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

31–40 of 202 posts

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

#31

Post by jeffmould »

I can somewhat relate. Although I was able to trace the cause of my novelty addiction to a particular job. I then built that into a career path for a bit (doing short term, very targeting consulting jobs. Most were subcontracts to larger projects) and oddly got tired of it and forced myself back to focusing on one thing. I do still find myself reverting back to always wanting to do new things. Usually I will devote a few hours a week just to doing something new or learning something new. Downtime between projects is used for learning as well. I make this a habit to feed my addiction to new things.

My first job in a R&D/Testing type role was working for an application service provider. I was responsible for evaluating new hardware from vendors before it would be released to our data centers. I had to not only test the hardware, but ensure the applications worked correctly, performance test, and document configurations. Each week was something new and I had great relationships with vendors such as Compaq, HP, Dell, and Microsoft that would constantly send demo hardware/software just so I could play. I left the job to take a position at Microsoft, and looking back regret it. I stayed at Microsoft for a little over a year for the same reason as you, I got bored. That is when I switched to just doing consulting.

But, if that doesn't work, I would look for positions in R&D for a company (that is the type of position where I traced my problem back to). Depending on the company/position you actually get paid to find and work with new "toys". Also, look at testing type positions.

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

#33

Post by kevinr »

Have you considered a career in information/computer security?

I have some of the same tendencies, and infosec has given me all the entertainment I can handle and then some.

(There are other fields adjacent to software engineering which you might prefer as well---consulting, operations.)

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

#34

Post by brandonmenc »

> Is there a cure from novelty-seeking behavior?

Start a project, commit to the technologies beforehand, and deviate under no circumstances.

Facebook was built with PHP. AdWords was built with MySQL. Instagram was built with Django. GitHub was built with Rails. Stack Overflow was built with Microsoft technologies.

It seems there are few instances where a "boring" tech stack prevents the product from being built. If the idea is good enough, you'll make it work with what's on hand.

If you can commit to a stack, yet still can't finish a project, you may have to face some uncomfortable possibilities: that your ideas are no good, or that you're simply not a very good programmer.

Attention span is a requirement for being a decent programmer.

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

#35

Post by coldtea »

>I realised that the only thing that motivates me in software engineering is learning new things

One could question if you really "learn" those new things, instead of merely skimming over them, since you don't seem to stay with them long enough to really get into the details.

Maybe what you're afraid is really learning? Which involves comitting to a stack, and also getting to the parts where a project approaches being finished, which is where the real and important issues emerge.

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

#36

Post by mindcrime »

I can relate. I get bored really quickly as well, and I am one of those people who usually kicks ass at a new job for about the first year, and then starts to tail off after that because I'm bored out of my mind.

I've found two things that seem to help:

1. Start a startup. I started Fogbeam at least in part because it gives me an outlet to pursue things that are interesting to me, and a place to work on really cool new cutting edge stuff, even if my day-job doesn't. Back at my last "boring enterprise software development" job, I found that coming home and working on Fogbeam stuff helped keep me sane. (Note: in my scenario the startup is just a side project, but if you have savings or feel like raising money, I suppose you could just jump into it full time. YMMV)

2. Become a consultant. I started consulting for Mammoth Data back in 2012, and I've found that this consulting lifestyle is quite a bit more interesting than the typical "sit at the same desk, working on the same product, with the same people" routine. I'm constantly working on new and different things... every project is different, and since we focus on "Big Data", analytics, BI, etc., there's a non-stop stream of new technologies being invented / released that we have to try and keep up with. In the past year or two I've worked with Neo4J, Hadoop, Spark, Storm, Kafka, Knox, HBase, Phoenix, Couchbase, EMR, Google's Cloud stuff, Impala, Kinesis, Pentaho, and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. The downside, of course, is the need to travel a lot at times (which is another of those "good and bad" things) and the feeling you get sometimes that you're drowning in all this new stuff. Example: In the past month or two, 3 different major companies have released distributed Machine Learning platforms (Google, IBM and Microsoft). And every day or two there's some new Hadoop / Big Data related sub-project hitting the Apache Incubator. And as a consultant, I feel a need to be on top of all of that stuff.. which, unfortunately, it's pretty much impossible to be.

Another side-note: You may find that signing up for and taking lots of MOOC's on Coursera, Udacity, EdX, etc. may serve as an outlet for your neophilia, and might let you stay more focused at work. Just treat coming home and working on a cool new class on Machine Learning or Synthetic Biology or $WHATEVER as a reward for putting in a good day of hard, focused work at the day-job.

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

#38

Post by mindcrime »

atemerev wrote: post #13
_m8fo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Sounds like you're freelancing on your own? Maybe consider going to work as a consultant for a firm where somebody else manages the sales and admin stuff, and you can just do the technical side? That's the way I work, FWIW. The downside is that I don't have total control over what I'm working on, and I probably make less money than what I could make doing it on my own. But I don't have to worry about sales, book-keeping, etc. (Of course, I have to do that stuff for my side-project company, but that's a separate story).
Post reply on HN