

Ask HN: Going Through a Crisis/Burnout - Advice - __throwaway__

Hi all.<p>I am going through quite a tough time of it lately, and would really appreciate some help + advice from hn, if that doesn't sound ridiculously vain and entitled. I am posting via a throw-away here, but am a moderate, if low-key, contributor to hn.<p>Some disclaimers: Forgive the life story aspect of this post. Just need to get it all out. Also apologies for the unrelenting sense of entitlement throughout. I am expressing how I feel, really feel, and that inevitably makes it sound as if I am not grateful for my first-world privilege. I am.<p>Background - feel free to skip...<p>Firstly, some background. I grew up in a family pretty much totally committed to a bordering-on-cult, but not really (a milder form - perhaps you could call it a sect?), whose tenets included the idea that we each have a 'natural talent' ordained by God and to go against it meant never really being able to find happiness/success.<p>'Thankfully' there is a person in this organisation whose 'responsibility' it is to (conveniently based on a letter you send them outlining interests/areas of academic success) dictate what your talent actually is. I was told to pursue a particular discipline in engineering, one in which I had no interest whatsoever. Thus began a very unhappy 5 years in which not only was I really unable to motivate myself to pursue the degree, but my family also fell apart due to my brother's repeated attempts to kill himself (thankfully all unsuccessful). I even failed exams one year, and suffered a lot of humiliation (professors telling me what a terrible student I was, etc.) and a complete undermining of confidence in my own intellect. I still managed to get a 2:1 from a good uni, but the experience has had a very serious effect on my ability to study anything, or even to hold my concentration long enough to get to any depth of understanding of a given subject.<p>So to programming - I have loved + programmed computers since I was 9 years old. I even contributed code to a relative's software firm when I was 15, though I did really little overall as a teen, certainly compared to many hn-ers. After uni, I decided I wanted to follow what I wanted to do, and worked an internal line-of-business job at one firm as a one-man team, then moved to another (my current job) where I've been for 4 years.<p>/Background<p>The situation now is that I feel quite desperate and despairing - I began feeling so passionate about programming but that has slowly been replaced with feeling utterly worn out + frankly terribly bored by it. I have had several overly-ambitious non-starter side-projects which I've screwed up, and busted so many interviews in such terribly crap ways that I've kind of lost count there too. I've spent 4 years at a place I am terribly unhappy at, and yet I can't pass a goddamn interview. I can't stand LoB/internal software anymore, and wonder whether it gets better anywhere else.<p>A large part of my anxiety at the moment is that I feel as if software engineering is all so much cargo cult bullshit. After reading articles on readability and quality of empirical evidence for readability tips, and certainly after reading a number of people's perhaps more cynical views in the community I have come to feel as if I simply cannot judge what is good or bad code, or at least that what I feel is good/bad is just bias. It's freezing me up and I find it utterly impossible to deal with the uncertainty of it all, something which attracted me to programming in the first place.<p>Another issue is feeling that the work can only be boring - it is impossible to motivate to work hard in spare time when you feel like you can't be passionate about something, and the idea that the 'reality' is that the thing is definitely boring, no matter where you work, is a horrific thought.<p>Another concern is that it's 'too late', 'too much competition', etc. and goddamn that grates at age 30. I am even considering a career change.<p>I suffer from depression, clinically diagnosed, so it's hard to know where that ends and 'real' concerns begin, but all-in-all I feel really down at the moment, and would appreciate people's help and advice.
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sixtofour
\- 30 is not old, don't worry about that.

\- Continue to deal with your depression. It's going to affect everything.
Take charge of your treatment and have a say in what works for you. Treat your
doctor as a team member, not a boss. Pay attention to all the "be healthy"
advice and decide what that means for you, but decide.

\- There will be software fashions and software eternal truths. You'll come to
know the difference. You'll also notice that fashion will change, and you'll
see some things fall out of fashion and come back years later. You'll also
find that things you held as eternal truths will change. So what? You don't
have to be right, you just have to be interested.

\- Maybe you want to step away from software for awhile, do something else and
come back.

\- Or something. It seems like, just vaguely, you could benefit from shaking
up the whole thing.

\- Overly ambitious projects: choose smaller scopes. Build up gradually.

\- You don't _have to_ stay in software, and you don't _have to_ leave
software. You don't have to do anything. You can do whatever you decide to do,
and there's no requirement to follow any particular path. Make lists of all
the mundane and outrageous things you can do, both career-wise and personal
wise. Leave nothing off the table. Decide to do some of it. But don't feel
like you have to commit the rest of your life to whatever you choose, you can
change it whenever you want. You're going to change _anyway_ (guaran-fucking-
teed), you might as well have some say in it.

------
dman
Do small things. If you love software get some job that pays you to write
code. Try to improve the status quo of the code at work in small increments.
The smiles you bring on users faces will give you the energy to start a
virtuous cycle of writing more software that people care about. Dont dwell on
doing significant things, dwell instead on pushing the boundaries of what you
know. Equalling a fields medalist is a depressing thought, knowing more math
than I did the day before is a much more meaningful and reasonable task.

