I have dyscalculia. Do you think it's possible for me to pursue a career involving code, or should I give up?

Question

Dyscalculia is my only (diagnosed, at least) learning disability, but it's fairly severe, I struggle sometimes with basic addition and subtraction. However, it only severely affects my arithmetic skills - other forms of maths are okay for me if I try a little harder than most.

I say "a career involving code" because I don't really want to set a target of a specific field if I'm unsure if I'm even capable of doing very well at coding at all, but I'm most interested in AI, machine learning, and the like.

Answer 1

With coding, knowing how math works is usually more important than doing the calculations yourself because the programs will do the actual calculations. I'm not sure which one you have trouble with.

Some coding releated jobs such as web development don't really require much math at all.

The ones that you mentioned, AI and machine learning are more math heavy I believe.

Answer 2

That's really interesting! Mind if I pick your brain a bit?

So in HTML, to figure out the width of a box you have to know (a) the width of the content—say, the text; (b) the width of the border of the box; (c) some padding between the content and the border; (d) some margin outside of the border.

Which means the total width of your box is: `a + 2b + 2c + 2d`.

If I only showed you this image: http://html.net/tutorials/css/figure008.gif
and asked you to figure out the width of the black rectangle, could you come up with the formula yourself, or verify that what I wrote is true?

If you can you are golden. Like if you are just bad at adding numbers then use a calculator, god knows I double check 5+7 sometimes. It shouldn't be a problem at all if you get the ideas. Leave the gruntwork to the machines.