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

Ask HN: How do I get over constant failure?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 126 posts

Re: Ask HN: How do I get over constant failure?

#91

Post by burnoutgal »

Terry_Roll wrote: post #83

Maybe move into sales if that is possible, very few people in sales are technical enough and let companies down, you however sound like might know enough to answer those board room sale pitches which require technical details. You can also then find out more about what the customer wants and then use that feedback to drive the technical direction of the product. By being able to code, you can randomly QA the product…

I've done field engineering and customer success in the past and enjoyed it. Going full sales is not very appealing to me.

Re: Ask HN: How do I get over constant failure?

#92

Post by legerdemain »

Terry_Roll wrote: post #83

Maybe move into sales if that is possible, very few people in sales are technical enough and let companies down, you however sound like might know enough to answer those board room sale pitches which require technical details. You can also then find out more about what the customer wants and then use that feedback to drive the technical direction of the product. By being able to code, you can randomly QA the product…

Maybe quit it with calling sales non-technical? There are many technical people working in technical sales and post-sales roles: customer advocates, sales engineers, evangelists, solutions architects, and probably lots more. So enough with your dusty cliches about sales.

Re: Ask HN: How do I get over constant failure?

#93

Post by burnoutgal »

rmk wrote: post #82

In my experience, you are in learn more or earn mode, but usually not both, when working a startup job. The early stage startups offer great learning opportunities: you get to implement the first cut of the system and learn from your (inevitable) mistakes. The focus is on building. But there is no guarantee of earnings apart from the cash paycheck that is deposited into your account every pay cycle. In such a setup,…

I think the problem for me with finishing projects is that they need to actually get used. I like iterating on prototypes and getting feedback from users, and if people are using the product I'm happy to maintain it. I've maintained a small open source project for 5 years, and I regularly respond to people's requests and add new features.

When nobody is excited about the project, I tend to cut ties. My ideal manager would be the sales/hype person who sells the project outside of the team - I've had a few of these and those projects were very successful.

Re: Ask HN: How do I get over constant failure?

#94

Post by burnoutgal »

rendall wrote: post #90
legerdemain wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh jeez, that sounds oddly familiar! Right before the pandemic I joined a large company you've heard of. My boss was mostly absent - I talked to her maybe four times during my entire stay. We were actively hiring for an intermediate lead to take the load off her. My teammates had no idea what to have me do. We operated a confusing distributed workflow that touched many teams. Changes and deploys were seen as risky, b…

> ...would have gambled on the possibility that painful, risky deploys and unclear success criteria were a pain point for everyone. That means work on metrics, tests, and the tooling for them. It means building reliable rollback and faster deploy. It means building parallel testing pipelines. Overall, when there is chaos and lack of buy-in, one possible solution is to build stuff that demonstrates usefulness without…

I've commented elsewhere, but this is a >1000 person company where deployments are owned by a dedicated team. There's a lot of technical debt involved, but my team is pretty far removed from it, and there is also necessary complexity. Dropping in and proposing a new process isn't really feasible.

Re: Ask HN: How do I get over constant failure?

#95

Post by burnoutgal »

lazyant wrote: post #52
burnoutgal wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the "constant failure" comes from comparing myself to all my peers who have been successful, gotten rich, been promoted, written books, etc. I don't expect to be the best of the best, but obviously some people are thriving at these places. Why am I failing?

Don't compare yourself to (selected, "successful") other people, compare yourself with the other possible selfs in different multiverses, how many of those for ex didn't take any risks and are in a worse position? Also, this is more for maybe a professional therapist that for me but it looks to me that your definition of "failure" is unhealthy or too hard on yourself? sorry for the assumption but you are probably wor…

I have a therapist, but sometimes it can be difficult to talk through these things with someone who doesn't know the field or the ground truth.

My big stressor is that I have hit the jackpot, and where do I go from here? So many people I know have settled into a comfortable groove, but work is by far the biggest stressor in my life, it's ruining my health, and I don't really have a path out. Continually churning applying for new jobs or dropping out of tech altogether don't seem very appealing.

Re: Ask HN: How do I get over constant failure?

#96

Post by jaw »

It sounds like you've been able to consistently land dev jobs, produce working software (it's not your responsibility to ensure the thing you've been asked to build is commercially viable), and build a good reputation (you mention good feedback and promotions), plus you've made a ton of money (most people make way less money than software engineers, and the average software engineer has not gotten a lucrative stock windfall). I think you've been very successful :)

> It's been a couple months and I have achieved nothing.

At my first software job it was said that a new hire typically wouldn't be a net positive for the team until they'd been there a year. You wouldn't necessarily have even been given a real task in the first two months, let alone gotten it shipped. Big companies have bureaucracy and gatekeeping (for good and bad reasons) and operate on timescales of months or years. By design, a new person can't unilaterally be productive. It's possible that investing the time to empower you to be productive just doesn't seem urgent to them right now - dealing with the fallout of a manager leaving may be much higher priority. You're on the payroll, they know you'll be around for them to utilize when they need you...

