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

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

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is literally the logic of capitalism. Your value is simply whatever value you are able to negotiate for yourself on the job market. OP is more valuable than a toilet cleaner, or a starbucks barista, less valuable than a corporate lawyer or a CEO. People naturally "compare up" rather than "compare down". Sure OP is probably in the 1% wealthiest people in the world, or top 99.9999% of those who ever lived, but rat…

> OP is more valuable than a toilet cleaner, or a starbucks barista Not to kill your point, but those two are dramatically under-valued and under-appreciated jobs in most societies around the world. Every time you use a toilet (other than the one in your home) which is hopefully clean, somebody had cleaned it recently. Imagine they hadn't. You'd have a terrible day. Every time you go grab a good Starbucks coffee. May…

I agree that our society's method for allocating value to people has fundamental flaws; chief among them is that money is the main measure of value.

Ben Franklin called money 'coined liberty'; in this day and age it is more 'coined status'. It is a scaling mechanism. Reputation only works if people know you, there are simply too many people to know, so we've replaced reputation with money.

However, in the context of this discussion thread, the word 'value' can be interpreted as "paycheck". Your and my diversions are that, diversions.

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

#222
Awesome, you have reached the low point and asked for help. That's the first step. Now you need to get your shit together and here is the roadmap that I would recommend. Focus on fixing your existence in the following order: 1. Body (sleeping, eating, exercise, spend time in the sun and outdoors) 2. Mind (reading, learning social/soft skills, discipline, journal) 3. Spirit (meditate, pray, hobby, get into flow state)

To start living a better, more fulfilling life you need to drop bad habits and acquire new better ones. You need to do it gradually, one by one, over a longer period of time. Drop one bad, gain one good. Check out book Atomic Habits.

It is important to start with the body because the quality of your thoughts and emotional stability is directly related to your nutritional intake, discipline, sleep, etc.

I read that majority of your discontent comes from work. Like may of us, you are using work (something that can think you can control) to distract yourself from other, more important aspects of your life (that are seemingly out of your control).

As an engineer, your whole life/career you are focused on computer-based logical problems. That created an imbalance because you neglected human-based emotional problems. That is why it is crucial to start developing soft skills. You can start with the book called How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Good luck on your journey and remember - If you think you can do it, or you think you cannot do it, you are right.

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

#223
I think your biggest issue is how much you're working (and not sleeping).

I'm a successful, reasonably good programmer in my 40's. In my whole life, if I didn't get enough sleep, or did too much overtime, my ability to reason and my productivity fell off a cliff. And I'm talking about, working the occasional extra day or few hours. It's the same with sleep too - if I don't have enough sleep, even for one night, the next day I'll be way, way less capable.

You have to fix this first before you'll be able to do anything else. Fatigue and lack of sleep will interfere with any attempts to improve your programming skills (LeetCode or otherwise); it will bring down your interview performance; it will hurt your self-esteem and motivation and general energy levels (and health!).

You don't necessarily need to resign. I would talk to your employer and insist that you need to return to working regular hours (40h/week maximum), and that they find people to take shifts with you for the on-call stuff.

If they don't agree to this though, I would quit. Plan your exit so you have enough savings to cover a few months off. I don't think you need to go on a big vacation or go traveling or anything like that. But what you do need is enough time to rest and recover, properly catch up on sleep (this can take a month or more!), do some exercise, maybe pick up a hobby. Then only once you feel rested, look for a new job.

The good news is you're in your 20's. Your body and mind are resilient and will recover given time. Once you're rested again, you'll find learning, improving your programming skills, or even the dreaded LeetCode will be much more doable.

Also some advice from someone in their 40's: software engineering is a very deep and broad discipline. There is so much to learn; you're just getting started. Give yourself time! (Can be difficult advice to follow when you're young). You have lots and lots of runway to learn, practice your craft, absorb knowledge from others.

I wish you the best! :)

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

#224

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…

> No-one will care about a month or two gap on your resume. On a related note, this "gap in resume" thing needs to stop being a thing at all. I don't know when it became a thing, but it feels distinctively like forcing a wage slave class to keep their head down and continue wageslaving. Why would an employer care whether I took time off to pursue other things otherwise?

trust me they care. especially in a fast moving technology space like cloud, k8s, ML. if you are hired for COBOL yes sure a gap wont matter

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

#225
I certainly wouldn't call yourself a loser, ever. You need to have some confidence in your own value. If your description of hours worked is accurate - this startup is leaning on you far too much. Here's something to realise: You HAVE to push back - if you don't fight your own corner, no-one else will and there is no limit to what a company will take from you, with no reward.

