Ask HN: As a developer, what are your biggest pain points?

Having to explain technical things/difficulties to non-technical people.

>You have to let them know why you are doing it.

Absolutely, yes. When I managed a tech support team in an open plan office, the indicator for "do not disturb" was either standard headphones or ear defenders. That was part of the new starter initiation, so everyone knows from day 1.

compare with Unix shell commands I learned in 1980, that I still use every day

Absolutely agree. The amount of technologies that one has to be familiar with just to get an interview is ridiculous. And then once you are hired you are still doing maintenance on the 10 year old ASP website. Also: 3. off by 1 errors.

Your comment is a day old already, but I'll reply anyway.

Can you elaborate what you mean with anxiety and distractedness?

I've switched from developer to product owner, and then back to developer after two years. The problems I'm having with my role came back instantly.

I'm anxious that I'm not good enough, taking too long for everything, not smart enough to understand complex existing code that I have to modify.

This anxiety alone keeps me from properly focusing on the job at hand. And the more time pressure there is, the worse my focus becomes, because I feel I have no time to understand everything properly and have to hurry, which only leads to a worse solution and more problems in the end.

Add to this the 'normal' distractions of working in an open plan office.

Listening to other people's experiences sometimes helps. Yesterday I watched Sandi Metz' talk "All the little things", and also reading about Clean Code in general, and about imposter syndrome sometimes help me think that it's not really my fault and that I'm at least an average developer.

Then again, I'm also prone to asking too much of myself and being overly ambitious, also with sports, nutrition, life in general, so I'm not really content with being an average developer.

But being 40 already, I feel like it's already too late to become really good at anything, when I have 20-year-old colleagues who are already presumably better than me, despite me having 10 years experience in various roles and companies.

And then there's so many things that I could improve in, systems architecture, frameworks, backend, frontend, databases, OOP principles, learning new languages etc, that I don't even know where to start and the whole endeavour seems futile already.

That's when I ponder quitting the dev role again and switching into something else, but how often can I do that before my CV looks like patchwork and nobody will hire me because they don't really know what role I'm actually qualified for?

That's my struggle, anyway. Having worked as a developer for quite some time, but not really feeling like one.