There are limits. You cited some very obvious ones.
I have no idea why you think that you are among the "catastrophically limited" as I will call them.
You presumably can program a computer based on your comment history. This puts you firmly in the "not really limited by IQ" camp. You may never be a Terrance Tao of John von Neumann, but every other level of achievement is probably available to you.
Even your own self knowledge of skills puts you above most people I work with. When it comes to overall competency, knowing that you aren't very good at programming puts you above many programmers I know.
Just browsing through your comment history it really seems more like you lack direction for getting better.
You didn't even answer someone's direct question toward you, a question that can really help you focus and find the direction you need to improve: "What are you working on now?"
Assuming that you don't have an answer for that question: I think I found your problem.
> You didn't even answer someone's direct question toward you, a question that can really help you focus and find the direction you need to improve: "What are you working on now?"
I didn't see it.
My day job leaves me pretty drained. Aside from that, I've been learning more about web-app programming. I allegedly do embedded and kernel work now for a large network hardware vendor so I realized a while ago I need to spread my wings so to speak.
It's mostly commoditized work where I am as well as throughout industry. The glory days of being a branch maintainer are over but there are still device drivers to be made for custom hardware, but a lot of consumer hardware is covered.
But it's mostly patch slavery. You ever wonder why old android phones don't get newer versions of android on them? One reason is that maintaining device drivers across kernel patches is a serious problem. I know of a product that is still using the 2.6.10 kernel because they have changed so much code they can't port it. iPhone doesn't have this problem since there are only, what? Five of them at any time? I guess they could but that's too much effort (slightly above 'breaking a sweat') so OEMs won't do it.
Doing anything with an embedded system always takes a long time. Even moving, adding or changing a single file into a packaged file where a bootable system lives can take a good 20-30 minutes depending on how much has to be rebuilt and how crappy the build system is (always). The deadlines are always short and immediate, too.
My job is mostly herding patches with an antiquated versioning system that never makes any sense, trying to herd machines to duplicate a 1:10,000 bug. Stuff I could have done when I was in school. I think I made a mistake agreeing to work here.
I have no idea why you think that you are among the "catastrophically limited" as I will call them.
You presumably can program a computer based on your comment history. This puts you firmly in the "not really limited by IQ" camp. You may never be a Terrance Tao of John von Neumann, but every other level of achievement is probably available to you.
Even your own self knowledge of skills puts you above most people I work with. When it comes to overall competency, knowing that you aren't very good at programming puts you above many programmers I know.
Just browsing through your comment history it really seems more like you lack direction for getting better.
You didn't even answer someone's direct question toward you, a question that can really help you focus and find the direction you need to improve: "What are you working on now?"
Assuming that you don't have an answer for that question: I think I found your problem.