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Ask HN: How do I get over constant failure?

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Re: Ask HN: How do I get over constant failure?

#51

Post by fxtentacle »

You sound like stress/self doubts are your biggest issue. There's plenty of people working in tech who are objectively not very good, but they get along winging it and pretending. Obviously, that shouldn't be your goal, but remember it as your safety net.

The secret of your high-performing people might simply be that they put in the work and spent 100+ hours reading the current codebase and, thus, they now know exactly where to change what. But they didn't start that way. They started out being unproductive and reading the source code base.

Re: Ask HN: How do I get over constant failure?

#52

Post by lazyant »

burnoutgal wrote: post #37
lazyant wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High-risk deploys and slow iterations is not on you but on engineering management. Not knowing who's responsible for reviewing your code is also not on you but on your manager, bad onboarding, bad documentation and general communication. Still you can check in the repo who's been working recently on adjacent work and reach out to them on slack/whatever and ask them. I suggest to try and get small wins (like merging t…

I think the "constant failure" comes from comparing myself to all my peers who have been successful, gotten rich, been promoted, written books, etc. I don't expect to be the best of the best, but obviously some people are thriving at these places. Why am I failing?

Don't compare yourself to (selected, "successful") other people, compare yourself with the other possible selfs in different multiverses, how many of those for ex didn't take any risks and are in a worse position?

Also, this is more for maybe a professional therapist that for me but it looks to me that your definition of "failure" is unhealthy or too hard on yourself? sorry for the assumption but you are probably working on the area you want and like (technology) and being paid well for it. That puts you in the top 90% or whatever of people in and 99.99% in the world (I know it's not consolation for feelings).

Re: Ask HN: How do I get over constant failure?

#53

Post by colanderman »

I don't have advice for you, but you're not alone. Been coding for nearly 30 years, full-time professionally for 10, in startups and bigcos. On every team I've been on, I've been the sole expert in several technologies. Yet the most productive I've ever felt professionally was as an intern; it's all been downhill from there. Haven't merged a commit now in probably 8 months. And I have very little code that's running in production anywhere.

Re: Ask HN: How do I get over constant failure?

#54

Post by awillen »

ravenstine wrote: post #43
cardosof wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to get downvoted to minus infinity but let me say this: consider also less techy firms. Or, companies that do have technology but aren't tech. I have some friends having a blast working with agriculture, there's lots of technology involved, but it's as far away from the stereotypical startup culture as you can get.

I think we overestimate the unpopularity of opinions auch as yours and the person you are responding to. Tons of HN users work for BigBoringCo after experiencing the typical startup and realizing they can't and shouldn't handle thr volatility anymore, and tons of developers work for non-techy firms because that's more problems can be solved. Most of my best times as a software engineer was when I worked at non-techy…

In my experience on HN, people here actually really love hearing/learning about businesses outside of tech, particularly those that are introducing tech... agritech, etc.

I run an ecommerce business, which is at best tech-adjacent (honestly I would say a farm using fairly advanced technology for their industry is more of a tech company than me using Shopify to sell dog treats online), and people love hearing about it.

Honestly, part of why I left enterprise software was because I found a lot of the SMB customers I worked with really inspiring. They were doing something... real/physical/tangible, and of course the ones who were looking at our software were the smart, tech-savvy types who I could relate to.

While I have very little desire to go back into enterprise software, sometimes I do get pings from recruiters hiring for companies that do stuff like agtech, and I think that working on something like that (as opposed to making software for call centers, which I have done) might be worth getting back into the working world for.

Re: Ask HN: How do I get over constant failure?

#55

Post by karmakaze »

burnoutgal wrote: post #10
vijucat wrote: post #6

Possibly unpopular advice on HN, but stop joining startups. Idiosyncratic-Culture Risk is off the charts for startups. Join more stable firms with a more "boring" but predictable culture where things get delivered every Sprint, everyone gets paid well, there is no Mountain Dew being guzzled at 8 pm in the office to meet some deadline, weekends are truly off, and your mental health actually recovers. Your dream jobs a…

My current job has > 1000 employees, it seemed from the outside like it would be sufficiently stable. It's not actually the culture you describe, it's pretty mature, good work-life balance. They don't have a great planning process but it seems insane that it is just impossible for me to onboard successfully as a result.

