Assuming you have some money saved up, go on amazon, buy some books, anything you really like that isn't tech; philosophy, history, literature, music theory, whatever makes you tick. Find a job far away (figuratively) from a computer screen. Manual labor, crewing on someone's yacht, working at a ranch, being a ski instructor, (preferably not something like fast food). But take some time off. Write code for what you want to write code for. Sounds like you could put your head up from under the surface of the tech industry and get a breath of fresh air, this field can be an echo chamber and its easy to start drowning in it. It sounds like you see the forest for the trees and a break could give you some time to reflect on that.
Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?
21–30 of 134 posts
Re: Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?
#22Try diving deeper into real CS, there is the entire world of things that can revive your passion. If you mainly were focused on building CRUD apps and websites it's not surprising to get bored and burned out. Get out of your typical routines and try finding challenging stuff to do. Some ideas:
* Figure out how to write AI for games. A simple example would be, how to write a bot that finds shortest path out of labyrinth.
* Check out graphics programming
* Try to see if low-level programming is for you: kernel level, GPU, OS
* Check out infosec industry, there should be a lot of fun there: malware analysis, penetration testing, etc
* Machine Learning: tons of coolest stuff. predicting, classifying, reinforcement learning, neural networks. Check out Kaggle machine learning competitions.
* Checkout competitive programming sites. My personal favorite is hackerrank.com, but other popular ones are topcoder.com, codechef.com, codeforces.com. Try doing challenges for a couple of weeks you may find that you learnt as much as you previously learned in a year. Also through it you may get interested in particular algorithms and fields.
* Distributed programming, system engineering. How to build systems at scale? How to process tons of data in parallel.
If you don't seek for the new challenging things to do that could improve you, then you will find boredom and burn out in any field.
Re: Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?
#23Is there still anything you'd like to see built? I mean, if you were on a desert island, would you even want a computer? What would you do with it?
I'd sooner build a boat and sail away.
The two happiest days in a boat owner's life are the day he/she buys his boat and the day he/she sells it. Trust me, you don't want to build a boat. But I get the sentiment.
Re: Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?
#24I've experienced this earlier and try not to read too much into it. Keep building things the way you want to build it and ignore people trying to introduce politics (trying to please as many people as possible and shitting on existing and tried solutions). Ignore it! Channel it into something positive, create something. That's all I care about, solving real world problems and creating my take on it. March forward comrade.
Re: Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?
#25Why do you care what is going on in the industry? Why don't you focus on you, and enjoy software development on a personal level? I personally don't think you are seeing things correctly.
Learn what you want to, work on what you want to. Tackle the difficult problems. We still have very difficult problems in this industry. I suspect you are not challenging yourself enough and that's why you are getting bored.
Re: Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?
#26I've found that it's usually not the task at hand but the people you have to work with
A lot of programmers as generally assholes for whatever reason
Re: Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?
#27I got to the same point a few years back.. so I quit my job, sold all my stuff and drove a $6000 Jeep Wrangler from Alaska to Argentina for 2 years. [1]
I've just been back at a desk for 4 years, but am again burnt out so now I quit again, and I'm driving around Africa for 2 years starting in a couple of months.
Get out and live, I say!
[1] theroadchoseme.com
Re: Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?
#28I feel exactly the same way, and yet I don't feel the same way. I've been programming since I was 12. Professionally for about 16 years. I'm 37.
Life is bigger than your job or your immediate interests. Take a break. Travel. Challenge yourself. Break out of the circle that you don't like and find something else, even if it's just for a short while. That's what I usually do. At the very least you'll find something else to rant about, and maybe eventually realize that things could be much worse.
Re: Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?
#29You've not burned out, you've matured as a programmer. You can see all the crap for what it is so now try and make a difference...
Champion the cause of code that's legible - and that doesn't mean covering it in syntactic sugar. Legible code makes it damn obvious what it does and how it does it. Sometime find the "power take off" for a tractor ... that's what you're trying to do.
You can also champion the cause of not fixing that which is broken. There is also fun to be had demonstrating the technical debt is real debt and it does need to be paid back.
Much fun introducing peer review, too.
Get yourself, your team or whatever to sit next to your damn customer. Have them look at what you're doing at least once a day so they can say "oh, no, not like that" before it turns into a $100k fuckup.
So, yeah, you've just got through to the next level. It's not the software that's the challenge, it's the people.
Re: Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?
#30Technology isn't an end, just a mean to accomplish some things. If you focus your life on tech because that's where the money is, it should be no surprise that it's boring you. Find something you really want in life, maybe it has nothing to do with tech.