
Ask HN: Does anybody else feel overwhelmed while reading HN? - yeswecatan
I&#x27;ve been programming for about 4 years now. During that time I&#x27;ve become an integral part of my team and have constantly been learning. Despite this I always read comments on HN and feel like there is SO much to learn that I&#x27;ll never have the time for. I work at a big company and desperately want to leave so I have been dedicating time to prepare for interviews (pretty much just CTCI at this point). Even if I do get better at my interviews and land a job elsewhere, I&#x27;m worried that either I&#x27;ll 1) not be as good as the other engineers there and they will quickly notice or 2) will basically feel the same as I do now. Hopefully the latter doesn&#x27;t happen. My work environment is pretty negative right now so maybe a change of scenery will help.<p>Anyway, back to the original question. Does anybody else come on here and feel overwhelmed? Too much to learn, a lot of other people out there who are so much better than you etc. Could be just me, the Bay Area, or tech in general.
======
patio11
Attempting to be as accomplished/skilled as the union of people you read on
the Internet is a fool's errand. You have to accept you'll never know
everything and that, for almost all things, there will be someone -- or a lot
of someones -- much better than you.

Pretend you were working at a company with a hundred engineers. Do you
understand how easy it is for _every single one of them_ to simultaneously
feel like you do? The React mavens feel like they're just knocking together JS
and wonder when they'll be allowed to do real engineering. The backend
specialists wonder why they don't understand networking or servers better. The
DevOps folks envy folks who build things. The American office wonders why they
can't speak foreign languages; the German office marvels that anyone can learn
Japanese; the Japanese office worries their English isn't up to the global
standard.

There's nothing wrong in specialization -- it's how we stay sane. A very
workable and easy to understand formula early in your career is specialize in
two things; you don't have to be better at X and better at Y than everyone you
meet, you have to be "better at X than anyone who is better at Y" and "better
at Y than anyone who is better at X." This is very, very achievable,
regardless of how highly competent your local set of peers is.

Also, unsolicted advice as a sidenote, but life is too short to spend overly
much time in negative work environments. Assuming the negativity isn't coming
from you, changing environments to one of the (numerous!) places where happy
people do good work might be an improvement.

~~~
rrherr
Reminds me of this:

"Data Scientist (n.): Person who is better at statistics than any software
engineer and better at software engineering than any statistician."

[https://twitter.com/josh_wills/status/198093512149958656](https://twitter.com/josh_wills/status/198093512149958656)

~~~
QuercusMax
That's very helpful. I was having trouble parsing "better at X than anyone
better at Y" and vice versa; this is a perfect example.

------
inputcoffee
Oh, you will feel much better once you have mastered:

1\. Programming chips in binary, machine code, and C. You need a variety of
chips. Try to learn at least 5 from each manufacturer.

2\. Learn at least 37 Javascript frameworks, as evenly divided between front-
end and server side as you can. (Good news: angular 1 and 2 count as 2
frameworks).

3\. Learn Scala, Rust, Haskell, C, C#, Java. (Python and Ruby go without
saying).

4\. Learn R, machine learning, statistics (prob and regressions), linear
algebra and multi-variate calculus.

5\. Learn growth hacking (edit:) and lean startup, human centered design, and
design thinking.

6\. Learn accounting, finance (go through Markowitz, to Black Scholes, Fama,
CAPM, and factor models. Read the original papers only and implement
everything yourself, in 2 languages).

Now you are ready to read HN.

~~~
te_platt
Hardly. You still need:

1\. An in depth understanding of Physics, History, Literature, and Philosophy.
You can just make up whatever you want in Economics, Sociology, and Bitcoins
as fits your political leanings.

2\. Learn to resist weapons grade grammar analysis.

3\. Learn to recognize sarcasm in short, written text.

~~~
roryisok
> 3\. Learn to recognize sarcasm in short, written text.

No need. This is HN. Someone's bound to have used machine learning to crack
this already.

~~~
mbrock
Duh, haven't you read "Automatic Sarcasm Detection: A Survey" by Joshi,
Bhattacharyya and Carman?

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.03426](https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.03426)

~~~
fho
And for a second there I thought that you just made that up :-)

------
groby_b
Here's the dirty secret: You'll always feel that way.

I'm in this for 30+ years now. (Yikes!). My resume is somewhat nice. I've got
a deep store of knowledge and experiences. A large group of people considers
me somebody you ask for advice.

And yet, every day, I still learn something new.

Sometimes because it's a new paper cycling about. Sometimes an HN article.
Sometimes because some other senior person shares from their wealth of
experience. And quite often because a junior does something in an unexpected
way - knowledge comes from every corner.