I onboarded at a > 1000 employee company before the pandemic. Even then I found it frustrating that it took months to have even a small a project and get a PR reviewed and merged. Coming from a small startup co culture made that a shock and wondered if I'd made a mistake. Your journey seems similar but far more challenging in having to onboard remotely. Make the most of communication channels you have, not specifically your manager or onboarding buddy, but any team or project Slack channels, etc. Take time to browse the codebase without worrying about shipping PRs. The company hired you hopefully as a long term investment that will pay off once you've onboarded so do that well, even if it doesn't have any visible artifacts. Merely asking specific questions will show that you are getting up to speed. My #1 suggestion to fix most of these things is to pair program on tasks. There's so much miscellaneous information that is useful and isn't otherwise documented. It also provides some human feedback from peers indicating that there's no problem where you imagine one to be.

Re: Ask HN: How do I get over constant failure?

#56

Post by burnoutgal »

faangiq wrote: post #50

Sounds like you hit the lottery with that one startup and got promoted to a level far above your competence. Common problem. Truly senior people and true startup people do not struggle to find projects and contribute PRs. Find a job at an appropriately junior level at a real company. (FAANG will downlevel you appropriately.) Learn some real skills then try the startup thing again in a few years if you want.

I wasn't a director or anything, I've hovered around senior/staff engineer depending on the company. Still an IC role where I expected some help onboarding and picking a first project.

Re: Ask HN: How do I get over constant failure?

#58

Post by burnoutgal »

Kletiomdm wrote: post #49

If you haven't done any pr for so long, what do you do? Do you don't work in a Team? Or aren't you building up a team or org? Either it's your position to see issues and solve them for the org or it's your job to execute. If you can't come up with things to do, but it's your job, you should search for a team or product and not for a company.

When I joined my manager had a few onboarding tasks, I did all of those, and started protoyping my first PR. It was actually a pretty meaty open-ended project and in retrospect it was sort of high-effort, low-reward. I iterated on that several times, wrote proposals, solicited feedback, but ultimately nobody really gives a shit about it, so it hasn't gotten shut down or moved forward.

At this point I've kind of accepted the project is dead but my manager is gone. I've put together a few small PRs but they're similarly just in review hell.

Re: Ask HN: How do I get over constant failure?

#59

Post by FpUser »

cardosof wrote: post #26
vijucat wrote: post #6

Possibly unpopular advice on HN, but stop joining startups. Idiosyncratic-Culture Risk is off the charts for startups. Join more stable firms with a more "boring" but predictable culture where things get delivered every Sprint, everyone gets paid well, there is no Mountain Dew being guzzled at 8 pm in the office to meet some deadline, weekends are truly off, and your mental health actually recovers. Your dream jobs a…

I'm going to get downvoted to minus infinity but let me say this: consider also less techy firms. Or, companies that do have technology but aren't tech. I have some friends having a blast working with agriculture, there's lots of technology involved, but it's as far away from the stereotypical startup culture as you can get.

>Or, companies that do have technology but aren't tech.

This is how I make money. I create products that serve real needs of real businesses / people. Bit of warning - I am not a direct employee for those businesses, I have my own company that does product design / development and contract as such. Still I get much satisfaction looking at my products doing something real

Re: Ask HN: How do I get over constant failure?

#60

Post by mch82 »

Very, very few things survive long-term. Experiments fail, projects fail, market leaders change. I know talented people who have worked long careers & never seen a product ship.

Clayton Christensen made an academic career at Harvard researching market leaders getting replaced.

The Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration reports about half of businesses fail after 5 years, https://advocacy.sba.gov/2011/10/19/what-is-the-survival-rat...

Skill plays a role in these outcomes, but so do other factors including luck & imperfect information. The top engineer at Blackberry was a rising star, until suddenly the iPhone showed up.

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