Ask HN: How do you deal with professional jealousy and getting older?

You're 26, and you're not good enough.

I'm 51, and I still don't know what I'm going to do when I grow up.

When I was 26, I was writing a test tool and a test plan for MacTCP 1.2. Not long before that I was very excited at first to have saved enough money to purchase a used 700 MB - yes megabyte! - SCSI drive USED from the Usenet News, then quite a while after that, I managed to save up enough money to purchase the second megabyte of memory for my Mac Plus, thereby enabling me to run Multifinder on Mac OS System 6.

But for my next job, I was the Product Development Manager at Working Software, I had an office with a door I could shut, I had a direct report, and the very finest Mac in the entire company. A few months after I started at WSI, I shipped my very first shrinkwrap retail product, a keystroke recorder called "Last Resort". It wasn't for espionage but was a useful tool for saving valuable text in the event of power failure, system crashes &c.

So you are 26 and your life has been a complete waste.

When I was 27, I shipped my very first product that sold like hotcakes at $9.99.

You are comparing yourself to people like Mark Zuckerberg. Consider that he was paid by some upperclassmen to write The Facebook under contract; he later settled with them after they sued him for stealing their work. He went on to quite openly state - in a very public way - that one should not hire older employees. I don't clearly remember but I think he said one should never hire anyone older than 25.

In the US, it is a civil offense to discriminate for reasons of employment against anyone over the age of 40.

I write quite a lot of good, working code around the time that I was your age, but even so these days I do not regard myself as having had much of a clue at the time. For example I was completely unaware of the existence of C's assert() macro. I spent a lot of time in the MacsBug machine debugger that would have been quite unnecessary had I used assertions rather than single-stepping assembly code and looking at CPU registers.

Looking over my entire career, I regard myself as having really come into my own as a coder right around June 2000. It was then that I figured out how to write C++ code that was completely free of memory leaks or pointer errors, however it wasn't until a couple years after that that I really took automated testing seriously.

In early 2002, the head coder for my Bahamian Hedge Fund client said to me "Your code is by far the best in our codebase". That particular code went into production with no known bugs; a year later, no bugs at all had been found. When asked to implement what I later delivered myself, the original author of that 100 engineer-year Windows executable asserted that "it couldn't be done".

So I got pretty good in 2000, when I was 36 - ten years older than you are now - but awesomely good when I was twelve years older than you.

Give yourself time.

My concern these days is, for the most part, how rich I'm going to get, what product I might ship, whether I can ever vest any stock that turns out to be worth more than one square of single-ply toilet paper.

No.

My concern these days, is what software I can write, that will still be in use ten thousand years from now.

I want to be remembered after I'm gone, you see.

My ex-wife Bonita Hatcher, a devout Shambhala Buddhist, pointed out many times that I would never know whether I had been remembered, seeing as how I was dead.

But I do know very well that when I lay on my deathbed looking back on a life well-lived, I wasn't going to wish that I had shipped more product.

I'm definitely not going to advocate that someone not try to better themselves. If you feel like you want to try to overcome some part of your personality that you're not comfortable with then that's a positive thing. I do, however, think that after multiple failed attempts at overcoming that trait, it's best to reevaluate your perspective on it. Sometimes it's best to admit that something is just a part of who you are and that it is, in fact, a flaw. Of course, we are all flawed in some ways, but it's how we learn to live with those admissions that will determine your self-esteem. Sometimes, even, what we think are flaws from one point of view are actually advantages when viewed from another. For example, procrastination is generally seen as a flaw or a "bad thing", but if you learn to take advantage of that by fully thinking out the problem you're actually trying to solve when you finally DO start working, you might might find that you create brilliant, innovative solutions to difficult things. Solutions that the non-procrastinator didn't think of because he was too fast to the keyboard.

I do realize that line by itself looks a little nasty, I'm sorry. I meant it to be taken together with "And we're all frauds to some degree, because we all tell ourselves stories about ourselves that feel good."

How about without using the word fraud, which can be a little more loaded than I intended, I simply stick to the line afterwards– that we feel gnawing pains, etc whenever our actions are not consistent with the beliefs we hold (or claim to hold).

^That is true. So I think the reality of OP's predicament is a little more subtle. It's probably "the desire to be/become ambitious" rather than overt, naked ambition. The two aren't mutually exclusive, too.

There are also some nice Zen-sounding arguments that you can't fully realize your ambitions until you relinquish your desire to be ambitious– because you suffer from all sorts of perfectionism and performance anxieties, etc. But it's possible to argue either way– talk is cheap, actions are the differentiator.

Don't be sad that you can't change the past: you weren't the person you are now 6 years ago. But be happy that you can change yourself, and get better over time. Don't let the stress of not measuring up destroy you, but definitely let it propel you forward, to keep pushing yourself to do better. Not better by someone else's metric but by your own.

Would you like to create and maintain useful projects that you love to write and people love to use? Then it's not to late at all! Edward Kmett maintains a ton of widely used haskell libraries. He had a successful career as a software developer, went back and got his master's degree in his 30's, learned haskell, and became a leading figure in the community. Not just as a hacker, but he gained a deep knowledge of the mathematics behind haskell and made numerous contributions.

Think about that. At 26, you may not even have found the thing that you'll become famous for yet. You may not even know anything about the field that it'll be found in. The only way to get better is to push yourself, and little by little you'll become more disciplined, and learn more.

Read, push yourself, code, learn. You aren't dead yet, and don't let the achievements of people younger than you make you feel like you are.