I _still_ feel like I have no idea what I'm doing. I'll probably feel that way
for the rest of my life. All my colleagues do.

So, don't worry. There's always somebody who's better than you, and that's
great, because you can learn from them.

~~~
alexashka
Imagine you are going for surgery and the doctor tells you 'yeah, I have no
idea what I'm doing, really'.

You'd be very interested in knowing whether it's 'I just graduated from med
school, I'm barely competent', or 'I've been doing this 30 years, the more you
know, the more you realize how much you don't know'.

Those are not the same.

Insecurity is there for a reason - to let you know you should tread carefully
and learn more.

The feeling of insecurity will go away when you're competent. The feeling of
wonder and curiosity hopefully remains until you die - the author's problem is
not the feeling of wonder that the parent is referring to :)

~~~
dek0de
I know you used surgery/medicine as a parable, but I would argue that
competency is probably a little easier to objectively gauge in those fields
than in Computer Science, for instance.

~~~
i336_
Objectively, yes, but in practice, doctors sometimes work 12 to 30 hour
shifts, all while the medical establishment actively tries to educate that
tired driving is worse than drink driving...

------
dasil003
I've been a professional web developer for 18 years now. I was very much on
the bleeding edge of web standards, and jumping on Rails in 2005, I did
everything from managing my own servers through backend, front-end and design
in Photoshop. At the time the web was still a very greenfield type of place
that was uncolonized by the top talent in either software engineering or in
design, as a result it was possible to be one of the best web generalists with
a little bit of aptitude and a lot of interest.

Fast forward ten years and every discipline of web development now goes very
deep. It's still worth it to have a broad skillset, but it's no longer
practical to be upper echelon across the board in web development. This
generally leads to a feeling of overwhelm and regret that I can't learn all
the things I possibly might want to learn, but on the bright side the
playground is bigger than ever.

My advice is don't spend too much time thinking about the big picture, instead
pick one practical project at a time and spend 95% of your time making it the
best you can. Even if you only read HN a couple times a month, that's all you
need for basic awareness of the landscape. By giving yourself heads-down time
you can replace some of the overwhelm with a feeling of accomplishment, and
you'll be growing your skills to boot.

------
abakker
What you are feeling is the exact opposite of hubris. It is _good_ that you
feel overwhelmed by looking at the universe of possible technologies and the
pace of change within them. It sounds to me like you need to make peace with
that, and then decide for yourself where you want to build expertise. You can
extreme depth, extreme breadth, or something in between. According to IDC,
worldwide IT spending is going to be around $2.5trillion this year. Its a big
world with tons of products, disciplines, people, and very little of it is
totally static. In fact, large swaths of IT probably get very little mention
on HN.

To reiterate though, pick your battles, follow your interests/employment
possibilities, and make peace with the fact that you can't know everything.

~~~
marmaduke
I think the opposite of hubris is called nemesis, or what happens after
hubris.

I'd say the OP is describing humility, a quality which is essential imho

~~~
abakker
I think you may be right, however, Hubris is a "feeling" while nemesis is an
"Agent". So, it is possible for you to be my nemesis, but you can't be my
hubris.

Humility vs Hubris do seem to be opposites.

~~~
marmaduke
Good point about agent versus feeling. If my Greek friend is a reliable
reference, the words originated in Greek mythology wherein a human acting in
hubris would be punished by the gods, the punishment was called nemesis.

------
cubano
Everyone is overwhelmed by envy-stoking social media. Humanity simply did not
evolve to process information from the whole world instantly.

Up to a short time ago, _most humans never ventured farther then 5 miles from
their birthplaces_ in their entire lives. Before printing presses, books, and
finally newspapers, all news was word of mouth...a very limited bandwidth
indeed.

Even newspapers really were nothing but mostly gossip and had very limited
work-related information for almost everyone, so feeling totally overwhelmed
by the avalanche of targeted career knowledge is not only ok but actually
totally appropriate.

------
hunterjrj
I think that the structure of the commenting system here at HN might
contribute to this feeling.

Usernames are de-emphasized and there is no indication of karma/reputation. A
trick of perception can lead one to read this forum as if the same handful of
broadly knowledgeable people are participating in every discussion.

The reality is, I believe, quite the opposite. There are hundreds of us here,
and we all have depth of knowledge in vastly different areas. There are
developers, DBAs, sysadmins, doctors, lawyers, writers... I think once I saw
someone mention that they were a welder.

