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

Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 521 posts

Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around

#161

Post by samrocksc »

Companies that use leetcode in interviews are rarely worth the effort or risk/reward to interview for. Getting into a like FAANG dev team is doable by anyone memorising that stuff, but it's rarely worth it.

Try out talking to a recruiter, and find a job with a senior that can help guide your career. Your self-esteem is pretty low, and a good senior and mentor can guide you out of that rut, and into being a senior yourself in no time with the amount of work you say you're putting in.

Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around

#162

Post by scaramanga »

coastflow wrote: post #45
WheelsAtLarge wrote: post #27

I can tell you that if I were in your case I would quit the 70 to 90 hrs grind. It's not worth the long term damage to your mental health. If you haven't, you will soon burnout. Money is not everything. The only reason I would work those hours is if I was doing it to advance my interests not someone else's. Before you do anything seek a career counselor that will help you plan your next 1,3,5,10 years. You'll need to…

>"I would quit the 70 to 90 hrs grind. It's not worth the long term damage to your mental health. If you haven't, you will soon burnout. Money is not everything. The only reason I would work those hours is if I was doing it to advance my interests not someone else's." Absolutely. To reinforce this: any money secured by working longer hours will very likely be spent on treatments for the physical and psychological hea…

Big time... these employers are not going to be there for you when you are a frazzled, empty shell, so this is a bad deal. Only in that sense can OP be considered a "loser", in terms of the fact that the bargain that has been struck here is appallingly bad.

In all other regards, I am confident that OP is a wonderful chap.

Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around

#163

Post by kolleykibber »

This thread is an amazing distillation of hard earned advice. For me. Do something physically challenging. Do a long distance walk like the Camino de Santiago, climb a mountain, do some cycle sportives. Travel, read philosophy and physics, watch Mike judge films. Live as cheaply as you can. Your brain is telling you it's time to change things.

Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around

#164

Post by jacek »

I can relate to quite a lot to what you said. First of all, you need rest. I am not talking about weeks, but rather months. I once was in similar situation and it took almost 5 months to start working little, another month to start working full time.

I would also recommend therapy. I felt very directionless too, and therapy improved my life significantly. In that time I really gained courage to change things in my life and go my way.

My final piece of advice is to go freelance. A while ago everyone wanted to work in a startup. But the startup life has made me very cynical. It turned out you give so much to a company that is not yours, and owners will really exploit everything you've got while trying to hustle you out of the ownership. In the end you work for their futures and money, not yourself. The only people that were truly happy working for startups I have seen were freelancers. They were paid fairly, had no unpaid overtime and did not have to participate in that shitshow.

I am also bad at networking, but there are ways around it. It looks like you have a lot of experience and a broad skillset. There are freelancer agencies that can help. Usually they screen potential freelancers, have a interview and then they find projects for you (also I am getting best paying jobs through agencies). The main advantage of freelancing for me is that I am paid for every minute I work and not more. As a result, the employers don't abuse your time, because they have to pay for it, and you can control you time and work-life balance way better. Also I earn much more than I used to.

I wish you all the best and would love to hear from you in the future. Let us know how you are doing.

EDIT: Also, you are not a loser, you are human. Everyone in your position would feel the same, everyone learns through experience. I am very happy for you that you are asking these questions at 28. It took me 4 more years to do it myself.

Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around

#165

Post by cracrecry »

Stop using labels to define yourself: Loser, Loner. If you do, at least use positive ones: Winner, extrovert and fake it until you make it.

But I would never use labels at all. I have won several times, but it came after lots of work, effort and sacrifice, before winning I lost other things.

You need to have something in your life that it more important than money or status. A mission that is not about you, but about others. In the past people had religion, country, family. We are social animals, we care more about our group than about our isolated selves.

Learn about your limitations, the more you work diminishing returns kick in.

How do you try to work smart when you are using your time as an exchange of money? The people I know that work the smartest are the people that don't have time and HAVE TO work smarter: They have kids, or a music band or love traveling the world so they need to work efficiently or else they will have to abandon their kids or music band, something unacceptable.

Working smart is a skill, and you need to allocate time for learning it. If all you do is direct work you won't be able to learn indirect work. You need to sharpen your saw. Exercise, sleep and eat well.

Put a limit on your working time and enforce it: Never work over 40 hours. Use the rest for learning, improving yourself, making friends, making love to women, the usual things that make people feel happy.

In order to work much smarter I recommend you learn about making the computer help you. Learn about a very important concept in computing: Bootstrapping.

If you have not, read and write Lisp, with the "Land of Lisp" or whatever, then read Graham "On lisp", and "Structure and interpretation of computer programs". There are lectures on the Internet.

Learn about compilers: https://buildyourownlisp.com/ https://craftinginterpreters.com/

Those tools will help you make the computer do most of your work, with things like designing Domain Specific Languages. But it takes years to master and you need to allocate time for them.

Read: How to make friends and influence people. Very important, the oldest edition is the best one, as the authors' descendancy decided they knew better.

You should also learn to delegate in other people If you want to earn a lot of money it is a good idea paying someone to make it so they give you time. Things like doing the laundry could be outsourced much cheaper that it taking hours of your precious time.

I really hate the term "networking" applied to personal relationships. I make friends and lovers, I care about them and they care about me. Stop considering people just like things that will help you in your "career".

Who gives a damn about you if you only care about yourself? You want to become rich and isolated, attracting gold diggers that will bankrupt you without the skills to make genuine friends and lovers?

