I know a number of other blind people who have done it. If I think about it I think I could come up with at least 10, though apart from myself I don't think I know anyone where I could point a random unknown off the internet at them.
I started programming at 12. I didn't release my first project until 20 or 21 or something like that.
Much of your difficulty--much of what college teaches you--is that you're probably not learning in an organized way. Project-based learning doesn't scale well, where you decide you're doing a project and damn that project is going to happen. Being frustrated isn't really compatible with learning, and setting your goal as something specific that you can't do right now is a great way to just be frustrated instead of getting anything out of it. I attribute much of my success to having come at it from a different perspective, where the primary motivating factor was hey aren't computers neat I wonder what makes them go, and then one day I found a project and did it. And it sucked. We don't talk about camlorn_audio. But camlorn_audio was my "and now the pieces fit" a-hah moment where years of interest payed off and I saw how it fit together. After that big projects stopped being frightening.
When you do college you spend a year or two writing very tiny programs that do very boring things. You'll spend an entire semester covering just if statements, loops, and functions. Programming is sort of engineering. There's no instant gratification at the beginning, and chasing instant gratification at the beginning is often harmful. The thing that college does that's useful is it imposes a fixed structure and guides your learning down productive paths. Yeah the classes are nice, but really what's useful is that there's a place to ask questions and the homework/syllabus etc is always saying "now go here next" or "you need this first".
You're probably freaking about these timelines. But you've got to remember: the average programmer doesn't program before college, and goes and learns it in 4 years. It took me from 12 to 20 or so because until like 19 I was doing high school and stuff and a few hours on the weekend is never going to really do it for something so complicated as coding, because by the time you really get started you're out of time for a week or whatever. If you sit down and do it intensively a few years to be Amazon-level competent is reasonable. You probably won't get into Amazon because there's 99 Amazon junior level engineers who all interviewed for your position and they're going to just basically randomly pick one; but go to a good college and you come out of it with that kind of knowledge.
Some sighted people--at least 1 of my coworkers, but i think 2--did the even faster path of coding bootcamp. Those work if you find a reputable one and can get someone from not knowing much to junior-level resume in 3-4 months. But they're expensive and very far from an ideal environment for a blind developer.
In so much as I was lucky, I was privileged enough to have a family who could support me through college. Beyond that, yes, talent plays some role. Whether or not everyone can learn programming is an open debate, I come down weakly on the side of they can't. But a lot of that is more to do with, I guess being inspired by it? Some people see a keyboard and know that music is going to be their thing; some people see a computer and just start tearing it apart and finding out what's inside and etc. Half of programming is art, in a really hard to describe way. at least, at the level I'm at where it's not "implement this class with these 5 functions that do exactly this stuff" anymore. If you're not inspired you can definitely force it, but you'll never be as good as the person who it spoke to.
But as to how I stack up? Hard to tell, except that I've got at least 2 coworkers who make me look like a newbie. I think that currently my primary advantage is that I'm interested in things. I learn bits of math and algorithms and such just because I get curious and have an hour to kill, so I go look up how a thing works. Then I forget most of it, but a little bit stays around and suddenly 6 months later it proves useful that I knew about b-trees or this weird C++ feature or whatever. Now imagine that over 10 or 15 years and it gets really impressive fast. Combine that with having the experience necessary to work on large codebases and you get to throw words like full-stack engineer around.
Blindness jobs go one of two ways. It's either something average paying minimum wage or less. Or it's something super high paying like programmer. I think there's some blind lawyers, some of the top Randolph Sheppard spots make 6 or 7 figures, and my brother's business may very well take off in a couple years and do the same for him (also blind; he's doing dumpster rentals in Florida with a friend, and even 5 trucks aren't enough. They just have to pay back their loans). But high paying is always going to take time and work. I'm where I am because it's been the last 10 years of my life plus high school hobby. I didn't get here by winning some sort of programmer lottery. I could have been much less lucky. "I can't go to college and don't have enough discipline to learn what I need without it","I don't have a roof over my head", there's lots of ways to be unlucky enough that you can't pull it off. Being able to dedicate a few years of your life to just accumulating knowledge and skill in anything you care to name is privilege of a sort, But it's not as bleak as you think and there are lots of ways to work your way up--especially if you're disabled, because let's be honest, people love to give disabled people scholarship money and stuff like that. And if you can't sit in a room and learn on your own? Well, neither can 90% of humanity, "this is my room and I will learn x and it will take a year of intense work" *is* very hard, which is another thing college helps with.
I think this just circles back to you not having particularly realistic timelines. You must learn how to think about something that's going to take years if you want to be a functional adult. You must find strategies to make yourself do things when nothing and no one else is pushing you. I don't see your problem as not being able to program. I see your problem as you defeating yourself because every time you bring up stuff it's pretty clear that you aren't thinking in adult mode yet. That's fine, but don't make the mistake of flailing around hoping that you'll land on something. You won't. I'm not saying do programming. If you don't want to program, don't. But for the things you say you want, you'll have to figure out what you are going to stick with, then make yourself stick with it. Programmig isn't a bad one, because even if you did turn out to be a lame coder you'll still have a job. But seriously, most people decide they want to be a programmer professionally before they even touch a programming language, then they go make that happen. And for most, it involves 8-10 hour days 5 days a week of learning for a few years, or less learning plus a job to make ends meet, or whatever. But, so does every other field where you can have a career with a retirement as opposed to a job where you're an interchangeable cog.
And yes. I am saying "this thing will take as long as all of high school". Most big life things that adults do take way longer than I think you think they do; just moving to Seattle was a month. Not planning it or the prep or anything like that, just the physical process of packing stuff up on one side, unpacking it on the other, finding the apartment, learning the local area enough to be left alone. I effectively had infinite money for the move because I'd saved up for it over a long time, but it still took 6 months total if you count the planning and scheduling when people would be available and all the things like that. This is a *small* adult project. I could have probably done it faster if it was me and the clothes on my back and nothing else and also there had been someone at the far side to help, I guess. But I don't think I have a single life goal at the moment that will be completed in under a year.
This is already quite long and rambling, so I'll just finish with this. Work is a small tech company that's been around for something like 5 years. The company is nonetheless thinking about the next 2 or so at all times. The bigger guys--the Amazon and Google of the world? They've got 5 and 10 year plans. Apple currently has a rough idea what's going to happen in 2023 or 2024, probably down to the product. They're probably already working on it as we speak. This is just how the world is.
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