Keep that in mind when reading the comments here.

~~~
i336_
FWIW, I do note the usernames comments come from sometimes, particularly if
they're insightful.

Regarding the numbers here, I'd say there are multiple thousands, possibly 5
figures. The top article about Apple refusing to publicly backdoor the iPhone
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11116274](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11116274))
got 5667 points. And sometimes my comments will attract a reply chain but not
get upvoted, which shows that some proportion of people doesn't upvote here.

------
agibsonccc
Specialization actually isn't a bad thing. I'm the CTO of an AI company
dealing with some very complex problems. I've even written an oreilly book on
deep learning. I tell you this for perspective.

I can't design for crap. I don't understand the thought process and don't even
want to put cycles in to trying. It's not time well spent.

I'm also an enterprise founder. I don't mind wearing a suit selling to folks
who have obscene requirements with 6 month to year long sales cycles. I don't
understand B2C companies at all. I could never run one. The idea of catering
to hundreds of millions of people with none of them paying you _while_ relying
on VC to scale blows my mind. I feel similar about small business.

I like the idea of a smaller number of big name customers with large
requirements. I also understand how they work: They are for profit
organizations trying to make money or cut costs. I see consumers (despite
doing a ton of data) as a blob of irrational behavior I don't want to deal
with.

I also can't do marketing. I can kind of write when needed but my main focus
is on technical content or specialized pitches.

Being on HN is very similar to being a founder, you see everything and wonder
how the people around you do what they do. Don't worry about it! You hired
them for a reason.

Hope that helps!

------
bingo_cannon
I was overwhelmed at first. Every time a Show HN would pop up, I was amazed at
how individuals could deliver on so much alone. So I accepted these things:

\- There will always be people who are better than you, in any field. I see it
as a positive and a great learning opportunity.

\- There will never be time to learn everything you want to learn.

The question I try to answer is: Am I doing the best I can at the moment? Of
course, this can also lead to complacency.

~~~
losteric
The internet solved discoverability but gave us the problem of consciously
_avoiding_ information, learning about the right things at the right level and
accepting some ignorance in favor of specialized deeper understanding.

Personally, I forward everything from HN's front page, every tech-relevant
subreddit, major tech companies and software projects, roughly 30 blogs,
Twitter, and blogs/changelogs for every project/service I depend on (for work
or side projects)... all straight into my email.

Rules automatically curate emails into prioritized / categorized folders.
Setting up those rules was my solution to information overload - reviewing
rule relevance is the same as measuring how my attention investment tracks
against long-term learning goals.

One process for managing my work, personal life, and interests :)

10 minutes a day is enough to follow every personally relevant development. I
do a deeper hour-long review of lower priority content at least once a week,
but my email is an effectively infinite backlog of interesting-possibly-
relevant information.

~~~
ferdterguson
> I do a deeper hour-long review of lower priority content at least once a
> week, but my email is an effectively infinite backlog of interesting-
> possibly-relevant information.

As a zero-inbox kind of person this is terrifying. It's already enough effort
to keep up with the new journal articles every day. I use my morning commute
to do that and my evening commute to unwind and read the more interesting
stuff.

~~~
losteric
I don't think you understand, my inbox is almost always at zero :)

This folders and rules was my strategy for balancing the need to be hyper-
informed, well-organized, and not-overwhelmed... only uncategorized content
shows up in my inbox.

My "High Priority" folder has subfolders for friends, family, bills, and other
things that have to be kept at 0. The "Low Low Priority" folder has folders
for online store emails that useful a couple times a year for discounts when I
need a new shirt or something, auto-deleted after 14 days. In between is
_everything_ , nicely triaged and categorized.

It's really more of a personalized private ad/tracker-free mobile and cli-
compatible individual media aggregation service - perfectly managing the flow
of the internet into my brain :)

~~~
i336_
So, I'm trying to do what you do, entirely using browser tabs. It concretely
doesn't work.

After 200-400 suspended tabs open and a browser chewing molasses, I tend to
export all URLs to a list for One Day In The Magical Future™, kill my session
and restart.

So yeah, I'm very interested to find out what rule system you use - is this
bespoke, or using standard email client features?

Also, what email client do you use? I've been trying to find a medium between
"old computer becomes unusable after >10 tabs are open" and "fast, native
information-presentation applications (like terminals) are text-only and don't
support images" for 15+ years.

I use Gmail's basic HTML mode 99% of the time. It... I can't say I like it. I
want something that doesn't use Qt and GTK+, because I perceive more lag with
applications that use these toolkits than I did with lightweight WinAPI apps I
ran on Win98/Win2K machines with half the hardware capability.

~~~
losteric
Browser tabs were a different part of the puzzle, for me anyway. This is my
preferred way of managing information:

* My email pulls new information into my digital sphere of awareness. * Browser tabs/history manage active context and mid-term working memory. * Bookmarks (poorly) curate resources for long-term information retrieval. * My git-backed repository of notes tracked my own thoughts and plans.

