Ask HN: After almost 30 years the romance is over - What now?

I have a very similar background. Scary similar. I'm older though. I've had similar feelings at various times. Is this it? Really? Lame...

I used to get excited about new technology and it did seem that something cool and amazing would come out all the time. Just an endless stream of wow. I just can't get hyped up about some mash up, retread, or social widget. I don't think I've changed I think the industry has.

That isn't really a bad thing though. It is an opportunity. I used to wait in anticipation for someone to come to market with a product or solution I foresaw. That rarely happens now with market driven development. That is the opportunity. Don't languish that the amazement isn't there. Make it. You have the skills. I'm sure you see the deficiencies. The industry is now so stagnant in true innovation, this gives us, the technical entrepreneurs the opportunity to innovate.

How to rekindle the flame? I don't know if this will work for you. This is what I do. I buy a new toy and hack on it. A computer or phone. I find a new programming language or something like pfsense (router) and play with it. Find some software that sucks and build one that doesn't. Scratch an itch.

What itch would I scratch right now if I wasn't busy. I'd build a soft bios driver that would emulate a CD/DVD drive. This would load an emulated CD/DVD driver into a PC bios just like a SAS card loads its driver into the bios. This would allow you to select multiple iso images from a usb drive and then boot to that emulated CD/DVD. Right now you can't really do that.

Similar background 15K miles down south of you, though the same thing happen to me earlier this year and I had it coming. Too much work on things I didn't like. I took some time off to figure it out and it worked. If you can, don't rush it and try to focus on what you really enjoy, no matter how hard or crazy may seam at first, and you'll find it. The shallow scenery is an opportunity to us, oldies. Lets show we still have a few tricks and cooler than ever.

I wouldn't worry about it too much. Accept that you need a change for now and re-look at it every so often. I've been coding since '84. I've found myself very jaded by computers a number of times in the past and I'm definitely not chasing every technology thread I could be. But hey, sometimes it comes back and you see the same stuff in a new light, or you discover areas that really do interest you, or you combine what you know with a new domain.

Don't force it. Let it go until you enjoy it again.

I'm 45 and I think I giggled like a 5 year old when I first started using the Star Walk application on my iPad.

Welcome to the law of Diminishing returns. Your choices fundamentally boils down to the following:

-Take the blue pill. Stay in wonderland. Pick a technology, any technology. Drive yourself into it deeper. The rabbit hole goes much, much further, than you can imagine.

-Take the red pill, and wake up: the rabbit hole goes the other way, too. On first basis, you have the ever-exploding number of scientific disciplines ( http://www.turtlshel.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/43056172... ). Even further, society isn't merely a collection of engineers, and scientist: other people have all kind of different jobs.

Furthermore, they are equally convinced, that their field of choice was the right one; and from their own perspective each one of them was right.

Since you're HN, you might have a particular interest towards this field we call "business". Now, this is not what people around you -who are called "managers" btw- do. A good working definition for engineers is: Business is the ability to actualize a job that needs to be done, on which you're retroactively hired (or fired) by society as a whole. Or, as PG put it: doing stuff what people wants.

Regardless of how you choose, a good partition of it is going to be soul-searching. There are 2 pieces of media I'd strongly recommend for that:

-Randy Pausch Last Lecture [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo], and

-wishcraft, which is a short book, available freely from http://wishcraft.com/.

On an ending note, I feel for you. Every time I've been down to this alley, I always always wished I'd have done it earlier. If anything, you should know this: the direction of your life does not boil down to singular moments, as you've described in your initial post. It's something that must must must be constantly evaluated, and course-corrected based on any new piece of life-data you happen to stumble across. And it's never to late to change things.