I think you may be going about learning programming wrong. I've seen this several times (source: am DevOps/programmer) where my non-CS-degree sysadmin/IT cowork

I think you may be going about learning programming wrong. I've seen this several times (source: am DevOps/programmer) where my non-CS-degree sysadmin/IT coworkers will sort of "force it" when trying to learn programming. This includes things like reading technical docs way above their head, copy/pasting a lot from SO and not fully understanding things, and diving into complex code bases. It's a slog for the guys who do it this way, and I think its because there are some in-between steps that they skip over. I usually suggest tutorials, but I get the impression from them that the tutorials they use are long, boring, and worst of all.. too easy. Then they dive into real-world work and get overwhelmed. I feel like this is akin to showing them how interlocking gears work for the first time and then asking them to fix my car. What helped me was being in that setting where I would get small not-real-world problems to solve over and over. IOW homework, classwork, etc.. I think is what helped. Eventually I did enough small things that when I saw real-world code, I could pick it apart into pieces that I understood because I've actually programmed those pieces before. Having written it before was a huge help as well because I already had to be familiar with the concepts to get it to work... reading it was then a matter of comparing what they have to what I wrote in the past and incrementing my knowledge (rather than starting from zero understanding). TL;DR I think there is a gap between beginner/intermediate tutorials and real-world coding. I think you may need to find yourself a path through this gap that involves solving a lot of practice problems and working your way up. HTH and Good Luck