Fastmail, gmail, and my old university Outlook account all support creating
rules, however I am not aware of any RFC standards around rules. My adhoc
suite of scripts for pushing content to email is entirely custom.

I like Thunderbird, but it's a pig at 300MB memory consumption... however it's
open source and does what I expect.

~~~
chrismorgan
Sieve scripts
([https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5228](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5228))
are the standard for email rules; FastMail uses Sieve scripts internally and
also allows you to write your own if you desire:
[https://www.fastmail.com/help/technical/sieve.html](https://www.fastmail.com/help/technical/sieve.html).

~~~
losteric
Oh that is so freaking cool, thanks for sharing!

------
smacktoward

       Fill your bowl to the brim
       and it will spill.
       Keep sharpening your knife
       and it will blunt.
       Chase after money and security
       and your heart will never unclench.
       Care about people's approval
       and you will be their prisoner.
    
       Do your work, then step back.
       The only path to serenity.
    

\-- _Tao Te Ching_ , Stephen Mitchell translation
([http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/taote-v3.h...](http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/taote-v3.html))

~~~
twoquestions
I need to get this carved into my steering wheel.

I need to burn it into my brain that it's acceptable to be adequate.

~~~
smacktoward
If that excerpt spoke to you, I can't recommend the whole thing highly enough.
Mitchell's _Tao_ is beautiful -- one of the few books I can honestly say
changed my life. (I wrote a bit about how here:
[https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2016/08/books-love-stephen-
mitche...](https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2016/08/books-love-stephen-mitchells-
tao-te-ching-new-english-version/))

------
mothers
HN in a way can be considered a monolith with thousands of years of combined
cumulative experience in every domain and in every technology.

Of course, you, by comparison will seem lackluster. Realizing that a single
person on here may be lacking in specific expertise may give you solace.

------
beckler
As much as I love HN, it does make me feel extremely inadequate as a developer
sometimes.

I often dream about building some project that would provide me passive income
to no longer have to work a 9-to-5. It's not that I lack the skills to execute
on it, but as a father and a husband, I struggle to find time to commit to
such ideas while balancing time with my family. The only time I attempted to
build my own product, I ended up getting fired from my daytime job because of
performance reasons. It only discouraged me from attempting to pursue anything
further.

I've learned that I just can't compare myself to others here, because it just
makes me horribly depressed.

------
crispyambulance
There is quite a bit of braggadocio going on here too.

What may sound super bad-ass might just be a 20 year old intern riffing like a
BOSS!

------
alexashka
You'd benefit from clarifying what it is that you really want.

More money, better work environment, be better at computer science, etc etc.

These are all different things and require a different approach. The sooner
you figure out which one you value more, and understand that you'll have to
neglect some other things in order to succeed in that area, the better you'll
feel.

For example you didn't mention any education - if you want to not feel like a
fraud, you'll have to educate yourself on all the things a common 4 year
program teaches you. There is no way around it.

You may score a nice paying job in something like web-dev or mobile where
there's a lot of demand, but you'll be blindly stitching other people's code
together for a long time if you continue down that route.

The solution is to take some time to go fill in the fundamentals.

The more solid your fundamentals, the smarter and more interesting the
projects you can be involved in, but you'll have to sacrifice time and money
to get there.

Clarifying your real intention is important.

As for not feeling overwhelmed - by being good at your area of expertise. If
you know you're better than most people at one specific thing that's in
demand, you don't need to worry that someone else is kicking ass in augmented
reality, big data or whatever hype phrase of the year is :)

------
rpeden
I sometimes feel the same way while reading HN.

I can usually cure it by going to a Sharepoint developers' meetup, or
something similar. Running into people who there who are doing consulting work
and doing very, very well for themselves while working significantly less that
40 hours a week and using almost none of the cool stuff that gets mentioned on
HN.

I suppose the lesson there might be to avoid a game of one-upmanship with
alpha nerds. And I don't say 'alpha nerds' in a derogatory sense. It's just
that on HN, you're going to encounter lots of people who will run circles
around you in one domain or another. And some people _love_ being the absolute
expert in their particular technical domain.

That's okay. Good for them, actually! Everyone should do what makes them
happy. You might find you're actually happier in a role that is more concerned
with the business problems you're solving than with needing to be an expert in
everything you see mentioned on HN. Your technical skills will be important,
but not as important as your ability to use those skills to help a business 1)
save money, 2) make more money, or 3) both.

------
Mz
No, I don't feel overwhelmed. I am just happy to know of a place where it is
possible to find meaty discussion that is reasonably civil.

