Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Novelty addiction is ruining my life and career. What should I do?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 202 posts

Re: Ask HN: Novelty addiction is ruining my life and career. What should I do?

#11

Post by atemerev »

tvm wrote: post #10

Such behaviour can be hardcoded for certain types of personalities and is not bad per se. You're just trying to achieve something that isn't compatible with your personality. I'd perhaps recommend doing an MBTI personality test (there's a bunch of them on the internet). This might help you to understand the mechanisms behind your behaviour and most importantly give you some hints how to make yourself useful. I recomm…

All right, let's assume I decided that software engineering career is not for me. What careers are compatible with constant novelty-seeking?

Re: Ask HN: Novelty addiction is ruining my life and career. What should I do?

#12

Post by _m8fo »

atemerev wrote: post #11
tvm wrote: post #10

Such behaviour can be hardcoded for certain types of personalities and is not bad per se. You're just trying to achieve something that isn't compatible with your personality. I'd perhaps recommend doing an MBTI personality test (there's a bunch of them on the internet). This might help you to understand the mechanisms behind your behaviour and most importantly give you some hints how to make yourself useful. I recomm…

All right, let's assume I decided that software engineering career is not for me. What careers are compatible with constant novelty-seeking?

Consulting might be a good bet.

Re: Ask HN: Novelty addiction is ruining my life and career. What should I do?

#13

Post by atemerev »

_m8fo wrote: post #12
atemerev wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All right, let's assume I decided that software engineering career is not for me. What careers are compatible with constant novelty-seeking?

Consulting might be a good bet.

I do consulting. 99% of consulting is persuading prospective clients that they need your consulting. Not that there's something wrong with it, but I am not that good at it...

Re: Ask HN: Novelty addiction is ruining my life and career. What should I do?

#14

Post by staunch »

(This is intended as just another idea to think about)

The long-term passion and commitment come after some level of success, not before.

Steve Jobs didn't dream of dedicating his life to Personal Computing. It was his early successes that fed into his self-image and a feeling that it was what he was meant to do.

Maybe you need to find the right project.

Turn your weakness into a strength by publicly launching a new project every week. A new mobile app, web site, screencast, open source project, whatever. They don't have to be good, just a bit useful. Make things that you want and try to give them away and/or sell them to other people.

There are a lot of ways to make a living as a skilled programmer. Most people have trouble finding the right kind of project, and that's mostly because they don't iterate quickly enough.

Re: Ask HN: Novelty addiction is ruining my life and career. What should I do?

#15

Post by 9935c101ab17a66 »

atemerev wrote: post #8
theWold wrote: post #6

I would second a therapist/counselor/etc. Did that during college (thanks to the couseling services my Uni provided), and it helped me just not feel too crazy. I spent a long while, and still do, thinking about what am I heading towards. I know a lot of people don't know this and there is no way I will ever know all the details to make a decision, but I prefer the 'fail to plan, plan to fail' montra. Thus I plan, but…

I can write good code in Java, Scala, Python, Perl, MATLAB, Javascript, and now learning Go. I can configure Apache, nginx, Ansible, Docker... I worked with nearly every favor of Linux, OpenSolaris/OmniOS, CoreOS, etc. I learned how to do things in big data, business intelligence, algorithmic trading. Learning new things is not a problem, this is what I enjoy. Most of them are marketable. What's killing me is inabili…

Honestly, with the skills you list, you can definitely find something that is rewarding, both intellectually and financially. You view your attraction to novel technologies as a downside, but it's kept you remarkably up to date and you probably have a much wider (though may be a little more shallow) knowledge base. Have you considered pursuing things like project management, marketing, developer support, QA, etc? Or maybe freelance? There are jobs where you can still apply your knowledge, but on smaller project.

Re: Ask HN: Novelty addiction is ruining my life and career. What should I do?

#16

Post by LifeQuestioner »

atemerev wrote: post #8
theWold wrote: post #6

I would second a therapist/counselor/etc. Did that during college (thanks to the couseling services my Uni provided), and it helped me just not feel too crazy. I spent a long while, and still do, thinking about what am I heading towards. I know a lot of people don't know this and there is no way I will ever know all the details to make a decision, but I prefer the 'fail to plan, plan to fail' montra. Thus I plan, but…

I can write good code in Java, Scala, Python, Perl, MATLAB, Javascript, and now learning Go. I can configure Apache, nginx, Ansible, Docker... I worked with nearly every favor of Linux, OpenSolaris/OmniOS, CoreOS, etc. I learned how to do things in big data, business intelligence, algorithmic trading. Learning new things is not a problem, this is what I enjoy. Most of them are marketable. What's killing me is inabili…

You sound like me, (also adhd). Jack of all trades.

