Ask HN: Please help a frustrated Mid-Career (?) Developer!

"I would say it is most likely your job" -> I would agree so. Quit your damn that makes you feel miserable. But please find an offer before doing that! Money is still the factor to survive here.

I hope this article of mine may inspire you a little bit: http://programmingzen.com/2010/07/04/the-pursuit-of-excellen...

You may be experiencing a mild case of burnout. Career capabilities and recognition often undulate based on many factors. Even when you think you're doing everything right, it may be harder to do what you used to be able to do easily. I think that's a natural part of being human. Over the long haul, though, you will continue on an upward trajectory--assuming you continue to absorb new information and practice new skills.

If it really is burnout, there are many resources for how to approach that. An important part, though, is taking a break. Surfing the Net doesn't help. You need time away. You'll know you're at least partway through it when you begin itching to try something new.

Like many here, I went though similar periods in my career. You do get through it and you can definitely become a better developer over time, despite age. Assuming you like what you're doing and you want to improve, then the question is, "what to do?"

Decide on something new that you want to learn. A new language, development environment, operating system, tool set, or whatever. Then pick a problem and work on it. Do it at home in your spare time, so there is no pressure and no expectations. You may not notice any immediate benefit, but you will be growing and improving. This is what makes the difference long term.

Best of luck.

I feel with you, man.

Unfortunately I cannot offer words of advice, I'm in the same mood and a similar position right now (and it starts to influence my private life a lot, which sucks. Explain to your SO this kind of "I'm feeling that I don't accomplish anything so we're fighting regularly, sorry").

Story's, as I said, similar, but with some key differences: I'm senior in title and in practice, but not in payment. My job's in a niche (OCR/DMS) as well, where basically people just jump between competitors if anything bothers them. I don't want to follow this practice. I might leave, but this inbred culture leads to lots of problems.

Coworkers are mostly converts from VB times and stopped caring about self education after they were forced to learn C# 1.1 (it still works. Nvm that 4 is out). I lobby for a (company provided, I use git personally) version control system for 5 years. The company handles projects in the 5-6 digits range and didn't manage to support this request for the most basic of tools yet.

To add insult to injury we're divided into two divisions, one is doing projects for the customer, one is developing the platform. The latter is elite and you won't get a job there. I'm sure they don't even earn much more, but they do the interesting thing. Design new features, research new possibilities. We (as I said, I'm "senior", but still) are just code monkeys.

Sorry for hijacking the thread, but this crushes me, right now. I'm seriously unable to get up, unable even to turn on any machine. There's so much I want to learn and do, but the mere thought of my day job currently stuns me. I constantly find me wandering off, I even think the Net is boring and I've seen it all by now.

(Queue the "Quit the job" responses.. Currently searching for better alternatives, but I've a family to support - and maybe I just abuse that as an excuse to hide my fear for something new).

Long post, in huge parts offtopic - sorry for that. Let me finish with "Yes, you're not alone". And the best of luck to you, this is for me the writers block in programming - and it sucks.

Ah, another eager, frustrated dev with 5 years of experience. As much as I can relate to your experience and mindset, I gotta tell you that I'm happy to not be alone.

I have a very simple advice that I got from someone far back, do one thing that will make you feel that you accomplished something. It could be anything, an android/iphone app, a usable web app or a game (in HTML5 may be?) or just patches to your favorite open source project.

The joy of building something which people use is unprecedented. It helped me a lot and I'm pretty confident it will help you too!