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Ask HN: What do you struggle with?

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21–30 of 553 posts

Re: Ask HN: What do you struggle with?

#21
Overambitiousness. Or more precisely, actually getting stuff finished because of overambitiousness.

I really need to remember the idea of a minimum viable product and not get sidetracked with 'wouldn't it be cool if' type features that slow everything down.

Re: Ask HN: What do you struggle with?

#24

I struggle with scaling up my business. I have been working from home for the past 10 years and I have websites that generate ok money ($100K/y). My struggle is I just can't get myself to hire my first full time employee. I tried it many years ago but after facing the headache of hiring, dealing with attrition, training, etc, it took away all my focus from work. I feel management is a skill I just don't have. Also wo…

Get a partner who is just as invested as you (deferred equity over a number of years works well) and lean on them for some of the management functions.

Re: Ask HN: What do you struggle with?

#25

Depression. I have a lot of social anxiety and I feel really isolated, my best friend passed two years ago which didn't make anything better. Isolation makes depression into a feedback loop, and it feels like you keep sinking deeper and deeper.

Have you tried yoga? It's kinda like Apple, but instead of just working, it just solves (almost) everything. If you can find a good studio and hang on to it, that might help. Also, I'd recommend Vinyasa, or Ashtanga, or any dynamic variant. Not slow yoga, I feel like it doesn't help letting go as much. Hang in there!

Re: Ask HN: What do you struggle with?

#26
Long-term: dating/relationships. I'm very outgoing, but I have love shyness or something like that. I basically don't date. I find the entire thing extremely stressful and unbearable. I've always been alone.

Short-term: not much! I recently dropped everything and moved to the other side of the globe (Japan) on a student visa. I'm studying a very interesting language and culture and making friends with people from all over the world that are on average 15 years my junior. I'm also brushing up on technology, learning new programming languages and stacks. This is a sort of sabbatical for me, so I plan on picking up creative hobbies (drawing, making music) as time permits.

Re: Ask HN: What do you struggle with?

#27
post #7

I struggle with feeling like I never know enough. The more I learn the more it feels there is to know. As a result even as I learn more and more, I feel dumber and dumber :D

Dunning-Kruger.

I think that's the opposite of Dunning-Kruger.

The Dunning-Kruger effect describes people who don't know very much, but think they know a lot.

Re: Ask HN: What do you struggle with?

#28
OCD.

Lately I've been struggling with what they call inflated responsibility. I typically ruminate that something I said, something I did, or something I did not say or do will have some large negative effect on some or something and that I will be responsible for it. It's immensely stressful to worry about.

I'm seeing a therapist to work on my issues.

Re: Ask HN: What do you struggle with?

#29
post #5

More recent jobs I have been told I am not coding quick enough, and being grilled because something took 2X or 3X that they expected done in X. Not sure if I am slow, have slowed down, or remained the same speed and now expectations are a lot faster, or it is more transparent with time logging in JIRA being a big thing now. What I do different to other coders I have noticed when doing code reviews is I do a lot less…

Relevant https://www.monkeyuser.com/assets/images/2018/79-focus.png

I also like a similar version: https://heeris.id.au/trinkets/ProgrammerInterrupted.png

Re: Ask HN: What do you struggle with?

#30
I make I try to get at least one Git commit every day, but my job is pretty draining, so that doesn't happen. And sometimes all my projects get blocked on hard stuff that I don't have the energy to solve.

For all I know, I might look alright on paper. I've co-authored a paper in a respectable journal, written a few Rails apps, a few desktop apps, and a crappy interpreter for an old language - which doesn't really use any compiler theory stuff except a simple hand-rolled lexer/parser, so that's probably a strike against me more than anything else. I'd delete it except I want there to be something that lets me step through programs in this thing so when my Project Euler problem attempts in this language fail I can figure out why, which is why I wrote it in the first place. But I keep revising my goals downward. I've been thinking I ought to go get an A+ cert and become an IT grunt - the pay would be a little better than what I'm doing now, I'd be able to afford the occasional steak...

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