I think this is a perspective problem. You need to stop comparing yourself to
everyone in all things. That isn't what I come here for. I just come here to
gratify my intellect and enrich my life. You don't need to compare to people
here. You need to compare yourself to people you are in actual competition
with at work or compare yourself to the work standards you are expected to
meet. Don't come here and do that. It will only lead to misery.

------
gdulli
You have to accept a lot of it is noise, or effectively noise.

Some of it is wrong, some of it will never be relevant to you, some of it
could relevant to you but not knowing it will never hurt you. Some of it could
possibly be relevant but will be obsolete or out of date by the time you get
around to using it. Some of it is nonsubstantive self-promotion. Just focus on
some area you want to improve on at a given time and do it. Read what you want
to read and have time to read and ignore the rest.

Just because someone puts up a nice-looking blog post with some information
doesn't mean they're right, or better than you. Not that it matters if they're
better than you. You could be in the top 10% and that still leaves hundreds of
thousands who are better than you.

That's assuming there's some pure linear scale of developer quality anyway,
which there isn't. People are fingerprints, not points on a linear scale.

------
skadamat
I strongly recommend reading the following book -
[https://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-
You/dp/14555091...](https://www.amazon.com/Good-They-Cant-Ignore-
You/dp/1455509124)

It's a fantastic book by a now tenured CS professor that provides a good
framework for how to think about your career / career satisfaction. He
encourages working backwards from the lifestyle you want to the skills you
need to master to where you are right now. His framework provides a lot of
clarity and helps you ignore the roller coaster of announcements, updates, and
new "things" you _FEEL_ like you need to stay on top of.

You can also just read some of his blog posts - calnewport.com/blog - if you
don't feel like buying the book. Or check out some of his interviews, etc.

------
rroriz
Read about the T-Shaped profile mentioned on the Valve's Employee Handbook[1].
It's a nice concept on how to know when to learn something new and when to
learn more about something that you already know.

And calm down: HN users are really heterogeneous. Trying to be like everyone
here is impossible. Even you find someone with the same profile as you, it is
a nice thing to know that there is something new to learn. A bigger problem is
when you don't have anything new to learn.

[1][http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...](http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf)

Edit: And answering your question: I feel overwhelmed when I learn somenthing
new here, and there is already another article telling me that what I learned
is obsolete.

------
darksim905
I'm a Sysadmin on the east coast & I feel completely wrecked every time I read
the comments here. The level of brain power & swell here is beyond me. Some of
you can be a little brash, though. I wonder if it's just you guys are all on a
different level, cognitively, are taking drugs, or what. But the precision at
which some of you respond to comments, clarify things and/or just rip apart
content, is fascinating.

------
RandomOpinion
> _Anyway, back to the original question. Does anybody else come on here and
> feel overwhelmed?_

No, or at least not much. Most people have a specialization or two, whether it
be front-end, back-end, mobile, application, embedded, games, etc., which
limits the scope of what you really need to care deeply about.

Beyond that, it's a matter of your own personal curiosity and desire to expand
your abilities; my reaction to most articles is "hmm, that's interesting; I'll
remember that in case I ever need it" with just a scant few meriting a "I need
to dive into that because I also want to have that knowledge / skill."

------
apohn
Reading HN is extremely overwhelming. I'm in the data science field. So I read
yet another Deep Learning article on HN and wonder how long it is till I'm
unemployed and bankrupt because I barely know anything about deep learning and
have no opportunities at all to use it at my job.

Then I remember the following.

1). I'm employed, my manager is happy with the work I do, and I make enough
money to pay my bills, have savings, and live in a decent place in a safe
neighborhood.

2). I don't have to be better than everybody else at my workplace. I just need
to find an area where I can contribute.

3). When I apply to other jobs I get some positive responses. I know people
who would be happy to recommend and hire me if they can.

4). I've met more than a few people who can talk about data science like they
can solve any business problem under the sun, but cannot actually do much of
anything except talk.

5). There is plenty of stuff I read on HN that is clearly wrong or
exaggerated.

I think the key is to focus on what you need today to stay employed and have a
realistic assessment of your weaknesses and where you want to go. Then figure
out what you need to get there and slowly work towards that that. I don't need
to know Rust, Go, and Vue.js because they have nothing to do with my job or
where I want my work direction to go. If they day comes when I do need to
learn that stuff, I'll learn it.

------
MajorWalrus
I experienced much the same thing when I first discovered HN. What helped me
was the realization that there's a difference between being aware of something
and being an expert in it.

