Reading your comment here made me feel worse about my impostor syndrome. I don't know that I have very many things that I have genuinely accomplished, which I think gets at the heart of the issue. When I do mimic accomplishing various things, this mostly comes from taking various portions of online example code, reformulating it, and doing some basic data plumbing to make it work the way I want it to. Almost everything that I have "written" looks like modified example code glued together with stackoverflow-plumbing. I have in fact built tons of projects and worked on large codebases, but I'm not certain that makes me an engineer or that any of this is a genuine accomplishment. It isn't.
At the same time, I feel stupid trying to learn how to program properly at my age. I should already know all this at this point in my career so it feels really demeaning, depressing, and embarrassing to do programming exercises. I can't get out of this middling-tier programming skillset, and I have to keep up appearances that I am not middling.
Every time I do go back and try to fix my understanding I'm caught in a loop. I get bored/upset by shuffling through the same basic intro-type work that I already know if I go back too far into intro material I already know by heart. At the same time, when I try to pick out less introductory projects/exercises I just end up spending the whole time googling for stackoverflow questions every few minutes. Getting me back into the "this project is just a string of answers I looked up" head space. The project never feels like a true accomplishment.
At the same time, I feel stupid trying to learn how to program properly at my age. I should already know all this at this point in my career so it feels really demeaning, depressing, and embarrassing to do programming exercises. I can't get out of this middling-tier programming skillset, and I have to keep up appearances that I am not middling.
Every time I do go back and try to fix my understanding I'm caught in a loop. I get bored/upset by shuffling through the same basic intro-type work that I already know if I go back too far into intro material I already know by heart. At the same time, when I try to pick out less introductory projects/exercises I just end up spending the whole time googling for stackoverflow questions every few minutes. Getting me back into the "this project is just a string of answers I looked up" head space. The project never feels like a true accomplishment.