So, novelty seeking, I do this: - work part-time on something i'm passionate about as it's products that help others. Research based, which brings more novelty naturally. Also, passion for me was the most important thing to keep my focus, not "interesting" as "interesting" gets boring. - spend rest of the time mostly building random side-projects that won't be finished, but I don't care, that's not the point.

Seems to be working well.

Re: Ask HN: Novelty addiction is ruining my life and career. What should I do?

#17

Post by roneesh »

You might be a good candidate to teach at a coding bootcamp.

PROS: 1. Your energy level would match the students 2. You could make sure the curriculum stays up to date, and every few years transition some large parts of the curriculum to a new language/framework. 3. You have tons of experience to draw for the many left-field questions you would get 4. The consistent new influx of students might feed that need you have for novelty

CONS: 1. Not sure if you could teach each session knowing 80-90% is the same content as the last, but you're just changing 10-20% for this batch. 2. Could you handle answering some of the same newbie questions every 3 months? 3. They would, like most jobs, want you to stick around, but this isn't a total CON, they are likely more amenable to you leaving than almost any corporate gig.

So maybe it's something to consider!

I do think you might need some more help in managing this, but in the meantime, you can always find work that fits what some part of you needs right now.

Re: Ask HN: Novelty addiction is ruining my life and career. What should I do?

#18

Post by bmdavi3 »

atemerev wrote: post #8
theWold wrote: post #6

I would second a therapist/counselor/etc. Did that during college (thanks to the couseling services my Uni provided), and it helped me just not feel too crazy. I spent a long while, and still do, thinking about what am I heading towards. I know a lot of people don't know this and there is no way I will ever know all the details to make a decision, but I prefer the 'fail to plan, plan to fail' montra. Thus I plan, but…

I can write good code in Java, Scala, Python, Perl, MATLAB, Javascript, and now learning Go. I can configure Apache, nginx, Ansible, Docker... I worked with nearly every favor of Linux, OpenSolaris/OmniOS, CoreOS, etc. I learned how to do things in big data, business intelligence, algorithmic trading. Learning new things is not a problem, this is what I enjoy. Most of them are marketable. What's killing me is inabili…

I can't say that I'm affected by this sort of thing to the same extent that you are, but the feeling of 'suddenly losing interest after gaining understanding' is easy to relate to. I have no problem keeping focus for hours trying to understand how a particular bug could possibly be happening, continuing to work after hours until I figure it out. When I'm still in that 'learning / understanding' phase, there's no effort required. I want to know what's going on here and it will bug me until I get it. And hopefully, the end solution is a couple line fix.

And very often, it is. But sometimes it ends up being the type of problem that requires a much more involved architecture change to solve correctly. It's not just a one line change, but something the whole team will have to sign off on. Which will require at _least_ 100 times the work of the usual two line fix. By this point, I already 'know' how to solve the problem, and it could be very easy to lose interest. But the error emails keep on coming. And they're easy to ignore because "they're just those weird errors we get from that 3rd party API we use so there's nothing we can do about it."

But these emails are really annoying. So I find I have to reframe the problems from understanding how to fix the issue to how to get buy in and get the fix actually deployed, and I haven't run out of these types of problems at any company I've worked at, and that works for me to keep my attention.

Re: Ask HN: Novelty addiction is ruining my life and career. What should I do?

#19

Post by hcarvalhoalves »

You like technology and learning, but you don't have an engineer mindset.

You can look for research jobs or freelance, where you can try lots of things quickly.

Alternatively, find a business partner or team that complements your skills/interests.

Re: Ask HN: Novelty addiction is ruining my life and career. What should I do?

#20

Post by funkyy »

atemerev wrote: post #11
tvm wrote: post #10

Such behaviour can be hardcoded for certain types of personalities and is not bad per se. You're just trying to achieve something that isn't compatible with your personality. I'd perhaps recommend doing an MBTI personality test (there's a bunch of them on the internet). This might help you to understand the mechanisms behind your behaviour and most importantly give you some hints how to make yourself useful. I recomm…

All right, let's assume I decided that software engineering career is not for me. What careers are compatible with constant novelty-seeking?

Open a novelty blog and write about what you love? You can make money from advertising and Amazon affiliate links. You could make a living out of it rather quickly.

Other thing - become a remote freelancer. Get in to projects that last 1-3 months. You can make good money while doing what you like.

Also the short interest period on projects is not part of your personality, but it might be a stage. I had same thing, but turned out to be good for me. I used it to my advantage - I learned everything I could. I would jump from niche to niche making money along the way. My base would be marketing, from there I could freely move to tech, programming and consulting while making money. It took a while but I grew up from it. Now I am full stack startup owner - I do everything from programming, through customer service to marketing - and it is awesome.

Post reply on HN