Ask HN: Underperforming, feeling stuck

One possibility is that I'm not as good as I think I am -- but I have had lots of validation. In the recent past (5 years) I've succeeded at some of the hardest interview processes in the world. I've written things that I'm proud of. I can speak as intelligently about code as any HNer.

Despite all this every time I sit down to code my brain turns to mush, somehow, and nothing gets done. I can always give my managers an intelligent explanation of why progress is so slow, but the thing is, progress is still slow. Lately I find myself making more and more beginner mistakes.

The weird thing is, I don't even feel burned out or depressed. I couldn't be happier with my current job. I'm just… stuck.

If something about this sounds familiar, feel free to offer advice. While psychological diagnoses may be right, at this point though I feel like there's something wrong in my practices.

I need some sort of professional help that doesn't exist. Someone to sit next to me all day and tell me what it is I'm doing that's burning up 8 hours a day without actually achieving anything.

1. get yourself checked out for ADD. I'm not saying this is the problem, but it's easy to check for, and if it is the problem, there are drugs that can at least temporarily make the problem just go away. Now if this is something you've never experienced until just now, it's probably not ADD. But if you've had these sorts of problems on and off forever, (I know for me, my performance falls off a cliff after I've had a job for about a year.) ADD is something to check out.

2. Try pair programming. It works really well for me.

3. Move into management. Even if your organizational skills are not great, having the knowledge of the field gives you a pretty good leg up. If you manage your own company, you can hire people specifically to take care of the things you are no good at or hate. You can get a CS student to watch you code and kick your chair when you stop for under ten bucks an hour.

Luckily I still have a reputation earned from some years ago. Plus, I interview well. People still give me jobs.

Managers don't seem to have a response here. In my experience most managers only have one bit of information devoted to programmer ability (ROCKSTAR xor SUCKS). They have alternately told me to try harder, or threatened then fired me.

I had felt like I was deceiving employers so I took a nine month break and did an artistic project. However even with a whole day to do nothing but that, I wasn't able to achieve much. I worked with a small number of people and lef that project, and it got done, but not very well, even though it was my "full time" job. Still, I felt that I had had enough of a sabbatical, and also had made some progress in psychotherapy, so I returned to the workforce, only to run into the same problems I had before. I now think the psychotherapy was not addressing the right problems -- it's more about what I do than how I feel. And it's clear my attempt at a sabbatical didn't clear up the fundamental issues.

I have friends that are able to learn programming languages on the side or take blacksmithing courses and otherwise have full and exciting lives. In other words they have reserve energy. I am so behind on just the basic requirements for my project, I feel I can't do any of this. I schedule more and more and more and more time for work and yet still nothing gets done.

As for happiness with work; I have a pattern of working with codebases that are in great need of refactoring and I am feeling a great need to stretch out and do something more original. So that is a problem.

That said, the guy who sits next to me has enough energy to actually satisfy those needs both at work (gets managers to agree to major refactorings) and also code up some great things in his spare time. Whereas I'm perenially playing catch-up and my code is ugly.

Part of me is itching to strike out on my own but if I don't have the discipline to even do halfway well at a job like this, how am I going to deal with a startup?