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

Only insofar as he remains motivated to use his skill for his own support. Even for well-paid software engineers, it can be difficult to amass substantial enough savings to feel comfortable taking 6-12 months off (depending, of course, on individual circumstances). Personally, I believe a sabbatical every few years would do wonders to prevent burnout, but very few plan well enough to make that happen.

Having experienced similar when I was your age (I'm now 41) here's what I've found useful:

1) never ever compare yourself to others, especially based on age. do your thing. for you.

2) wanting to achieve things in life is great but how young you do them really doesn't matter nearly as much as you think it does

3) wanting to achieve things in life is great but the way you treat people day-to-day trumps any achievement

4) go with where your energy is and let your goals emerge from that rather than expect the other way around. Don't set a goal of running a marathon if you hate running.

First of all, 26 is not old. It's just not.

on many nights I end up vegging out in front of the TV or aimlessly clicking around on the internet.

An hour or two per day of that is not a big deal. You need to relax. As long as you're doing well at your job and getting enough exercise, it's fine to watch an hour of TV. One warning: assume that once you start watching TV or junk internet, you probably won't do anything else for the rest of the day, so don't start until you've accomplished enough that you'd be OK with that. Also, keep a set bedtime. The problem with staying up late with TV or junk internet is that your judgment gets worse as it gets later and you're not as good a judge of "Is this really more valuable than an hour of sleep?" at 12:00 as at 10:00.

You shouldn't beat yourself up over needing an hour per day of "do nothing" time. That's completely normal.

I am crippled by the feeling that it's "too late".

As Ed Kmett says in this very good (and accessible) talk on how to learn (link: https://yow.eventer.com/yow-2014-1222/stop-treading-water-le... ) your career is going to be a lot longer than you think. It's far from too late.

Every day, I read an article by some hot-shot young dev who has a handful of fancy projects behind his belt (not to mention a great website and design sensibility) while I have exactly zero

Well... a few of those people were just single-minded and focused, but many of them were also produced. Evan Spiegel's a billionaire at 24, but he's a product. He was picked by aging venture capitalists, facing irrelevance and acting out of fear, to match their idea of what Millennials look like. Twenty years from now, these products (Lucas Duplan, Evan Spiegel) won't be relevant. Take the same attitude toward those "30 Under 30" lists. They have the same problem as the "holistic" component of college admissions: they're middle-aged C-players trying to separate the A+ from the A players among the young. (The middle-aged A/A+ players are out kicking ass and therefore too busy to give a shit about "30 Under 30".) They're just not capable of making meaningful selections, so you should view it as irrelevant celebrity noise and ignore it.

Trust me that very few people half a decade younger than you (that's 21) are producing fundamental work. Young people do get a lot more recognition for accomplishments that would be mediocre by an adult standard, and those "golden child" types get addicted to the recognition and don't improve. The people your age who will be kicking ass 20 years from now are, most likely, not even on your radar right now.

Some young people are producing fundamental work, and that's awesome, but they aren't numerous enough to represent a competitive threat. The people who are producing fundamental technology are generally not peaking in their 20s, but 40s to 50s and sometimes later. You have time to catch up. Some people have incredible focus even at 17; most of us take some time to get our shit together and that's OK. Fuck, I had a 9-year trolling habit (17 to 26, or 2000-09).

Whenever I encounter a technical article, I immediately and compulsively investigate the author's age.

Stop doing that. If you can't, see a psychiatrist. If it's an actual compulsion, then medication will help you.

For the first time in my life, my procrastination is starting to get tamed.

It will probably continue to get better. The ability to plan and project yourself into the future is sub-optimal from ages 12 to 25. In other words, it's normal to take that long to get your shit together.

But I can't help but feel that if I had started in earnest at 25, at 21, at 19 — then maybe the list of accomplishments at the end of my life will be longer.

Who knows? It's not worth fretting. You know kids who are straight-edge rule-followers in high school and go completely apeshit (and not always funny apeshit, but sometimes scary apeshit, like the guy who got to a near-fatal 0.37% BAC) with the first taste of freedom in college?That happens a lot to people who are "on the rails" in their early 20s. And the ones who get huge amounts of recognition (e.g. "30 Under 30" types) tend to fall the hardest because the recognition from "above" gets them used to looking up, and when they actually have to lead, they're not up to the challenge.

