Went late in life to college.
Got my first IT Dev Job at 30
Now almost five years later, I'm depressed, realizing that I can't do this. I'm a horrible dev and not the kind of "horrible" that writes blog posts about how horrible they are while they maintain several libraries and casually make tutorials on YouTube.

I'm genuinely bad.

I tried learning and improving myself. But I'm always overwhelmed and frustrated, because there are so many things I don't understand. Learning anything takes me an incredible amount of time and then it's only on a superficial level, to the point I mostly memorise patterns but never truly understand. While others go through documentions and they understand everything, I have to find articles that explain solutions and concepts with super simple examples. Without Google I would be lost.

Online or in real life, I'm just getting baffled how poorly I compare to others.

I can't sleep, it's 3 am and I have a meeting in the morning. I still wasn't fired so far, but I should be fired. I messed up in all aspects of life, but realizing your choices were all wrong is dragging me down.

I have a friend that came to that realization recently. For my friend the really hard part was that he wants to be the best of the best rockstar 10x dev.

Everyone has different speeds, complexity juggling skills, and abstract reasoning. When you find out that a personal goal isn’t reasonable, the problem isn’t with you as a person instead it is a problem with the goal. So you move the goal a bit and work on something that you will excel at. Keep doing that and you might get to where you want to go.

If you struggle I suggest that you find a development position where you can develop a customization niche. Like Outsystems, MS Dynamics, Salesforce, or etc. You can work for many years in a high demand job with a rolling learning curve for decent money.

I have a lot of respect for the people that dominate development within a product. It is a different skill but it is a very valuable one.

One thing to remember here is “you have not been fired”.

That means someone still believe in you.

Having to struggle is actually quite common and given that most of the world is still crying out for more devs its quite possible that even given your struggle, you are doing a better job than some others.

I have sometimes felt similar when it took me much more time to get a new tech working than my colleague, later it was revealed that his fast pace was because he actually never understood it at all but just copy pasted from example and got it doing what appeared to be working but at the same time exposed secret keys and opened numerous security holes.

He was not a fast learner, just ignorant.

My guess is that your slower approach probably leads to a more correct understanding when you finally do understand and given the number of bugs out there that can be just what is needed.

Even if you find that it takes time, perseverance can still be enough to in the end be the better dev if that is what you want.

But the if you really feel its not your cup of tea, start looking into options and evaluate.

Just remember, most really good developers are their own worst critics and the so called imposter syndrome is very common among devs,and not just junior.

I have felt it multiple times over my 35 year career.

So yes you should always be mindful of your doubts but do not let them consume you :)

We do very much need devs that do not believe them self to be infallible :)

Compare yourself only to yourself.

If I compare myself to someone that might work at Google or something of course I will feel bad if I compare myself to me last month I feel good.

Every Dev is on a different step of the ladder.

With that said if after years you can't do basic tasks and aren't progressing you might not be cut out for it. That's ok! I'm not cut out for a lot of things. There are loads of jobs though where you can put that understanding of how software is built forward as a massive bonus, think management, project management, agile consultants, any job that involves talking to developers or a software company.

At the end of the day it's just a job and not your soul.