Putin is paying soldiers from poor places in Russia USD5000 a month to go to war and die. It is more than what they earn in an entire year. You are already way richer that most people in this world.

Start caring about others, about your customers and people around you and you will be "successful". Start caring about the value you provide and you will get money in exchange. Focusing on money, money goes away, because you focus on yourself, me me me.

I am helping you right now. I am expending my time writing this and will not receive(or expect) anything in return. There is a small probability that you will apply something I wrote and then it will be worth it, by itself. Indians called it "Karma", in Silicon Valley "paying it forward".

The people I helped in the past had surprised me and helped me a lot, but there is really pleasure in giving.

Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around

#166

Post by benreesman »

When I was 28 I had been bouncing around startups for almost a decade. I had met some smart people and worked on one or two things I was proud-ish of, but I hadn’t really learned much in years, and nothing I had done was very notable. No college degree, kind self-taught web programmer, very little CS knowledge.

The startup I was working for was going under, and I got serious about finding a job where everyone would know more than me. The prospect of unemployment/insolvency didn’t hurt my motivation!

There wasn’t leetcode then, but I hit the books in a big way, having already flunked some big name interviews over the years.

The thing is I had been picking up CS a little at a time, and that time the books were still hard but not hopeless like before.

When I actually did the next round of interviews no one was more surprised than I was that I could avoid getting completely run over in a whiteboard interview.

The thing is the crazy-hard ones are regrettably common, but they say more about the interviewer than the candidate. Leetcode questions routinely involve tricky identities that you just have to know and other stuff that is absurd to ask in 30 minutes on a whiteboard.

There are lots of interviewers at prestigious companies who ask very reasonable (“leetcode easy”) questions. People do pull out the upper-division combinatorics crap, but that’s stupid, not you.

Getting a truly challenging job didn’t fix all the problems in my life, but I learned so much, so quickly that it re-inspired me about my career in a way that never went away.

So: 28 isn’t too late, you don’t need a CMU degree, and if cast a reasonably wide net you can find an interviewer who isn’t a jerk. You’ll still need to know about some CS stuff, but not the upper-division or even graduate stuff that pops up sometimes on leetcode and in some interviews.

If you fail a whiteboard interview and you’re like “damn I should know that”, study a bit more. But if it’s some off-the-wall shit: it’s them, not you.

Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around

#167

Post by atoav »

fshr wrote: post #30
colanderman wrote: post #9

1. Take time off, like a month or more. [1] Use it to do anything other than coding. Hone a hobby, travel, volunteer, etc. No-one will care about a month or two gap on your resume. 2. You are worth more than you currently think you are. Internalize this, know this, that is key. "I am a sole developer for Mobile and Web platforms at this startup in a very small team" --> is a desirable skill in and of itself. 3. Stop…

But what if they aren't worth more (as a dev, financially) than they think they are? They could be awful, but naively put in a ton of hours. Why do we assume people are worth more? Are we trying to make them feel better by making assumptions and potentially leading them horribly astray? Most people are supremely mediocre and there are just and many horrible devs as their are great ones.

Even more reason for them to get a decent work life balance. Who do you think makes more trouble for their collegues: a hypothetical mediocre developer who is overworked, or a mediocre developer who works normal hours and has two hobbies which fulfil them?

I'd bet my money on the first producing more trouble. The latter one is not centered around coding alone, so they are more flexible.

Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around

#168

Post by lukaszkups »

My 4 cents (of course, all of them are easier to say than done - I'm aware of that but still):

1. Stop working so many hours

2. Take a break from programming, try to do something else in your free time (best if outdoors!)

3. Try to build something for your own from scratch (side-project) - doesn't need to be something marketable, but at least to solve one of your problem (e.g. automating some boring task etc.)

4. If you struggle working with coming up with your own solutions maybe then try refresh your knowledge about basics of programming? Sometimes it might help and you'll never know what "gap" you have that might become your "A-HA!" moment ;)

Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around

#169

Post by dfcowell »

ctxc wrote: post #96
dfcowell wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP didn’t state where they are from, but there are plenty of places where it is extremely hard to fire, even if an employee is consistently underperforming. Not saying that this is the case in this circumstance (I don’t know OP,) but the “you must be good because you lasted 4 years” heuristic doesn’t work that well outside of the US, or similar markets with at-will employment.

"sole dev in a startup" is key here.

I did miss the word “sole.” Good point.

Re: Ask HN: Burnt-out, directionless but want to turn it around

#170

Post by shswkna »

comvidyarthi wrote: post #120
fshr wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what if they aren't worth more (as a dev, financially) than they think they are? They could be awful, but naively put in a ton of hours. Why do we assume people are worth more? Are we trying to make them feel better by making assumptions and potentially leading them horribly astray? Most people are supremely mediocre and there are just and many horrible devs as their are great ones.

I want to point out that a person’s is not a static thing. You are not born with whatever you are “worth”. You either build your worthiness over time, or lose it. I think instead of propagating that most people are horrible devs, we should try to tell people that it’s always an acquired skill. So everyone (and I really mean everyone) can work to acquire the skills, and become a “worthy” dev.

This.

I have seen eager but untalented persons build their skills and their portfolio over a couple years. To the point that had I been told this at the beginning, I would not have believed it. In a particular case, the person - at the time a low qualified technician - embarked at 26 to become an engineer, and by 38 is one of the most sought after engineers in his field.

Self confidence and willpower are factors that can overcome innate talent to a very large degree.

Post reply on HN