I've found that it's not often that I need to be as intimately acquainted with
a subject as those who are feature on HN appear to be. In fact, just knowing
_about_ something has been enough for me to intelligently answer an interview
questions, converse with a senior engineer, or make the right decision on a
project. And usually that's because what's most important is being curious and
asking questions - e.g. admitting to myself that I'm not an expert.

Now, instead of being a testament to my ignorance and personal failings, HN is
portal that let's me feed my curiosity.

You may want to do some research on the impostor syndrome. It's been my
experience that anyone who's any good at anything is convinced they'll never
"catch up."

------
yodsanklai
A few comments come to mind.

Yes, there's so much to learn that you'll never have time for it, even if
specializing in a small area. It reminds me of a Chomsky interview. He said
that he has so many books left to read in his office alone that a lifetime
wouldn't be enough. You're in good company.

It may sound obvious but don't forget that HN isn't one person. The guy that
knows about particle physics is usually not the one that tell you about the
latest type theory research. Don't compare yourself with a collective mind.

Besides, I'm sure there are people less bright than you in all positions you
can imagine. Retrospectively, I realize that there are a lot of things I
didn't even try for fear of failing or because I thought I wasn't smart
enough. It's only a few years later that I realized I missed so many
opportunities.

~~~
eric_h
> It may sound obvious but don't forget that HN isn't one person.

Honestly I think the total absence of avatars can make it quite easy to forget
that HN isn't one person. "That person with their name in little grey letters
is a frickin' genius, jack of all trades"

------
wonderwonder
I used to feel this way and when I had time set aside to learn I would just
sit there and waste almost all of my time figuring out what to study because
there was so much. I would waste all my time doing this and not really
learning very much because the breadth of stuff to learn was overwhelming.

Eventually I just forced myself to choose one thing and focus on it. When I
get to the point where I feel competent in it, whether that's a day or 3
months, then I allow myself to move onto something else.

Don't get stuck in your head. Just choose something and commit, no one knows
everything, the posts are by hundreds of people, each with skills in different
areas. Know one knows it all.

------
jhgjklj
I too feel this way. But somehow all my superiors in my work has so much
confidence about how much they know about the project and can even project
themselves as know what they are taking kind.I am sure they do not know as
much as they think, because they are very confident in my area of work more
than i ever will be.

    
    
       The irony is the more i know the lesser confident i get and i reflect it in meetings. I dont know how to avoid it. I am really looking for a mental framework on how to not look like a complete idiot in meetings although what i say is totally factual.

------
omginternets
Take a break.

Try cutting the cord for a few days. It's refreshing.

------
alexandru88
I also feel overwhelmed while reading HN. Being surrounded by so many great
and smart people, I feel like I know nothing and like my entire career until
now was a waste of time and resources. I am also becoming addicted to HN. I
left Twitter behind and now HN is my primary source of information. I am
reading HN anywhere: in subway when I commute to work, in car while I stay in
traffic jam, before I got to sleep, at work, etc. Thank you all for making HN
such a wonderful place.

------
trelliscoded
I feel this way about frontend technologies that people talk about, but I
concluded a long time ago that trying to keep up with the latest churn in that
space is pointless. I have a few technologies which are stable and work well
for what I need, so I focus on keeping up with that. Every time I've tried to
chase the latest and greatest frontend fad it usually turned out it was an
immature reinvention of a wheel someone else already built better.

------
thefalcon
I simply accept and take advantage of the fact that HN is filled with many
people much smarter, much more accomplished, much more driven, much more
successful than me. I've never felt overwhelmed by it - that seems like it
would take a personal choice to put yourself in competition with the best of
HN, which seems a little silly to me (especially if the end result is not
something productive).

------
SubiculumCode
I am a cognitive neuroscience post-doc. In my work I have to be an expert or
at least competent in: cognitive theory relevant to my specialty, brain
science relevant to my specialty, neuroimaging methodology, non-trivial
statistical methods, as well as a competent paper writer, grant writer
storyteller, and talk giver, I regularly need to write bash and python
scripts, administer and operate a linux compute cluster. I also need to be a
good dad and husband, and that takes practice. I read HN and am impressed with
all the expertise and competence and also feel overwhelmed. I'd like to try
some ML on my imaging data, but I'm stretched too thin already. Maybe someday.
Or I'll partner up with someone. I have the urge to do it all, but I'm not
smart enough and I don't have superpowers to manipulate time. I'm aging. Time
is running out. Oh my god.

Pause.

Take a walk.

Do what you can.

It is ok.

------
vijucat
Absolutely. It's much worse if, instead of HN, you follow a niche area like
machine learning because the pace of progress is so fast plus each paper /
