I have periods of ups and downs and intense doubts as a person.
Ask HN: As a programmer do you have ups and downs and periods of intense doubt?
41–50 of 63 posts
Re: Ask HN: As a programmer do you have ups and downs and periods of intense doubt?
#42Am not a programmer but I think I am in that phase myself. Especially also being an African, I tend to think the adoption of technology in our markets is quite slow & the effort needed to implement a tech based product takes more time & a lot of marketing to just kick off. I have created a company that wants to digitize all forms of analog data & do offline archival. But then the doubts has kicked in. Will I crack the market? Most importantly, how will I crack it. It eats me up even more knowing that I have no competition whatsoever. Its now my full time job & I feel stuck. I think of pivoting but that will be just another project left undone so I have to keep pushing on.
Re: Ask HN: As a programmer do you have ups and downs and periods of intense doubt?
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> From my previous experiences one man show is very difficult. Especially if you dream big and have high goals (e.g. monetization, startup idea etc.). It's been my experience as well. Pretty sad to recognize the limits to what you can accomplish alone. Sad but necessary.
True, but I think it force us to focus and put limits in time and features. A solution can be to outsource : hire contractors to make all that is not your core project (ex design, content...). Yes, as a dev you can do everything, but not with limited ressources (your time and money are precious!)
Especially time is most valuable resource. As you said outsourcing is solution. Almost all areas are so developed that is not in power of one man to be an expert in all of them.
When results are desired and there are deadlines, i cant afford wasting of time with trail-and-error approach for example with gui design. Even its interesting area.
This is also called opportunity cost. Famous footbal player will not cut his lawn even he knows how to do it (besides he dont wanna do it). He focus on more important things. And this important things helps him earn more money and outsource other things. And (sadly) money is root of everything.
After few years i have found out that dealing with issues during side projects increase my value in my proffesional life. I have experiences what can go wrong, where can be possible bottlenecks, which issues are just warnings (almost nobody is interested in) and which one are errors and have impact to business. This helps me a lot to take better jobs and contracts.
Re: Ask HN: As a programmer do you have ups and downs and periods of intense doubt?
#44I spent about a year alone building a fairly complex server tool. Some days were great. Many were hard. I'm 40 now, and have enough experience with myself and software that I got it done and enjoyed almost all of it. Here some things that worked for me. * Kept the initial push of code very simple, and doing something useful from day one. The software needed to always "work" so that I could be adding features, tuning…
> The worst two weeks for me were a terrible bug-hunting expedition that ended with filing a compiler bug.
That actually sounds like incredible fun to me. :) And you likely did end up with useful code after the experience, just not in the project you intended to work on. ;)
Re: Ask HN: As a programmer do you have ups and downs and periods of intense doubt?
#45"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." - Bertrand Russell
Read about the Dunning Kruger effect and relax.
Re: Ask HN: As a programmer do you have ups and downs and periods of intense doubt?
#46I've got all sorts of ideas with various levels of work done on them in the dustbin. Sometimes you get an idea that you think will make money, but you're not really that passionate about it, and find that it takes a lot of effort to get back into it. That could be a sign that it's not worth pursuing and let it die. But if you do keep coming back to the idea, even with some time in between, it's probably worth sticking it out until the end. At any given time I've got about 15 ideas that I have varying amount of energy for, and 10 that I started briefly but never went back to, but usually only one main project per medium (not everything I do is programming) that I keep going back to over and over again.
Those are the ones you really need to make sure get out there. Then finish those and see what's next you want to go back to. It's taken me over 8 years to finish a novel, for example, but I already know what the second novel I finish is likely to be, because I keep coming back to it and putting a little work into it here and there.
Sometimes those ideas you got super excited about for a week and abandoned will be incorporated into future ideas too, and they'll all meld together into some super idea. I've got something like that percolating that I noticed is basically combining three of my past ideas into something simultaneously simpler and more powerful.
But I'm not doing it for a business, just for fun. If I did it for business, I'd have to focus a lot more, and have a lot less fun, I imagine.
Re: Ask HN: As a programmer do you have ups and downs and periods of intense doubt?
#47Sometimes that fear can be a good thing. It means you are trying to do things just outside of your comfort zone, which can help you grow. If you are always 100% confident that you can do something, then that means you may be at a plateau in your personal growth. Run towards the fear.
Some specific advice that might be useful...
Bring in other people to your projects. It helps vet the idea, gives you someone to lean on if you're having an off day, and it is a huge intangible 'good' to know that you're in it with someone else. I'm reminded of a GK Chesterton quote, "It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one."
Second, bite off as small a chunk as you can at a time. Not just in terms of features, but break your work down into one or two hour tasks. Sometimes this is not possible, but more often that not it is. Write all of these small tasks down. As you finish one, cross it off. At the end of an 8 hr day of work, even if you have no user-facing features to show for it, you will have a sense of accomplishment over these 4-8 tasks that you were able to finish. This can help act as a positive motivator to push forward.
Good luck!
Re: Ask HN: As a programmer do you have ups and downs and periods of intense doubt?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> From my previous experiences one man show is very difficult. Especially if you dream big and have high goals (e.g. monetization, startup idea etc.). It's been my experience as well. Pretty sad to recognize the limits to what you can accomplish alone. Sad but necessary.
True, but I think it force us to focus and put limits in time and features. A solution can be to outsource : hire contractors to make all that is not your core project (ex design, content...). Yes, as a dev you can do everything, but not with limited ressources (your time and money are precious!)
Sometimes you can't outsource. If it's a small personal project and you can't pay anyone to work for you. It it doesn't smell like a hot startup, nobody's going to be attracted by equity either.
Re: Ask HN: As a programmer do you have ups and downs and periods of intense doubt?
#49I spent about a year alone building a fairly complex server tool. Some days were great. Many were hard. I'm 40 now, and have enough experience with myself and software that I got it done and enjoyed almost all of it. Here some things that worked for me. * Kept the initial push of code very simple, and doing something useful from day one. The software needed to always "work" so that I could be adding features, tuning…
> The worst two weeks for me were a terrible bug-hunting expedition that ended with filing a compiler bug. That actually sounds like incredible fun to me. :) And you likely did end up with useful code after the experience, just not in the project you intended to work on. ;)
haha. Or just a reminder not to use go tip.
It was satisfying to fix, very satisfying. But probably not the two week build up.
Re: Ask HN: As a programmer do you have ups and downs and periods of intense doubt?
#50All the time. I feel like crippling anxiety, insecurity, mental anguish and deep self loathing is par for the course in this career. When it gets to the point where I literally hate myself for being alive, I start to consider dropping everything attached to a circuitboard and cleaning floors for a living instead. This happens about 2-3 times a week.
It takes a lot of cojones to acknowledge those feelings (even to oneself), let alone share them with others.
So (despite the triteness of the slogan), thanks for doing that.