day is not automatically going to improve your coding.
What stands out from the example of the postdoc is that the first thing she did was and took online Berkeley courses on data structures and fundamentals. If you learn fundamentals before you hack away you can safe yourself a lot of time, because a lot of leetcode problems is just identifying and applying CS theory.
To get better being frustrated and sinking hours per day into something is not a healthy or good thing. Focusing on weaknesses, having a plan on how to improve, studying fundamentals even if it isn't fun or rewarding and keeping schedule is how people get better.
Why would this be a joke?
>My two cents are, unless we're talking about very high aptitude in a domain (say the top ~0.1-1%), most is reachable through deliberate effort for most people.
Yes, that amount of aptitude is where I want to be. Who wouldn't? Furthermore, do you have evidence for the claim that anything below top 1% is achievable by anyone?
>What stands out from the example of the postdoc is that the first thing she did was and took online Berkeley courses on data structures and fundamentals. If you learn fundamentals before you hack away you can safe yourself a lot of time, because a lot of leetcode problems is just identifying and applying CS theory.
I had a degree in computer science. I had more of an education than she did. I also looked at lectures of similar kinds myself.
>To get better being frustrated and sinking hours per day into something is not a healthy or good thing. Focusing on weaknesses, having a plan on how to improve, studying fundamentals even if it isn't fun or rewarding and keeping schedule is how people get better.
Why do you assume I didn't do any of this during my 5 years?
there's no hard evidence for these sort of things. But to put some context on this. In chess getting to the top 1% in the US means you have a 2000 rating. That's what people generally consider to be a 'strong amateur'. I've seen people from all walks of life get to that level. Aged over 50, janitors, businessmen, academics, there's no magic to reaching that competence. Take running. A three hour marathon already puts you into the top 5%, that's not that crazy either, and many amateur runners achieve it with rigorous training.
>Why do you assume I didn't do any of this during my 5 years?
because not knowing anything else about you I just think that's simply the most likely explanation. In another post you mentioned that your goal is to get a FAANG job and that you don't have good social skills. Software developers don't just get hired based on leetcode performance, so your performance might not even be bad at all, you may simply have to work on your other skills that aren't even coding related.