project that gets released is so _dense_. It took me a couple of weekends just
to set up an old box with Linux and the proper drivers for a GPU, learn python
virtualenvs, etc; Meanwhile, it's absolutely discouraging to look at
reddit.com/r/machinelearning and see the flurry of _productive_ activity.

I think a sense of resignation is actually useful here. Just resign yourself
to the fact that you'll never be as good as them and that it will take you 10
years to be able to just follow instructions under a Google or Facebook AI
scientist (, say). And continue to trod on like the tortoise in the tortoise
vs. hare story :-)

------
mdjt
"During that time I've become an integral part of my team and have constantly
been learning." First off, this sounds like you know a lot more than you give
yourself credit for!

Second, think about what kind of site HN is. This is a site whose DAU are
mostly highly educated (either formal or otherwise) from very diverse
backgrounds in tech, machine learning, etc., etc.. It should come as no
surprise that for any given topic there will be a ton of high quality and
interesting points of view.

As for the statement 2): "will basically feel the same as I do now." To be
completely honest, you probably will. Every new opportunity in life presents
you with a chance to learn and while learning most people often realize how
little they actually know. But that is why you are learning in the first
place!

------
stinkytaco
I can see how this would happen, so I doubt you are alone. There's so much
stuff and s o little time to consume it. My browser tabs and pocket account
seem to grow and grow and I seem to spend as much time organizing and moving
information as I do actually consuming it. I have trained myself as I've
gotten older to just let some of it go. Not everything has to be seen.

I think this is one of the (probably many) reasons feed readers failed and
chat came to beat email: the feeling of something incomplete. I had to force
myself to ignore unread counts to stop myself from going crazy, but Twitter,
HN, Reddit, etc. did away with outward signs that there were things unread,
and that's a good start.

------
127001brewer
No, because you can't expect to learn and use every new technology -
sometimes, it's better to know "proven but boring" than "new but broken"!

I appreciate more the insightful conversations than view a link to the latest
JavaScript framework.

------
rblion
Yes and no.

Yes that I realize I have a lot to learn and I should keep removing
distractions/bad habits and toxic people/situations out of my life. Yes that I
realize there are Ivy Leaguers in here and also people who work at the world's
largest companies.

No also because there is also a fair amount of hubris here. There are also a
lot of people who miss the forest for the trees. There is still a lot of room
for innovation in certain markets and the means of fulfilling human needs are
ever evolving even if the needs themselves are still the same.

I take breaks from time to time. Also I've recently deactivated my facebook
and unfollowed a lot of people on Twitter/Quora/Instagram. Feels great.

------
lmm
In my case, no. I don't know everything, but I know enough; I'm good at what I
do. I'm confident I'm contributing.

Sounds like you need to change jobs, if you're at the point of acknowledging
that your work environment is negative.

------
acomjean
Yeah there is a lot out there. I've been doing this for a while and tech
changes all the time. Don't worry about not being an expert at everything,
enjoy that there a lot to learn.

I don't worry too much about it, as long as what I'm building works and can be
maintained I'm happy.

The good news about tech changing all the time is if you wait there will be
some new language or framework so you didn't waste your time learning
something obsolete !

"An expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less till they
know everything about nothing" \- from a Murphy's laws on technology poster..

------
LarryMade2
Keep in mind:

\- Most solutions posted here probably won't just work for your problem, you
have to work it into your needs - concentrate on what works for you not
necessarily whats new.

\- Many really cool things took someone years to develop, you are just reading
a lot of different people's long-term accomplishments not a small group. And
most of those people were sticking to things that worked instead of chasing
the shiniest technology.

\- Theres more than one way to do anything, just because they may be currently
more successful doesn't mean you can't find new solutions, don't forget to try
your own thing.

------
3pt14159
You don't get good by worrying. You get good by loving to learn. I went to
college at ten years old to learn to program. I had a job when I was 14
working on invoicing software for telephone companies. At 18 I went to
university to learn engineering (structural). I lasted 8 months in industry
after graduating because of how bored I was not learning. It's not a bug its a
feature that there is so much to learn in CS. Embrace it. You're able to pay
the rent in under a year and the sky is the limit to how much you can learn.

~~~
fivestar
I see nothing in this comment that would require a downvote.

------
gorbachev
The greatest thing about a resource like Hacker News is that you get exposed
to a lot of ideas. It's up to you to figure out which one of these ideas
you're going to explore more.

Nobody explores all of them.

Figure out what's interesting to you and then go deep on that. Keep an eye on
the stuff that's not interesting to you just to develop contextual knowledge,
then when/if your interests/responsibilities change and you do need to go
deeper on stuff you didn't need before, you can get started more easily.