> If I can't work in the tech industry it would completely upend my entire life.

Based on what you've said, this fear sounds very unlikely to come about. Even if this company is dysfunctional and you need to move on, you have a history of being able to get tech jobs, and it sounds like you've made a positive impression on many coworkers in the past, so I imagine they'd vouch for you. And there's a ton of demand for developers right now, and a wide variety of companies to choose from!

Re: Ask HN: How do I get over constant failure?

#97

Post by luckyscs »

ravenstine wrote: post #43
cardosof wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to get downvoted to minus infinity but let me say this: consider also less techy firms. Or, companies that do have technology but aren't tech. I have some friends having a blast working with agriculture, there's lots of technology involved, but it's as far away from the stereotypical startup culture as you can get.

I think we overestimate the unpopularity of opinions auch as yours and the person you are responding to. Tons of HN users work for BigBoringCo after experiencing the typical startup and realizing they can't and shouldn't handle thr volatility anymore, and tons of developers work for non-techy firms because that's more problems can be solved. Most of my best times as a software engineer was when I worked at non-techy…

My favorite tech job was when I intered for a fire department doing fire mitigation inspections and ended up building them and appointment scheduling system in my spare time, as well as put together a geomapped report of the programs mitigation efforts to present to the county.

Re: Ask HN: How do I get over constant failure?

#98

Post by agumonkey »

akamaka wrote: post #66
burnoutgal wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried this - I taught myself Rust and Scala, built several prototypes, it was all kind of satisfying for a while until I came back to the fact that none of it translates to job security. I can sit in a corner by myself and build things nobody uses, but it's not going to keep me employed.

That’s interesting. Sounds like you’re a solid developer, but that your company doesn’t put much effort into making its employees feel secure. This suggestion might be a bit out of left field, but reading The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts has helped me a lot with this problem.

Even trying to be a hotshot, something i often do naturally, I believe comes from anxiety of joining a new group; a way to justify, ensure my place in it.

Re: Ask HN: How do I get over constant failure?

#99

Post by legerdemain »

burnoutgal wrote: post #94
rendall wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...would have gambled on the possibility that painful, risky deploys and unclear success criteria were a pain point for everyone. That means work on metrics, tests, and the tooling for them. It means building reliable rollback and faster deploy. It means building parallel testing pipelines. Overall, when there is chaos and lack of buy-in, one possible solution is to build stuff that demonstrates usefulness without…

I've commented elsewhere, but this is a >1000 person company where deployments are owned by a dedicated team. There's a lot of technical debt involved, but my team is pretty far removed from it, and there is also necessary complexity. Dropping in and proposing a new process isn't really feasible.

I'll just come out and ask: is this literally Palantir?

Re: Ask HN: How do I get over constant failure?

#100

Post by throwaway-blue2 »

burnoutgal wrote: post #95
lazyant wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't compare yourself to (selected, "successful") other people, compare yourself with the other possible selfs in different multiverses, how many of those for ex didn't take any risks and are in a worse position? Also, this is more for maybe a professional therapist that for me but it looks to me that your definition of "failure" is unhealthy or too hard on yourself? sorry for the assumption but you are probably wor…

I have a therapist, but sometimes it can be difficult to talk through these things with someone who doesn't know the field or the ground truth. My big stressor is that I have hit the jackpot, and where do I go from here? So many people I know have settled into a comfortable groove, but work is by far the biggest stressor in my life, it's ruining my health, and I don't really have a path out. Continually churning appl…

Similar to another comment - it sounds like you’ve made good money, you’ve landed tech jobs several times, and you’ve got good feedback from your peers - that is successful, you should take some time to take pride in what you have achieved so far.

I think there’s 2 things for you to think about. Firstly, comparing yourself to everyone else you will always find people who have done better in some area than you, that’s no failure on your part, that is the reality that every person exists in. It’s hard sometimes to appreciate yourself, I certainly have bouts of this.

Secondly, when you’re working in an organisation, you’re not solely responsible for making some project succeed, shipping some feature or whatever it is. If there are processes making progress very difficult, that’s not your fault. It’s easy to internally create all this pressure on yourself to meet your own standards, but sometimes you’re thrown into a situation where external factors out of your control prevent you from meeting what you yourself deem acceptable performance - that’s not on you. You can raise the issues that are blocking you, you can suggest ideas for improvements, but in a company, most of the time you cannot fix these things alone. I have found that my stress increases when I don’t understand what it is that is preventing me from performing, and when I put it all on myself to fix. Identifying the issues and absolving myself of the responsibility to fix all of them have been the best things I’ve done for my work stress levels.

Post reply on HN