Let me say right off the bat your written English is impeccable, IMO as a native English speaker. I understand it's quite possible you spent a lot of time revie

Let me say right off the bat your written English is impeccable, IMO as a native English speaker. I understand it's quite possible you spent a lot of time reviewing and revising your post... I do that too, with all of the code I feel most proud of :) I used to be pretty bad at programming. I also used to be pretty bad at walking; when I was born I couldn't even sit up straight or crawl, let alone walk! I have not always been a big fan of pair programming. In fact sometimes I feel very introverted and just down-right don't want to sit down with a coworker and go through something. But, some of my best memories from school are sitting with my OS and later RTOS partner, who was from China and spoke pretty poor English, and working through our issues into the middle of the night and beyond. And these past few weeks, I've spent hours every day with a very extroverted coworker getting our code just right (it's still not done). I mentioned offhandedly how "dealing with people is a skill, one I'm still working to develop" and he said that he thought I was good at doing it. I asked, "Really?" and he said "yes", and I replied that I really appreciated the comment and the thought. I don't think I can allay your fears, and I can't say with certainty that they are misplaced, but I believe to some (perhaps large) extent they are. But I understand them, deal with similar issues of my own, and I have a pretty successful career by my standards. If I were in your shoes, I'd try to sit (alone) and work on some of those hard coding problems. I've heard good things about the book "Cracking the Coding Interview" and I have made a couple of half-assed attempts to go through it, and lately I intend to go at it full force and see where it takes me. I'd also try to list all of the things that I've learned and how far I came from when I first started programming - I learned from the gentle introduction in C for Dummies, quickly got in over my head, and had a friend help me with pointing out all the off-by-one errors in my new fancy lightbar menu code bit that I wrote for Borland C/DOS, and my fancy console input routines. I've looked back on my journey, and taken large steps backwards due to personal issues. But I've always moved forward in the end...