------
dhf17
I've felt this way too in the past but gradually realized that's it OK not to
know everything. Specialize in one area, make it your 'home base', and then
test the waters of other tech from there. Once you find something new that you
like you can gradually chip away at it and expand your skill set. I've got
several things on my radar right now, but still put my specialty first. With
this state of mind, I don't feel overwhelmed, but still have lots to look
forward to.

------
DoofusOfDeath
I'm guessing there's a few factors at play that lead to your perception:

(1) HN covers a lot of areas of software development; more than any one person
can really be expected to know. But each reader is ignorant regarding _how big
a fraction_ of the covered technologies are well-understood by the other
readers.

(2) HN stories often involve technologies related to web-development,
containers, or virtualization. Those technology areas spawn inordinate numbers
of tools, frameworks, etc. This exacerbates issue (1).

------
b3kart
Try doing DL research these days -- just skimming through new papers takes
most of your day. :-)

The thing that helped me the most was to realize that you _have_ to
specialize, at least to some extent. It's impossible to know and do
everything, no matter how much you would like to.

Pick "your thing", and worry about staying up-to-date on it. Everything else
skim through just to understand what's going on. How broad "your thing" should
be depends on how much time you're willing to spend.

------
tomschlick
Tech in general is a fast moving target.

Don't try to master everything all at once. Just learn what you need, or what
interests you and then on to the next thing. There is no "done".

~~~
johansch
I think there _has_ been an explosion in potential distractions the last
couple of years though. Everywhere you look, new frameworks, platforms and
languages, as far as the eye can see. So much shiny stuff. And it just keeps
coming. (I do think something has changed in like just the last five years or
so. Github has been an important part of it, I think.)

~~~
petra
Does this change also appear in usage numbers, is real large scale use in the
industry much more divided among tools since before 5 years ago ?

------
slake
That's one way to look at it. The other way is to gaze in wonderment to how
much there is in the world to learn. And learn just for the sake of it. The
day I look at the world and don't find enough interesting stuff for me to
learn about is the day I'd really be afraid.

Your work situation can be remedied. Lots of companies require good engineers
who're willing to learn stuff rather than pre-know stuff.

------
mino
Just have a look at:
[http://n-gate.com/hackernews/](http://n-gate.com/hackernews/)

:)

~~~
qb45
It actually is quite useful, I sometimes find interesting stories there which
I missed when they were submitted.

------
robteix
The old adage of not comparing your life to somebody else's highlight reel is
valid for HN as well.

You'll never master everything. No one does. Take it easy. You say you've
become an integral part of your team and that you're constantly learning. You
seem to be on the right path.

------
OJFord
Even if you assume every comment you read is written with good authority, bear
in mind that each time you read a comment on a different topic it is in all
likelihood written by someone else; the two authors couldn't have written each
others' comments.

------
bsvalley
Life is all about learning new things. Feeling overwhelmed is part of our
life. You should break it down into small chucks and start learning one thing
at a time. Just learn one new thing everyday, you'll endup knowing a lot in a
year from now.

------
h1d
You'll realize everyone is only good at 1 thing. Taking everyone against you
certainly makes you feel overwhelmed but after you realize 4 years is nothing
and you are financially stable, you'll feel better.

------
aaronhoffman
There is a lot out there, you don't need to be an expert in every new thing.

Strive to be a helpful, open, honest team member, with a thorough
understanding of core patterns and practices. (e.g. SOLID principles)

------
fav_collector
The only people who comment on the technical posts are the experts in that
domain/topic. Most readers just read silently and don't have the
knowledge/context to comment

------
sigi45
4 Years is not much.

HN starts to fall in pattern as a lot of stuff you do. There are those new
cool hip stuff, papers, a few deep inside blogposts and it repeats itself.

Enjoy HN as long as it holds :)

------
mayanxoni
Yes, I do feel overwhelmed while reading Hacker News, 'cause it is the only
community where I feel free from getting absurd ads. :)

------
psyc
Find comfort in the fact that broad mastery takes a very long time, but there
is always room for apprentices and journeyfolk.

------
JanhLinxProject
Yes it may feel overwhelming at times, but the trick is to be focused and
selective what you read.

------
lhuser123
And I just found out there's so much smart people here. Seriously.

------
xiphias
Have you been learning from your team? Although HN is nice to find about
interesting things, there's nothing that can give me more experience than
focusing on my team's goals. Focusing on execution is the most important and
most translatable skillset you can have besides interviewing.

------
Danihan
I feel underwhelmed...

~~~
floatboth
Yeah, exactly. Sometimes I open HN and find no new things that are interesting
to me. I guess I'm opening it too often :D

------
Jimmie_Rustle
no

