Do you have a lot of savings? If so, maybe your brain is telling you that your work is worthless to you because the imaginary number in your bank account is as big as needs to bem
Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?
141–150 of 326 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?
#142I know exactly what you mean. As a counter point to the many "burnout answers" here which I completely agree with by the way. It could also be an example of "neuroplasticity" (hear me out). I'm 40 and been coding like it feels forever, I find it "relatively easy" to learn new frameworks or languages. What is much harder are new paradigms; example OOP vs functional. The last few months I've started to learn Clojure. M…
In addition, it can also because the more experienced we get, the more we forget about the initial struggle we had to overcome to become experienced. When we develop expertise, we go deeper and deeper, each new learning experience reinforce our previous knowledge. But when we have to operate a paradigm shift, we don't go deeper, it's a lateral movement. We start back at the beginning. For some people it's the other w…
I don't remember forgetting things as soon as I learned them, when I was a kid. I grew knowledge quite rapidly. Now I can re read the same thing every week and re "learn" it.
Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?
#143This sounds like burnout to me. I am in my mid-40s and used to have spells like this, but no more. I needed some kind of large change, back then, to get myself sorted out, but this could be pretty destructive because if I waited too long, the change I'd need wouldn't really be conducive to staying on whatever project I was on. The key to not having to deal with this problem anymore, for me, was starting to proactivel…
Getting fed up with all the stupid technology grind is not necessarily burnout though. One could call it wisdom or experience too.
I do think this is true - if you don't see the advantages of learning a new tool then you won't feel motivation or energy to do so - but I can also understand that it has to be done because of career reasons.
I mean if you were all in on e.g. Backbone.js or Dojo ten+ years ago, you're kinda running behind now and it'll get harder and harder to find a gratifying job.
I can see it happening for Vue vs React as well.
Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?
#144Your problem is very simple: you are working on bullshit. Across your entire description of your situation you never once mentioned what it is you are actually working on but called out the income you hit and frameworks you are playing with. I humbly submit that your problem is that you have lost the plot. Hate to break it to you chief but the libraries and frameworks and techniques you use to work are not the point.…
This is something that I wondered too.
Are you excited about the problem that your software and company are focused on improving?
Do you connect with the users whose lives are going to improve when they use your solutions?
Are you empowered to talk to your users and figure out how to solve their problems?
Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?
#145A few years ago I just felt tired at the thought of learning another fad language. I ended up getting an MBA and switching into procurement. Now I just code on personal projects and it's fun again.
The MBA route not a fad language in itself?
Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?
#146Down in the commments [1], OP has said they had COVID earlier this year. There's a strong possibility that the symptom OP is experiencing is "brain fog" due to post-viral syndrome. As a PSA: People are recommending exercise in the comments. If you are experiencing symptoms like OP's, do not start vigorous exercise unless you're sure that post-viral syndrome is not the cause. If you have post-viral syndrome, return to…
I suffer from Post Exertional Malaise but from before Covid. Though Covid has made it worse. Really a horrible predicament because the more you try, the more you get punished. Currently thinking about taking a break from running and lifting which is incredibly hard because well, i'm a white collar worker that's already too sedentary. If you or others have tips to get out of the cycle of crashes please share your tips…
This might not be relevant to you, but a lot of runners/cyclists exercise at 'tempo' - an intensity higher than necessary which mostly generates more fatigue without much benefit.
So, if you need to drop the pace/intensity of your running to recover better, it's probably still worthwhile. More info here: https://www.trainingpeaks.com/blog/zone-2-training-for-endur...
Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?
#147It’s weird I’ve probably been “burned out” for 10 years but I’ve never had the option to not to put in 100%, if not every day, by the end of every week.
When I get up and don’t feel like working I just start working until I’m having fun and the hours start flying by.
I hate what I’m doing most days, but, it has to be done. Just last month I had to, finally, really learn regular expressions, read the Scrapy docs start to finish, figure out how to scrape/merge a 1M+ document site where none the metadata for the docs live in the docs themselves, learn to use Falcon to fix a project only to find out that Falcon has some issues that make fix the project impossible, requiring me to figure out how to make a raw ASGI app.
That was just April. On top of my other work!
Over the past two years I’ve learned, in depth, Bash, Make, Helm, Kustomize, CSS, Sass, HTML, JaveScript/TypeScript, Angular, RxJS, half a dozen testing platforms, Kafka, Cassandra, color theory, Style Dictionary (design systems), and a few dozen other little things. I’ve read tens of thousands of pages of books and documentation, taken extensive notes, and written demo code as I’ve worked my way through them.
It’s been like this since 2002 and I think it’s going to continue until 2042. There’s no reward, it’s what’s expected.
