Yes, I feel exactly the same. I ride the rollercoaster of depression and the impostor syndrome is definitely there. Most of what I do is mired in incidental com

Yes, I feel exactly the same. I ride the rollercoaster of depression and the impostor syndrome is definitely there. Most of what I do is mired in incidental complexities that have little to do with the task at hand. Programming in itself is simple because it's a closed system that you can learn and master. What makes it seem hard is having to manage the logistics of it with the crude tools we have (checking logs instead of having a nice graphical control panel for instance). I also feel like all the problems I have to solve are ultimately the same, even if in wildly different areas, because it's all about how do I put these function calls in the right order to get my result. I can never shake the feeling that there could be a generic-programming genetic algorithm that tries a bunch of permutations of function calls and the way the results are the arguments for the next calls, given a list of functions I know are necessary for the solution. I always feel like I am still having to do computer things in my head, while sitting in front of the computer.