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As someone who programs, plays guitar and has worked as a cashier, being a cashier is by far the easiest. A month or two of working as a cashier with some focus

As someone who programs, plays guitar and has worked as a cashier, being a cashier is by far the easiest. A month or two of working as a cashier with some focused attention to efficiency and memorization will put you ahead of 90% of working cashiers. Between guitar and programming, I would say that guitar is easier to get a basic proficiency at, though much harder to do at a professional level. I think that is largely due to supply and demand. There are very few jobs available for guitarists who are merely proficient, while there plenty of jobs for proficient programmers. The ability to try things and make mistakes without consequences definitely helps to make programming easier, but it will only get you so far. There just isn't enough time in the day to program purely through trial-and-error.

eternityforest 5y ago
I've been trying to get better at guitar on and off for more than a decade, and almost all my jobs have had lots of incidental noncode work. Even learning a simple 4 chord campfires song is on a level of difficulty with a small production ready app, and the incidental work My favorite story about this is that one year I found that I had left my keys in the front door and gone inside. I made it my top priority to learn to not do this. I programmed by phone to play a voice reminder when i connected to wifi after getting home. Sometimes I'd get up at 3AM in a panic and run to check if i left them there. After a few months of this, I did the same exact thing at work. I never did find a way to gain that skill to a totally reliable degree, I just used lanyards and Tile tracking. Non programming activities are almost 100% things like that. Stuff where you have nothing to rely on but your own brain and body, and if you hit a wall and find yourself unable to improve it takes months to make small gains. Unless you're born with a natural talent for learning simple patterns reliably... that's where a lot of of the real challenge of life is. You can't completely program by trial and error, but you can program 10% by trial and error and 90% by actually getting it right. There's no requirement for consistency. Minor mistakes are just 10 minute delays, so if you make 3 or 4 typos a day and have to wait for a compile to spot them, you can still be an above average programmer. If you mess up making change that often(Which you probably will, unless you can reliably count to 5 every time in a fast environment), you'll be fired. If you mess up that often while driving or as a pharmacist, people will probably literally die.

eternityforest 5y ago

I've been trying to get better at guitar on and off for more than a decade, and almost all my jobs have had lots of incidental noncode work. Even learning a simple 4 chord campfires song is on a level of difficulty with a small production ready app, and the incidental work My favorite story about this is that one year I found that I had left my keys in the front door and gone inside. I made it my top priority to learn to not do this. I programmed by phone to play a voice reminder when i connected to wifi after getting home. Sometimes I'd get up at 3AM in a panic and run to check if i left them there. After a few months of this, I did the same exact thing at work. I never did find a way to gain that skill to a totally reliable degree, I just used lanyards and Tile tracking. Non programming activities are almost 100% things like that. Stuff where you have nothing to rely on but your own brain and body, and if you hit a wall and find yourself unable to improve it takes months to make small gains. Unless you're born with a natural talent for learning simple patterns reliably... that's where a lot of of the real challenge of life is. You can't completely program by trial and error, but you can program 10% by trial and error and 90% by actually getting it right. There's no requirement for consistency. Minor mistakes are just 10 minute delays, so if you make 3 or 4 typos a day and have to wait for a compile to spot them, you can still be an above average programmer. If you mess up making change that often(Which you probably will, unless you can reliably count to 5 every time in a fast environment), you'll be fired. If you mess up that often while driving or as a pharmacist, people will probably literally die.