It doesn’t matter how senior I am, how many people I manage, or what my title is. I’m 38 and I feel like a junior dev with 22 years of experience. I don’t know if this level of flexibility is required to be a good developer, but, I’ve never worked on a successful project where it wasn’t.
At night I watch videos on CSS to keep up, read books about tech we may need to adopt in the future, read about changes to Kubernetes/TypeScript/Angular/Django, do UX+product design for the next version for our app, and read resumes.
For me learning new things is something that I have to do to move forward and get paid. It’s an investment that has a huge opportunity cost associated with it.
You’re getting paid multiple six-figures to learn new stuff? Sounds great. If you don’t like what you’re doing, why not quit and take a few weeks or months off to figure out what you want.
Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?
#148So this may not apply to your case in specific, but hey, lots of people read these posts. There's probably at least a handful of people helped by each of the responses in this thread, so maybe mine will help too.
So my first major period of work-malaise was ended by switching jobs. I decided if I didn't find my job fulfilling and interesting enough to work on, I would go out and find a job that I could be excited about.
It helped; everything felt new, and if I wasn't super productive right off the jump, well, I was learning a lot of new things and no one expected me to be productive.
The next time I got into a work-funk, where it felt like I wasn't getting anything done and I had trouble being excited about the work, I thought about changing jobs again. But my job was objectively good, I liked my coworkers, there were plenty of opportunities for exciting work, and there was nothing about it I particularly disliked. I just felt like I wasn't particularly happy, like I was spinning my wheels and not really getting anywhere in life.
So I left work well enough alone, and took a step back to look at my life and think about my identity and figure out what made me happy.
I decided I needed three things: home, community, and quests.
I am, deep down, a nester, a home-body. I need a space I feel like I belong in, that's mine and no one else's. Archimedes' "a place to stand". So I bought a home, committed to it, and started changing it to suit me better. Set up a private home office, a workshop, started reshaping the yard and planting an orchard. I hope to be there the rest of my life. The very idea of a place to be, forever, gives me a sort of stable comfort and happiness.
But while a part of me would love to be a hermit, I do want a sense of community, like I am connected to the people around me. So in addition to starting a family, I also do what I can to get involved. I started volunteering at a local food pantry and with the town's Rec board to put on local events; I ran for local office once. Even if I like to spend a lot of time by myself doing my own thing, it's nice to meet people, to feel like I know the people around me and they know me, at least a little.
Deep down, though, I do want a quest. I want to work on something meaningful. Something that it's worth working towards even if I never achieve it. Something that, if I gasped out "finish my work" on my deathbed, someone else would reasonably consider devoting their own life to the project as well. I haven't figured out that last part yet. Maybe it will end up being something I quit my job to do, either a job itself or a pursuit in retirement.
But in the meanwhile, formalizing my life in this way helps me take the pressure off at work. I enjoy my job, I think it's useful, and I take pride in my work from time to time, but it's ultimately just a job.
I still fall into a work-funk from time to time -- these last two years especially -- but when it happens it is no longer the existential crisis it was the first couple of times. I have other parts of my life I can work on and take pride in instead, it's not me failing at my one big thing. It makes it easier to just focus on making a little bit of incremental progress on my job every day until the malaise passes and work become fun again.
Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?
#149Your problem is very simple: you are working on bullshit. Across your entire description of your situation you never once mentioned what it is you are actually working on but called out the income you hit and frameworks you are playing with. I humbly submit that your problem is that you have lost the plot. Hate to break it to you chief but the libraries and frameworks and techniques you use to work are not the point.…
That doesn't explain why OP was able to learn and do bullshit before.
Bullshit is much easier to learn and do when you are young. I am not sure why this is, but a shift does seem to be common once you start to hit your 30's.
This is why it is much easier to recruit people in their 20's to work super hard on problems that don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. Once people get older, they don't really want to spend all week optimizing a tiny button on an Android app that no one will ever see or use, no matter how much you get paid...
Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Getting fed up with all the stupid technology grind is not necessarily burnout though. One could call it wisdom or experience too.
Notice the fast decline in the last 20 years? Even active X was less crappy than the most well-polished actual react project, and active X was crap. Even java applets did more and in an easier way than modern frameworks and JS shit. One simple page, with login, logout, some search, and navigation nowadays require a few plugins, router, state management, lib for requests, lib to handle cookies, lib for JWT, etc...
I feel like I am one of the few that switched from angular to react in 2014 and while enjoying how "simple" it was started noticing how much people liked building complexity in it.
Now I have used react at a few different sized companies, taught it to some students and completely stopped using it for personal projects. It just seems like too much added complexity for almost every situation and people just see everything as a SPA now.