The reality is that there are many different responsibilities that, confusingly, fall under the singular title of "programmer".
If you're the tech cofounder at a startup, you're probably focused on building a new product that customers love from scratch. You're going to need a very different set of skills and abilities than, say, Microsoft engineer #10000 who is maintaining some old codebase. Or even engineer #100 at Google who's trying to scale to hundreds of millions of people. Etc.
What's weird is that people hardly ever mention these differences. They just say things like, "All programmers should know advanced algorithms"... or data structures, or compilers, or UX design, etc. Even if people/companies don't say this explicitly, they say it implicitly when they quiz for specific material in interviews for jobs that don't rely on that type of material.
If you're exceptionally good at what you do, but you constantly hear that you're inadequate because you don't have this skill or that knowledge, it's easy to doubt yourself. But you shouldn't. The fact is there's nobody who knows all of this stuff, or even most of it. And there's no job that's going to ask you to do most of it (I say this as the sole tech person at a startup where I have to do sysadmin, back-end coding, front-end coding, and design single-handedly).
If you're the tech cofounder at a startup, you're probably focused on building a new product that customers love from scratch. You're going to need a very different set of skills and abilities than, say, Microsoft engineer #10000 who is maintaining some old codebase. Or even engineer #100 at Google who's trying to scale to hundreds of millions of people. Etc.
What's weird is that people hardly ever mention these differences. They just say things like, "All programmers should know advanced algorithms"... or data structures, or compilers, or UX design, etc. Even if people/companies don't say this explicitly, they say it implicitly when they quiz for specific material in interviews for jobs that don't rely on that type of material.
If you're exceptionally good at what you do, but you constantly hear that you're inadequate because you don't have this skill or that knowledge, it's easy to doubt yourself. But you shouldn't. The fact is there's nobody who knows all of this stuff, or even most of it. And there's no job that's going to ask you to do most of it (I say this as the sole tech person at a startup where I have to do sysadmin, back-end coding, front-end coding, and design single-handedly).
Just find what you love and get good at it.