Sounds like burnout.
Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?
41–50 of 134 posts
Re: Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?
#42Have you considered taking a break? I did 3 years of menial work after graduating from a good university, got really bored, and now I'm going from central Europe to Mongolia on a motorbike. It's an absolutely refreshing change. I'm not sure how long the euphoria will last after getting back though.
http://www.silkroadmadness.blogspot.com/
Re: Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?
#43I went through the same disillusionment. My solution was go from the routine of learning of 20th programming language or mastering 100th API back to fundamentals computer science. Go deeper and explore beautiful mathematical concepts behind programming. Refresh your lambda calculus, read about type theory, explore issues related computational complexity, study how people model parallel computations, dig into correctness proofs, etc.
Re: Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?
#44Have you considered taking a break? I did 3 years of menial work after graduating from a good university, got really bored, and now I'm going from central Europe to Mongolia on a motorbike. It's an absolutely refreshing change. I'm not sure how long the euphoria will last after getting back though. http://www.silkroadmadness.blogspot.com/
Awesome. I did something similar but am flying around (now in Beijing). How do you carry your pack?
Re: Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?
#45I would recommend joining an enterprise startup that is solving a problem for an industry you find interesting. Make sure the startup's customers are leaders in their particular industry.
When working for such a startup; the primary focus will be solving your customer's problems. You should work one on one with your first couple of customers. Doing so will be very challenging and if things go well very rewarding both intellectually and fiscally.
Issues of programming languages, editors, infrastructure frameworks will be secondary. But as the company grows, the technical challenges of scaling, reliability, managing teams, feature growth, etc. with will need to be met.
Re: Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?
#46Have you considered taking a break? I did 3 years of menial work after graduating from a good university, got really bored, and now I'm going from central Europe to Mongolia on a motorbike. It's an absolutely refreshing change. I'm not sure how long the euphoria will last after getting back though. http://www.silkroadmadness.blogspot.com/
Thats fantastic! What kind of motorbike? Good luck, i am sure you will have a lot of fun! Turkey (Kapadokia, etc) is amazing but I am sure what you will find deeper into Asia is even more fascinating.
Re: Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?
#47My take on what is exciting yields the following questions:
How much time have you spent with design patterns?
How much time have you spent with WebSockets?
How much time have you spent with Asynchronous coding?
How much time have you spent with Taligent MVP concepts?
How much time have you spent with Reactive Extensions?
How much time have you spent with ReactJS?
How much time have you spent with drinking and playing CS:Go?
Have you ever considered the concepts that are being taught as the 'leading edge of thought'? AKA Abraham Hicks. There is a whole new world that talks about an evolution of the human species simply by realizing that you have a 'higher mind' which exists in spirit world and that you can connect with that pure positive energy and when you do your life becomes an explosion of Synchronicity (see bashar.org).
Re: Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?
#48I started to feel like this when I got to my 30s, especially when moving to San Francisco, where these issues you mention are much more pervasive than other places I used to live.
There were two things that helped me clear my head a bit - going to the gym and focusing on my well-being (a.k.a. actually going to a gym 3-4 times a week) and learning something outside of computers (in my case, learning the Japanese language). I think just focusing for a bit on something more than computers can help you take a step back and gain some of that lost energy back, at least it did for me.
Re: Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?
#49Go on a vision quest. Only a half-joke.
Re: Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?
#50It sounds a lot like burnout, that happens when you've worked really hard to achieve something which, after achieving it, you come to realize wasn't all that important to you personally. It can really take a toll on you mentally. It can also be something of an intra-life crisis. For some reason 34 hit me really hard. I think part of it was that suddenly I knew that there was some things that I had considered "somethi…
You can save up $200,000 for Virgin Galactic, it has some delays and problems but I think it will be ready in time for you to experience being an astronaut. (Training, preparation, take off, landing, and telling stories about it). If it's what you want to experience, go for it.
If not Virgin Galactic there will be another company.