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 si

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.