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Ask HN: I'm 40 and feel my mental ability declining. Programming seems harder.

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Re: Ask HN: I'm 40 and feel my mental ability declining. Programming seems harder.

#151

Post by Arisaka1 »

I just started being a professional developer in my forties, and all I can think of is that I wasn't this competent ever before. I slap my noise cancelling headphones, put some piano music and enjoy the process.

But I'm not perfect. I'll miss a detail, I'll get a message in the chatroom, I'll take a stretch break. I'll forget. That's not just me being 40, that's me being human.

There's also the fact that when you're younger your body lets you get away with "murder": Drink lots of coca cola, eat junk food, sit for hours, never hit the gym. An apt metaphor would be that you had a 10k PC for gaming and lots of games that were not optimized properly but run well enough due to the hardware being that good.

The older you get, the more your bad habits bite you. So it's not just age decline but every lack of maintenance and abuse of drinking, smoking, junk food comes to take its toll. You know, the "I can do that while I am young" kind of habits.

What I'm saying is, it's more than aging that it's at fault. We just like to correlate aging with it because it takes years for the side-effects of all the poor habits to manifest themselves to take effect.

Re: Ask HN: I'm 40 and feel my mental ability declining. Programming seems harder.

#152

Post by optymizer »

I suspect you're burnt out. Surely you can hold more than 2 levels of a callstack in your head at 40, so something else is going on.

Of course the code can also be particularly convoluted with some domain-specific knowledge that you may not necessarily be an expert on, so in that case, I'd find someone to ask questions or or an intro book until you can get to an 80/20 situation, where you feel like you understood most of the domain context.

If it's not the code, take a break. Long walks in a place with trees helps clear the mind. Longer sleep, exercise to get the blood flowing, no alcohol. All the usual healthy stuff.

You could also try to draw the data flow on a whiteboard, in a "follow the money" kind of way.

Alternatively, if time permits, try to reimplement the algorithm or solve the problem yourself, in your own preferred language/environment. This will get you sufficient knowledge about the functional requirements where you'll be able to see what the author of the code you're porting was thinking, since they likely encountered the same challenges as you.

If nothing else works, you can just be honest with your manager and try another project that feels like it would be easier or more fun.

Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: I'm 40 and feel my mental ability declining. Programming seems harder.

#153

Post by sherilm »

It probably has less to do with your age and more with where you are in your journey and how you are seeing things. Increasing domain mastery can also mean less tolerance for BS.

Slightly tangential, and perhaps abstract, but nevertheless applicable - two counterintuitive ideas that might be helpful:

1. Keats' notion of Negative Capability. We always think of abilities in the positive but often beyond a certain point dealing with the uncertainties is an ability in itself. More at https://www.leadingsapiens.com/developing-negative-capabilit...

2. Maslow's idea of Second Naïveté. Domain mastery can easily turn into increasing cynicism. Have to be on the alert for this. The masters are somehow able to reengage as beginners and push past what others find mundane. More at https://www.leadingsapiens.com/naivete-in-leadership/

Re: Ask HN: I'm 40 and feel my mental ability declining. Programming seems harder.

#155

Post by dgb23 »

thiago_fm wrote: post #58

Nah, I think your expectations are wrong. No matter how good you are, nobody is good enough to port an API like you are saying it, by memorising or thinking 9 levels deep. Humans aren't designed for this kind of tasks. Instead, you should take steps to understand the parts that compromise the abstractions that make up that API and implement it. Also have good test coverage from both sides, so you make sure you are im…

There's a lot of good, generic advice in this thread, but this is I think the right answer. I specifically scanned for one like this.

What OP is trying to do is quite literally impossible. Not even the best chess players in the world can hold such a big (decision) tree in their heads _at once_. And they might be the most extreme data point we have on this matter.

The way we humans compute needs to be supported by breaking stuff apart and focus on few things at a time on one side, and by abstraction on the other side. Iterating on smaller problems and generalizing the big picture along the way.

Think forest & trees metaphor, or the 7 +/- 2 problem.

Of course as we get older our ability to completely emerge into one task and put all our energy into it generally weakens for a variety of reasons. But there's enough evidence to support the idea that regularly challenging our cognitive ability keeps us sharp and maintains or improves our ability to learn and tackle new things.

What we can't do however is fight our natural limitations and OP seems to try just that.

Additionally, and this might be just as important, this seems to be a very tedious and boring task. The worst tasks are the ones that require a lot of mental effort while also being incredibly boring. It's hard to find a high state of motivation and focus, which contributes to the issue.

Re: Ask HN: I'm 40 and feel my mental ability declining. Programming seems harder.

#156

Post by cstever »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #134
jb1991 wrote: post #17

I don't know you personally but I doubt cognitive decline has anything to do with this. As we age, we usually end up with more and more life responsibilities, beyond just the work we are doing. All of that is input to the brain and requires energy in response. The brain is not infinite. I often feel as you do, but then I have periods where I am as light and agile in my productivity as 20 years ago, maybe even more so…

> As we age, we usually end up with more and more life responsibilities As somebody who far away from 40, how is one supposed to "look forward" to getting older given this likelihood?

More life responsibilities isn't a bad thing. Life is (or should be) made of intentional decisions by the user (you). And the culmination of these intentional decisions can fill your life with meaning, purpose, and fulfillment.

You don't have to take Responsibility A if you don't want to, but you have to live with the consequences of your decision (good or bad). It's a trade off. I want a house. I make that decision for that responsibility. I now own that responsibility knowing the duties that come with home ownership will take a portion of my time and therefore will reduce the availability of time once given to a different responsibility.

Of course, mistakes will be made, but the best part is you can most often correct mistakes in healthy and meaningful ways.

Re: Ask HN: I'm 40 and feel my mental ability declining. Programming seems harder.

#158

Post by hardware2win »

flippinburgers wrote: post #146

I would take a moment to consider what kind of "progress" the other developers are actually having. Deep layers in api calls indicate to me that the original author was either 1. too "clever" or 2. not good at their job. The number of programmers who do way, way too much vastly outnumber the number of programmers who get the job done correctly and succinctly in my experience. Give yourself some breathing room and try…

Are you serious by trying to call person who wrote that as good or bad just by that short description?

Thats crazy, context matters.

Sometimes software does complex stuff and no, you cannot infinitely simplify and abstract stuff. Complexity needs to be somewhere

Re: Ask HN: I'm 40 and feel my mental ability declining. Programming seems harder.

#159

Post by yetihehe »

Buttons840 wrote: post #5
pentaphobe wrote: post #2

I've experienced this periodically since my early 20's - generally in hindsight I realise it was: real life getting in the way, burnout, lack of interest (I was interested in the idea, but on some fundamental level - not the activity) - also occasionally just a feeling of Groundhog Day (ie. Some code tasks can just feel a little too familiar - even if novel, and that saps my joy) Either way, at the time it was quite…

Thank you. Good advice about hacking on some personal projects/experiments. I'm worried that wont rebuild my confidence and abilities fast enough though. I want to make progress on this task today, not next week. Other developers seem to be succeeding, and I'm worried about how I'll look if it takes me weeks do to what others are doing in hours. (This isn't meant to dismiss your advice, to but to give feedback and so…

> Other developers seem to be succeeding, and I'm worried about how I'll look if it takes me weeks do to what others are doing in hours.

That one exact thought is compounding your problem. It's pure anxiety and it makes problem worse, I know from experience. When you think that, try to calm yourself with "yeah, it's just anxiety speaking, it will be fine". Maybe also try magnesium supplements, magnesium citrate helps me (but it typically takes up to a week of supplementation, minimum 2 days).

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