So my advice to you would be to gird your loins, and assert yourself. Ask for a pay rise, ask for another staff member to ease this workload. I think the rewards for this will be more than just financial - once you assert yourself, and discover that it can work, you make it a habit, and this can boost your life in all ways.

I wish you the best of luck

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

#226
You're obviously a critical component of your startup's continued existence. Plenty of people have addressed the issue that your work-life-balance is screwed and your employer undervalues you by a great margin (money talks). I will speak to your worth as a programmer.

You say (I paraphrase) you don't come up with your own solutions, you just plug things/ideas from other sources. Well, that is every creative endeavour for you. Every author, painter, musician and yes - programmer - does that. If you take ideas from different sources, combine them, take them to a new conclusion - you already have created something new. You most likely already are an amazing programmer. Your workflow is industry standard. It is a good thing to approach the world with open eyes and not reinvent the wheel all the time.

I consider myself a genius level programmer (bragging is a valuable skill if you want your employer to compensate you). I listen to talks from great programmers, read books like The Pragmatic Programmer (still valuable after more than 20 years) and absorb ideas. I am driven by the hunger to find an application for them. At no point do I come up with my own algorithms or new industry changing paradigms.

I create value by writing interface driven software. This applies for any interface, networking, APIs, CLIs and even GUIs. It all starts with a problem you want to solve. A use case in industry speak. And I usually already have an idea what the software needs to do to achieve this. But the focus here is on how it is used:

- It needs to be concise and unambiguous in its use (the documentation should lay out which problem it solves and how it is supposed to be used for that)

- It should make it difficult to make mistakes, e.g. require explicit units in configuration files etc.

- Give expressive negative feedback as soon as possible, when you're programming an API, it is often possible to make things fail at compile time

- Allow the user to pick up where they failed, make a correction and continue, this is a non-issue when you're writing an API or a command-line tool, it's critical when designing a GUI

So I focus on making it intuitive to use, or at least easy to learn. It needs to provide real value (and the documentation should explain that value first and foremost). I focus on errors and how to recover from them (as part of this concern).

Often this breaks the cleanly layered design you had in mind at first, the kind of design a software developer immediately comes up with when they see a problem and consider what needs to happen in order to solve it. This kind of design focuses on the happy path. If you focus on interface and how to handle errors and feedback, you will need access to a lot of information that the whiteboard design would have encapsulated. This is why your software architecture should be interface driven.

One last thing, a warning about stack overflow. Incorrect but simple solutions have a tendency to win on stack overflow when the correct solution is complex and hard to understand. It is also rampant with wrong/dated ideas, such as multiplication is more expensive than addition (it needs more die space, but multiplication and addition both are a single cycle in most modern architectures). Division on the other hand is always expensive, there is just no way around it. That said, you still can find amazing value on SO.

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

#227

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…

I completely agree, even more so with 1. Do not skip or shorten 1. Force yourself NOT to code during 1.

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

#228
A good psychedelic trip to facilitate a mystical experience may provide you with insight from your unconscious mind that is usually suppressed. Some time ago, a research paper was posted here, "Mystical experiences occasioned by the hallucinogen psilocybin lead to increases in the personality domain of openness", Katherine MacLean / Roland Griffiths. DOI 10.1177/0269881111420188 I followed the conditions of the paper and it permanently changed me for the better.

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

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No-one will care about a month or two gap on your resume. On a related note, this "gap in resume" thing needs to stop being a thing at all. I don't know when it became a thing, but it feels distinctively like forcing a wage slave class to keep their head down and continue wageslaving. Why would an employer care whether I took time off to pursue other things otherwise?

I would agree for small gaps. But I think it's at least somewhat understandable why a significant gap would be a concern. With the pace technology moves at, if you have not been working for an extended period of time, it's reasonable that you might have fallen behind. Certainly this shouldn't be reason in itself to reject a candidate and it at least somewhat depends on what you were doing during that time, but I find…

It really should be put in the context of someone's life. Did they spend a year or two travelling? Did they spend it working on personally productive projects? Or did they do nothing but play video games or do drugs?

These are all very different extended gaps. The first two should be fine - if someone's skills have atrophied than that's another issue (but nothing a good interview or probation period won't pick up on if it's actually even a problem). The second one might be fine or a problem - and I can see why employers would be wary.

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