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Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?

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Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?

#121

Post by groffee »

ttoinou wrote: post #118
sinenomine wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Burnout has become such a catch-all term as to be effectively meaningless by now. In our professional lives, we are used to set quantified KPIs in a SMART way, and I wonder, why is it that our expectations are so comparatively low in our personal lives?

Any example of a smart KPI ?

"Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely"

Basically just one of those meaningless buzz words that gets thrown around.

https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/ot...

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?

#122

Post by disembiggen »

ttoinou wrote: post #118
sinenomine wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Burnout has become such a catch-all term as to be effectively meaningless by now. In our professional lives, we are used to set quantified KPIs in a SMART way, and I wonder, why is it that our expectations are so comparatively low in our personal lives?

Any example of a smart KPI ?

it's an acronym, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. So if you're struggling to read books say, "Finish this book by the end of the month" is:

Specific: read the book Measurable: no ambiguity as to whether you've read it Achievable: a month is a reasonable amount of time to finish a book in Relevant: read a book to improve your reading habits Time-bound: it's not a project that'll hang over you for ages, you're done at the end of the month

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?

#123

Post by sinenomine »

ttoinou wrote: post #118
sinenomine wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Burnout has become such a catch-all term as to be effectively meaningless by now. In our professional lives, we are used to set quantified KPIs in a SMART way, and I wonder, why is it that our expectations are so comparatively low in our personal lives?

Any example of a smart KPI ?

Some examples of directly measurable KPIs:

1. Mood diary

2. Time spent on social media, negative

3. Hours of sleep

4. Steps walked, number of repetitions in exercise, calories burnt

5. Psychometric tests (help measure mental clarity) https://openpsychometrics.org/

6. N-back: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0220...

7. Active vocabulary test to measure available crystallized intelligence

8. Biomarkers, for example the simple Levine PhenoAge clock: https://michaellustgarten.com/2019/09/09/quantifying-biologi...

You don't gave to measure every one of these, of course. In my experience they are more or less correlated: good lifestyle interventions improve many measures at once.

SMART goals regarding these KPIs are pretty obvious.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?

#124

Post by jordanbeiber »

ttoinou wrote: post #118
sinenomine wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Burnout has become such a catch-all term as to be effectively meaningless by now. In our professional lives, we are used to set quantified KPIs in a SMART way, and I wonder, why is it that our expectations are so comparatively low in our personal lives?

Any example of a smart KPI ?

Take one full day every other week where you play around, learn and explore. If you have not been able to do this at least 5 times last quarter - why not? What can we do to allow for that to happen.

This is an example of an actual goal I have for members of my team - it is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic/Relevant and Time-bound. It's also tangential to the OP's topic here in a couple of ways.

Good things happen when you allow for slack, but we often put too much pressure on ourselves, and won't allow it.

I'm looking at it as a bit of "lucky lotto":

https://danlebrero.com/2021/06/30/cto-dairy-lucky-lotto-chao...

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?

#125

Post by jseban »

rightbyte wrote: post #105
fleb wrote: post #16

This sounds like burnout to me. I am in my mid-40s and used to have spells like this, but no more. I needed some kind of large change, back then, to get myself sorted out, but this could be pretty destructive because if I waited too long, the change I'd need wouldn't really be conducive to staying on whatever project I was on. The key to not having to deal with this problem anymore, for me, was starting to proactivel…

Getting fed up with all the stupid technology grind is not necessarily burnout though. One could call it wisdom or experience too.

Yeah always switching tools basically resets your experience to zero, so you have to do the same mistakes over and over, no wonder it's hard to stay motivated. And the "senior" jobs have zero power, so you can't stop people from making mistakes, and trying to "influence" just makes the experience even more exhausting and frustrating when people have no reason to listen to you.

I wish there was real senior roles you could grow into where your experience is actually valued, and you would gain certain power to make decisions, but then the argument is that you can't hire juniors anymore because they think it's too uncool to have a boss.

It's really rigged for shorter careers.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?

#128

Post by sinenomine »

giantg2 wrote: post #120
huijzer wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You had a depressive episode, and you recovered. You’re quick in jumping to conclusions.

Agree. I hate my job and clock watch. But I enjoy other things in life. When I get screened for depression it never comes up as a problem. So it seems you can be fine and still watch the clock.

Have you considered living frugally and investing most of your income into stock index & crypto to become financially independent?

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?

#129

Post by jseban »

rawoke083600 wrote: post #35

I know exactly what you mean. As a counter point to the many "burnout answers" here which I completely agree with by the way. It could also be an example of "neuroplasticity" (hear me out). I'm 40 and been coding like it feels forever, I find it "relatively easy" to learn new frameworks or languages. What is much harder are new paradigms; example OOP vs functional. The last few months I've started to learn Clojure. M…

I don't know from your post if learning Clojure is for work or not, but if it is in your spare time, I would really ask myself why I'm actually learning clojure, and spending my free time working outside of work..

If that makes you feel exhausted and burnt out, then just stop learning clojure for goodness sake, and sit by the pool in your free time.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?

#130

Post by dgb23 »

Shooting into the dark here. Maybe you’re demotivated because this isn’t really learning, not in the real sense. The difference between Vue and React are almost arbitrary. It’s like Python vs Ruby or C# vs Java. There’s details that are interesting and useful sure, but most of it is boring. It’s entirely horizontal.

What I suggest, because it works for me, is to focus on the layers above and below. Above you find high level decision making, design, information architecture, visualization and so on. Below you find protocols, runtimes, browser/os internals and interfaces, distributed systems and much more.

All of the mentioned things are vast and interesting. And there’s much more. You work primarily on frontend, how solid is your math? Graphics programming?

There’s so much stuff that is genuinely useful, interesting and has a much higher impact that keeping up with library ecosystems.

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