Learning is really hard and I think we forget that. But all the old tips still work: regularly, grit, mentorship, and practice.
Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?
161–170 of 326 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?
#162This sounds like burnout to me. I am in my mid-40s and used to have spells like this, but no more. I needed some kind of large change, back then, to get myself sorted out, but this could be pretty destructive because if I waited too long, the change I'd need wouldn't really be conducive to staying on whatever project I was on. The key to not having to deal with this problem anymore, for me, was starting to proactivel…
Burnout has become such a catch-all term as to be effectively meaningless by now. In our professional lives, we are used to set quantified KPIs in a SMART way, and I wonder, why is it that our expectations are so comparatively low in our personal lives?
Measuring for the sake of measuring isn't useful. Burnout may have become a catch-all term but it isn't meaningless, it means that the person is currently fatigued and action is required. It matters that the root cause is identified, it could be a health issue, an environmental issue or more probably a combination of factors. The KPIs you set as I see are arbitrarily chosen, not sure what you are measuring or why and can't even say that the goals are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-sensitive).
Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Getting fed up with all the stupid technology grind is not necessarily burnout though. One could call it wisdom or experience too.
Notice the fast decline in the last 20 years? Even active X was less crappy than the most well-polished actual react project, and active X was crap. Even java applets did more and in an easier way than modern frameworks and JS shit. One simple page, with login, logout, some search, and navigation nowadays require a few plugins, router, state management, lib for requests, lib to handle cookies, lib for JWT, etc...
Rails does 95% of this out of the box. Companies need to understand how much their poor technology decisions cost them...
Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?
#164You didn’t mention much about your personal life. Your professional life sounds successful, maybe you’re looking for fulfillment somewhere else?
Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?
#165I know exactly what you mean. As a counter point to the many "burnout answers" here which I completely agree with by the way. It could also be an example of "neuroplasticity" (hear me out). I'm 40 and been coding like it feels forever, I find it "relatively easy" to learn new frameworks or languages. What is much harder are new paradigms; example OOP vs functional. The last few months I've started to learn Clojure. M…
I am almost 30 and attempting to learn Clojure was to me like swimming through mud. It is definitely not just you.
I feel like the longer you've been steeped in OOP the harder it is to get over the hump.
Clojure also has a lot of bells and whistles that aren't really FP but add to what you have to learn.
For anyone wanting to learn FP, I'd recommend trying a more pure FP language like Scheme first.
Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?
#166i'd guess: - burnout - world stress - aging (you getting dumber) the burnout happens to everyone. whether you end up killing yourself, or taking a few months off, or switching careers completely or just internally like going to product, or getting fired/pushed out just depends on all the usual stuff - how stubborn are you? do you listen to friends? do you have friends? do you have any sane friends? and/or family? do…
> aging makes you dumber in the computing sense at least, and also because brain fog creeps in more quickly on a standard garbage western diet. saying this true thing got zuck some pushback ten years ago precisely because it was true, and it's more true today. As a big tech worker I find it insane that so much focused intellectual effort of my colleagues is poured into creating "metoo" competitor products and optimiz…
Is aging really a problem? On the individual level it is but as a whole the world population has exploded in the past century. Would we have enough resources for everybody if the life expectancy will increase to say 100 years?
Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?
#167I have the same problem and my take on the learning problem is: caring about something is an important part of learning. I remember also that I had a lot if patience for things years ago, but somehow I don't really have that any more. Partly because I think / feel some things are more complicated than they should be. I don't care about all the tiny caveats anymore. But also because of what I think is the burnout part, which is the feeling that it's never going to stop, there will always be something else to start over from scratch.
Is there a solution? Maybe focusing on acquiring knowledge that has a more lasting value. There was a post recently about finding work as a more niche developer. Maybe a break to refocus which is what I am doing, and maybe starting something completely new.
Good luck.
Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Getting fed up with all the stupid technology grind is not necessarily burnout though. One could call it wisdom or experience too.
Yeah always switching tools basically resets your experience to zero, so you have to do the same mistakes over and over, no wonder it's hard to stay motivated. And the "senior" jobs have zero power, so you can't stop people from making mistakes, and trying to "influence" just makes the experience even more exhausting and frustrating when people have no reason to listen to you. I wish there was real senior roles you c…
> I wish there was real senior roles you could grow into where your experience is actually valued, and you would gain certain power to make decisions
In my experience, the only way of getting some decision power is moving into management. Even team lead roles don't count and don't give you any ownership over the product direction.
In big tech engineers are generally trusted more, but still product ownership is dedicated to management.
Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any example of a smart KPI ?
Some examples of directly measurable KPIs: 1. Mood diary 2. Time spent on social media, negative 3. Hours of sleep 4. Steps walked, number of repetitions in exercise, calories burnt 5. Psychometric tests (help measure mental clarity) https://openpsychometrics.org/ 6. N-back: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0220... 7. Active vocabulary test to measure available crystallized intelligence 8. Biom…
So what are your goals?
1 - Wake up happy each day?
2 - Do not use social media?
3 - Sleep 8 hours per day?
4 - Walk 3000 steps per day?
5 - I fail to see how a personality test can measure mental clarity? Even if they aren't useless constructs. Thought "core self-evalutions" if taken regularly can be a good indicator of issue.
6 - Not sure what are you measuring. Work memory?
7 - "Available crystallized intelligence". Isn't this an oxymoron?
8 - Only if our bodies didn't show signs of aging.
Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Notice the fast decline in the last 20 years? Even active X was less crappy than the most well-polished actual react project, and active X was crap. Even java applets did more and in an easier way than modern frameworks and JS shit. One simple page, with login, logout, some search, and navigation nowadays require a few plugins, router, state management, lib for requests, lib to handle cookies, lib for JWT, etc...
Rails does 95% of this out of the box. Companies need to understand how much their poor technology decisions cost them...
It's the developers not companies that make this decision. Out of boredom or trying to get promotion. I'm just so tired of seeing something that could have been one static html page but was built with NextJS+lambdas+terraform and a hundred more buzzwords.