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Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?

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Re: Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?

#121

Post by robryan »

jacquesm wrote: post #85
meric wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Space tourist != astronaut, if they will ever deliver. Roughly like being a bus passenger is not the same as being a busdriver.

I suspect most people don't have much of an interest in the actual job of being an astronaut. Simply want to experience a trip into space.

Re: Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?

#122

Post by ChuckMcM »

robryan wrote: post #121
jacquesm wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Space tourist != astronaut, if they will ever deliver. Roughly like being a bus passenger is not the same as being a busdriver.

I suspect most people don't have much of an interest in the actual job of being an astronaut. Simply want to experience a trip into space.

Well in my case it was "doing science, in space!" which was something I thought would be really cool, after all if you're in space you're already in a target rich environment for discoveries, and then getting time to do science there? Well no end to the things you could find out. As a kid I used to write down space experiments in my notebook[1] that I would do when I was in space.

[1] Not exactly epic experiments though, I recall that one of the sillier ones was tie two fans together at the base, with their blades facing opposite directions, and see how fast it would spin.

Re: Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?

#125

Post by fidz »

tk120404 wrote: post #109

Get a housing loan, car loan and other loans, for sure you will start liking the job and life :)

"Liking" or "Trapped"? I don't know psychologically how does this work. Even though i have a credit card, i will always pay all the outstanding to avoid debt. Personally, being in loan makes me feel scared.

Re: Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?

#126

Post by aliostad »

I was exactly where you were. I felt I was solving problems that look almost trivial to me. Of course there are lots of hard distributed computing problems at the scale that Facebook and Google operate but not anyone is to work on them.

I found scientific programming: i.e. using Machine Learning and related disciplines to solve hard AI problems. I can guarantee you might get frustrated by lack of success and hardship of challenges but never ever bored.

In case you are interested, this is my blog post when I got inspired by this: http://byterot.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/future-of-programming-...

Re: Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?

#127

Post by ZeroFries »

scotty79 wrote: post #112

>Quite frankly many years of self hacking/studying and experience in industry, I think I've just had it with software industry. Does it get any better ? Am I seeing things correctly ? Is this a burnout ? You need to realize that what you think is not the source of your feelings, even though it seems like it. It's actually the other way around. What you feel dictates what you think about the stuff you have contact wit…

Spot on. Keeping a journal can help, to compare the thoughts you have about similar topics and how they vary based on your mood (be sure to include some measure of mood as a meta-tag for each entry).

Re: Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?

#128

Post by bbcbasic »

ak39 wrote: post #90
yankoff wrote: post #22

Try diving deeper into real CS, there is the entire world of things that can revive your passion. If you mainly were focused on building CRUD apps and websites it's not surprising to get bored and burned out. Get out of your typical routines and try finding challenging stuff to do. Some ideas: * Figure out how to write AI for games. A simple example would be, how to write a bot that finds shortest path out of labyrin…

An Ode to "CRUD" Apps: There's nothing unexciting or less complicated or challenging about producing good CRUD [sic] applications. I don't understand the industry cynicism towards producing good quality "bread and butter" software for any vertical market. It takes years of experience to learn good (relational) data modeling. It takes years of dedicated attention to assemble tried, tested and efficient user interface…

> User interface design (and yes, we are talking about your "boring" invoice capture screens here) may seem easy at first glance to be dismissed as unexciting, but almost every real world example is a challenge that requires creative thinking.

But how does this tie in with the manager who says 'it's just an invoice screen, why are you taking so long' probably based on the mentality that $ revenue is proportional to # features.

Re: Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?

#129

Post by mcnamaratw »

I've fixed this several times by going camping alone for a week with nothing to read, no devices, no pencil and paper. Just me, a tent, food and coffee. I come back full of ideas. Stuff I've been stuck on for a year becomes easy. Motivation returns.

I rarely "have time" to do it ... but somehow I always have time to work in circles for weeks or months and not get much done.

A common answer here is "learn something new" and that works for me at first. When "learn something new" isn't enough, I bring out the big guns and go camping. I haven't isolated what about camping does it for me. (I believe Danny Hillis, the founder of Thinking Machines wrote that he would never have finished his dissertation if he hadn't written the first draft at Disney World. Not my kind of thing but I guess it worked for him.)

Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: I am 30+ and bored with life and the software industry, what do I do?

#130

Post by tripzilch »

bbcbasic wrote: post #128
ak39 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An Ode to "CRUD" Apps: There's nothing unexciting or less complicated or challenging about producing good CRUD [sic] applications. I don't understand the industry cynicism towards producing good quality "bread and butter" software for any vertical market. It takes years of experience to learn good (relational) data modeling. It takes years of dedicated attention to assemble tried, tested and efficient user interface…

> User interface design (and yes, we are talking about your "boring" invoice capture screens here) may seem easy at first glance to be dismissed as unexciting, but almost every real world example is a challenge that requires creative thinking. But how does this tie in with the manager who says 'it's just an invoice screen, why are you taking so long' probably based on the mentality that $ revenue is proportional to #…

Wrong question, how does a bad manager getting in your way tie in with building well-designed quality CRUD applications?

Obviously the problem here is the manager, not the fact that you want to write and build quality work. Especially if they run on flawed assumptions such as "the mentality that $ revenue is proportional to # features".

You can't build quality under shitty management like that.

There's markets and jobs for both types: some desire cheap & shitty, others are willing to pay premium for solid, beautiful & well-designed.

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