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Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?

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Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?

#201

Post by FractalHQ »

conradfr wrote: post #191
leetrout wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I am one of the few that switched from angular to react in 2014 and while enjoying how "simple" it was started noticing how much people liked building complexity in it. Now I have used react at a few different sized companies, taught it to some students and completely stopped using it for personal projects. It just seems like too much added complexity for almost every situation and people just see everyth…

That's why I like Vue. It's mix of the two with a synchronized ecosystem for the core libs and a simple API. Vue 3 kinda tanked all that though.

What do you think of Svelte? I haven’t used Vue since I discovered Svelte but I’m always curious about peoples perspectives and try to keep my finger on the pulse. The new Nuxt looks pretty awesome! Love the api design. I’m hoping Sveltekit steals a few ideas from it before 1.0.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?

#203

Post by sinenomine »

vmception wrote: post #196
tehmillhouse wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's definitely something to the neuroplasticity thing. Learning does take longer as we age, that's just a biological fact. > Man what a frustrating journey it has been ! I keep telling myself I'm a seasoned senior dev... This right here, that's something you're misunderstanding. Learning something new is supposed to be uncomfortable. To learn most effectively, you want to shape your mental behavior to min…

I think neuroplasticity is bullshit and is a convenient scapegoat for a shared experience many people have. No different than phrenology explanations for differences in cognitive behaviors, an explanation that is now deprecated. The most clear example is the incentives. Change the incentives and people learn quickly. Find anybody that rationalizes their technophobia with their age, and look at the difference between…

I find it genuinely disheartening when a very real physical decay is masked with plastic social kayfabe. Maybe I'm not western enough and lack proper social grace.

Instead of striving to find real ways to help our seniors avoid a tragic fate of illness and decay, you whip up several white lies. All the more tragic, given your apparent intelligence. Can you imagine, how many individuals have to receive sub-par IQs through no fault of their own to "roll" just one of you?

We are all in the same boat, after all. Might as well help each other.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?

#204

Post by gilbetron »

The others are focusing on some things that it could be including demotivation, burnout, disinterest in learning something that is just a different version of what you already know, etc. Those are all definite possibilities.

However, another thing that could be happening is that as you become more senior, you start being used to knowing things really deeply, and so when you learn something new two things happen. First, you are comparing your knowledge of the new thing to your knowledge of the old thing. When starting out, you don't know anything, so when you learn a bit of React, for instance, it seems like you are learning a lot. But if you know React deeply and learn a bit of Vue, it feels like you have a long way to go.

Secondly, you want to know things deeply, and so you question and analyze all the knowledge that is going into your brain. When starting out, you are happy to just repeat knowledge without understanding it deeply. An example I use is when I started at my current company, there was an intern that started at the same time. We both would be told, "here is a script to put things into the staging environment". She would take it and use it and move on with life. I would question what it exactly did, why it did it that way, what were the failure modes, and the history of how it go there rather than other options. She was much more productive to start, but fast forward 18 months, and I have a much deeper understanding about our technology and codebase and approaches, and am able to drive long term decisions and fix deeper issues.

Learning as a senior is exhausting :)

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?

#205

Post by Dudeman112 »

sinenomine wrote: post #103
fleb wrote: post #16

This 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?

>In our professional lives, we are used to set quantified KPIs in a SMART way

In your opinion do you think that's been working well for the industry?

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?

#206

Post by r-zip »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #94
rawoke083600 wrote: post #35

I 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…

> The last few months I've started to learn Clojure. Man what a frustrating journey it has been ! I think calling this neuroplasticity is excessive. Clojure isn't trivial. For a young person who doesn't know how to code it will also take significant time. Knowing how to code means you have to re-evaluate/re-categorize a set of root assumptions which is objectively hard and there is not really a curriculum fine-tuned…

I agree with you--let me throw in my experience. In my first dev job, I was 26 (not super young, but also not old). We used Clojure, but I had only programmed C, Python, and Matlab up to that point. It took me a month or two to really grok it, mostly just learning ~40 hours/week.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?

#207

Post by vmception »

sinenomine wrote: post #203
vmception wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think neuroplasticity is bullshit and is a convenient scapegoat for a shared experience many people have. No different than phrenology explanations for differences in cognitive behaviors, an explanation that is now deprecated. The most clear example is the incentives. Change the incentives and people learn quickly. Find anybody that rationalizes their technophobia with their age, and look at the difference between…

I find it genuinely disheartening when a very real physical decay is masked with plastic social kayfabe . Maybe I'm not western enough and lack proper social grace. Instead of striving to find real ways to help our seniors avoid a tragic fate of illness and decay, you whip up several white lies. All the more tragic, given your apparent intelligence. Can you imagine, how many individuals have to receive sub-par IQs th…

> Instead of striving to find real ways to help our seniors avoid a tragic fate of illness and decay, you whip up several white lies. All the more tragic, given your apparent intelligence.

am I supposed to be defensive here, seems too easy when I really have no idea what you're talking about. You think I made white lies, ok. what I detailed is a valid experience that co-exists with other forms of physical decay.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?

#208

Post by sinenomine »

lazarus101 wrote: post #166
sinenomine wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

One look at the population pyramids of the developed world [1] is enough to conclude that a systemic shift is underway, and the old social order, at least in its current form, is doomed to be upended.

The logic of dependency ratio is hard, you can't circumvent it unless you really do deliver widespread automation of labor, including social service labor. And even then you have obvious concerns of EROEI and "Labor Returned On Labor Invested" - your society-scale park of machinery will require substantial infrastructure and qualified staff just to run it. It's 2022 and despite many attempts, widespread social robotics still hasn't appeared, and robotics startups of our recent history died all the same.

> Would we have enough resources for everybody if the life expectancy will increase to say 100 years?

I think yes, given falling birthrates, continuing emphasis on sustainability and doing more with less. Consider also how much resources are spent on re-educating every new individual, and how much of an economic win is extending the active professional life of an average individual, given it amounts to mere 2-3 decades as of now.

I'd say on the contrary, for our societies to avoid collapse we need to either up or fertility rates, or extend the active part of our lifespan.

1. https://www.populationpyramid.net/western-europe/2019/

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?

#209

Post by seydor »

I 'm not sure why people call it burnout. People adapt and get bored, learning new languages is exciting the first 3 times, a horrible chore at 11. Any intellectually demanding job will lead to mental fatigue, but it s not like people are burnt, we do our best when we do exciting stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?

#210

Post by throw1234651234 »

I am your age and don't make nearly as much money as you do, but I am in a senior role. I find the reasons for the seeming inability to learn to be these:

1. I have no time. I am completely capped out with meetings, certification expectations, etc. 2. I am expected to perform at a high level immediately, which takes away from the ability to learn. 3. I take on stories the rest of the team doesn't want. Like right now I am digging through Auth0's library code because they don't support a feature we need.

All in all, I think the solution is to back off and start with easier task. Oh, and sleep enough and make sure your diet is fine.

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