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

I'm sympathetic with your feelings. My advice is to focus on yourself instead of comparing yourself with others. I've often found solace in Max Erhmann's "Desiderata" --- http://mwkworks.com/desiderata.html --- which says:

  If you compare yourself with others,
  you may become vain and bitter;
  for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
  Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.

I recommend reading the whole thing; it's beautiful and very inspirational. Also, Richard Feynman has a great quote about disregarding what others are doing, which I guess is from "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman", but can't find his exact words (can anyone help me out?).

From https://imagineer7.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/the-most-importa...

  Feynman wrote one word, in capitals: DISREGARD on his
  notepad when he read that. This word became his motto.
  That, he said, was the whole point. That was what he had
  forgotten, and why he had been making so little progress.
  The way for thinkers like himself to make a breakthrough
  was to be ignorant of what everybody else was doing and
  make their own interpretations and guesses.

You can't stop time, so you better learn how to deal with getting older. I'm sure you're a great person, just find out what you want to spend your time on and focus on that, and disregard what others are doing. As Max Ehrmann said: "Strive to be happy".

I "started in earnest" at the age of 11. Now I'm 36 and have CTO in my job title (but I'm very hands on - still a small firm, headcount When I talk to younger people about what it is to be a professional programmer, I ask them "Do you like learning? Are you prepared to learn something new every day? Are you prepared to do a job where your task is to quickly learn and apply that learning constantly?"

That is what a programmer is. We all learn from each other. From the stackoverflow copy/paste crowd to the most senior computer scientists you have ever heard of. Some of them have original thoughts, original applications, but mostly we're just this big crowd learning off each other to get things we enjoy doing or are paid to do (and ideally both), done.

Procrastination is your subconscious saying "I really don't want to do this". You either listen to it, or you start telling your subconscious why you do. It's OK to move onto another project. Maybe no projects appeal to you right now. Maybe you need to talk to somebody about anxiety and depression, as you have some of the symptoms.

You read about these teenager because they are interesting to read about.

Who wants to read about a 50-60 yo professional CEO who just sold his Nth company doing some boring-as-ass Java enterprise thing? No one. Not in the TC crowd. There's nothing to fantasize about.

I'm 48. More productive in the past ten years than ever before. I used to feel the way you do, in my twenties. A lot of it was just jockeying for position among a group of high-achiever friends--trying to be the alpha in a group of alphas--and some of it was having been the big fish in the small pond of my immediate peers and finally being thrown into the big pond.

But none of that really matters. Don't plan for the next three years. Life is long, plan for that.

Many of the people I worked with in the '90s achieved a sort of fame like the fame the people you see achieve today. But when their achievements were superceded, they didn't go and do new amazing things. Instead they didn't do much at all, or did things that were completely tangential to their skill set, things they couldn't really excel at.

Part of the reason was that, having worked their way to huge XP, they couldn't start at 0 when they needed to restart the game. So they just didn't play. But we all start back at 0 when we do something new. We progress faster the second and further times around. We talk about learning from failure and doing better the second time around. These people couldn't learn from success.

So now I admire most the people who can achieve thing after thing, even if each of those things is not fame-worthy, not so much the people who have done a single thing, even if that thing gets a TechCrunch headline. The turtle, not the hare. I think the turtles do more good over their lifetimes than the hares, and that people who continue to be productive year in and year out are much, much happier.

My fears now are a different sort: do I still have time to accomplish the things I want to accomplish? Then I remind myself that I still have another 30 or 40 years of work left, as much in front of me as behind me. I encourage you to think that way: you have another 60 years of work left...what can you do over the course of 60 years? Pick a long-term goal (interstellar flight, artificial intelligence, peace on earth, whatever), break it into manageable projects, then start.

A few points I haven't seen while scrolling through the comments:

1. Impact of Achievements does not relate to time as much as we think. Someone can start with 50 and make more impact than the most talented programmer made in 30 years of hard work. Maybe you need 2-3 years to get up to speed, but for longer time periods there are too many other factors involved. So if you are really as good as you think (most programmers do, but we can't all be better than all the others) taking your time and working on something that is interesting to work on might be more interesting than a comparison with a guy 10 years younger.

2. Start small. That is even more true for side projects. Do a very tiny thing. Then you can finish it. And if you have more motivation add a second small thing to it. This way even if you lose some motivation you still have something to show for it.

3. Code on something you need. I'm certainly a below average coder, but my best side project is something that started without planning because I wanted to automate a tedious task of mine. I'm working on it from time to time for years now and gradually it becomes more and more useful and nice to use. It's not on Github. It might not help anybody else. But I'm really proud of it, and it really helps me a lot on an almost daily basis.

4. That also means the code itself has no value, but what the program helps you do has value. If you don't code something that does something useful, than your project is meaningless. And by far the easiest person to please is yourself.

5. The most valuable programmers and the ones who have achieved something in the eyes of the public are not the same. Your mother might think Steve Jobs must have been a much better programmer than you. But he's not even a programmer at all. Public recognition is not what we think it is as 20 somethings.