Ask HN: Will I Ever Recover?

Its not too late to start again and that has nothing to do with your age. You feeling miserable is partially from confusing these things and partially still a distinct unrelated thing.

Do you have alot if debt? Are you on the verge of declaring bankruptcy? Did you read too many articles where you think your future spouse is going to look down on you for not having a high credit score and being shut out of the mortgage market for the next 7 years?

Nobody cares. It doesn't matter. Go make some money to support and maintain your lifestyle.

I can relate to that feeling.

If you wish to have a small chat send me an email (check profile) and I can share with you some things that were of help during some rough times I went through (no bullshit, real stuff for real people).

Now? I cannot even get past the first round of interviews at the vast majority of companies I interview at. I would like to say that it isn't because I cannot code, but at this point my sense of self worth in terms of programming is rock bottom. I make mistakes - sure all people do - but when coding and making mistakes or not catching bugs each instance is added to an enormous pile of ever growing pain that I place on myself: obviously this is why companies don't want me. Obviously this is why I have been making $60k on average for my entire career. Because I am not worth anything. Yes I know that making something is more than making nothing. Yet the way people throw around salary numbers on this site just makes me want to turn away from everything in despair.

To make matters worse I now work at a place that tasked me with leading a team to make fundamental changes to our product which the business is counting on to expand its sales. The employees' spoken language itself is not my native language. The entire system was rewritten with new tech - some of which I had no prior experience using. Oddly I didn't seem to have control over the technical decisions being made by the engineers on my team. When I voiced concerns or laid out criticism, someone complained (a junior with 3 months of bootcamp prior to his joining the company) and the director of engineering told me I was needed to stop harassing the team. One of those "if someone is liked it doesn't matter what they actually do" scenarios. Things didn't go well. We overshot our, I would say, ridiculously optimistic development timeline, which was originally set by the director to please the higher ups, by 50% (1 year 4 months -> 2 years 4 months). The directory threw me under the bus from my point of view.

Now I am trying to find a new workplace. This entire time I continuously ask myself if perhaps I am the problem and it destroys me.

I don't know what to say but I hope you are not mentally where I am. Hopefully you find a way out. As someone older than you I guess I can say: you have more time than I do at least.

It is tough. But if there was no risk involved in doing a startup wouldn’t every tom, dick and Harry have done it already? You put yourself through big risk for asymmetric gains, isn’t it? This pain is the risk that played out this time.

Just take a break; get onto the salary wagon for a few months; gain back your mental peace and confidence and then come back.

For me now slowly leetcoding away, what’s helping is having less and less expectations. I can’t separate the awful feeling you also have of absolutely dogging yourself and having no sense of worth. Logically I know it’s not true, though that isn’t much help. But seeing the numbers people get from leetcoding and interviewing, I know realistically I have a shot to begin rising now that I’ve conquered my debilitating issues enough, even if the self compassion isn’t there.

PS: ever thought of trying a tech interview bootcamp? Your middle job seemed miserable. And you’re talking about pretty low income. https://Coachable.dev and a distant second, https://Outco.io, are two such ones.

If you do think about doing the bootcamps (I’m doing one and a friend is doing the other) or leetcode grinding on your own, feel free to shoot me an email :). It’s in my bio. This whole comment is a lot more positive than how things actually are. Partially because I don’t hide who I am so I don’t want to sound as despondent and reveal too much.