Does anybody else have this problem? How do you deal with it?

Look, everyone has these insecurities. I would be lying if I said that I didn't. It won't prevent you from doing a good job. Just get out there and build. Don't expect the insecurity to go away; just work in spite of it. From Game of Thrones:

    Bran: Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?
    Ned: That is the only time a man can be brave.

>> comparison causes conflict, conflict causes anxiety, anxiety causes fear, and fear makes mind dull

Am I the only one who read this in Yoda's voice?

This sounds very much like me. I beat it by finding a routine that works for me, a routine that helped me become more disciplined... and it took a while to beat, so don't expect immediate results. Also, while this worked for me, it may not work for you, everyone [despite those telling you that you're not a unique snowflake] is different and different things work for each of us so take what is helpful from my routine and ignore the rest, YMMV.

First step: Finding your zone. This is a matter of conditioning and conditioning doesn't come easily. Find something that puts you in a zone of focus. It doesn't matter what the focus is on, it doesn't matter what that zone is - the key is finding focus and maintaining it for longer and longer periods until you can easily maintain focus for a number of hours at a time [I'm told there are drugs that do this very effectively, but I personally try to avoid drugs wherever possible]. Whatever it is should be something that doesn't allow you to lose your focus or give up, even when the going gets tough and every instinct in you is telling you to throw in the towel.

For me it was cycling - totally unrelated to programming. It was better for me than being in a gym because if I decide to stop pedaling, I stop going anywhere. In a gym, this means just getting off the bike and I'm no further behind. If you're 10 miles from home and stop pedaling, you're 10 miles from home and the only way back home is to get back on your bike and start pedaling again. Sitting on the side of the road procrastinating isn't going to help, nor is it going to be in any way enticing to sit there. After 40 miles, you could be exhausted and realizing you still have a 5 mile climb ahead of you before you can put your bike down; there's no way around it, you just have to get on and do it.

I've set up a playlist on my phone of music that runs around 130-140 bpm [that's approximately the speed of club music that makes you wanna dance] and will run without looping for the duration of my ride. I listen to the same playlist every ride. You might get sick of it, but you listen anyway. After a few weeks of agony and wanting to throw in the towel but doing it anyway you start to find peace in the pain and it becomes a meditation, you don't even hear the music consciously any more but the beat drives you forward, you find the zone and it's just you, the pain and the road and before you know it the circuit is over. For me this process took a number of weeks, but now, if I put that playlist on, even if I'm not on my bike, my brain snaps into that zone. It's been conditioned to focus when that playlist comes on, just like Pavlov's dog salivating when the bell rings. [This requires ongoing maintenance]

Step 2: Remove necessary distractions. When I say necessary, I mean unavoidable things that will need doing and will break your focus when they are required to be done because you didn't take the preemptive strike of killing them off first. Things like important phone calls to your accountant or the bank. If you can't focus while you have a messy desk, clean your desk, get your coffee, eat your breakfast, do all of these unavoidable things first.

Step 3: Understand the problem intimately, ensure that you can recite it inside outside, upside down and backwards. You don't want to have to keep going back to ensure you understand the problem, this will break your focus. If you need to pester someone to help you understand the problem, pester them until you have fully digested every nuance of what it is you're trying to achieve.

Step 4: Understand the solution to that problem intimately. Ensure that you understand every single step that will take you from where are right now to where you need to be. Any pieces you don't understand, go back and reread step 4. If you keep having to come back and figure stuff out, this will break your focus. Again, pester whoever you need to in order to completely understand the path to the solution.

Steps 3 and 4 are my biggest triggers for procrastination. If I don't understand the problem or the solution to that problem well enough, I can't maintain focus. It might take me days to get down to it if I let myself skip either of these steps - so I don't.

Step 5: Everything else can wait: No Facebook, no Hacker News, no Blinkfeed, no Quora, no email, no phone calls, no text messages, no whatever else it is you like to waste time with. Put them all aside and have the discipline to stay away from them until you're finished this step. Now, do whatever it was from Step 1 that puts you into your focused zone. Get on with completing the steps you've laid out in Step 4.

Step 6: You're done, go reward yourself with all those other distractions that you put aside to complete Step 5. Congratulations.