Ask HN: Novelty addiction is ruining my life and career. What should I do?
I have an extreme case of neophilia. Well, most of HN readers like new things, but in my case this is really extreme. I start many projects, but never finish them because they are inevitably losing novelty (I had better luck with shorter projects). I am a fairly decent software engineer, but I never held a job longer than 1 year (for the last 12 years), and recently I realised that the only thing that motivates me in software engineering is learning new things and trying new fancy toys, not building something working and useful (this is obviously an invalid approach in engineering, and it makes me sad enough to consider leaving this career path for good). I've been fired from 2 jobs this year (having a stellar start, then quickly boring for good). Everything I do seems to be motivated by novelty, it seems like a dangerous addiction now. I am 32, jobless, and have more than $50k in debt now.
What should I do? Is there a cure from novelty-seeking behavior? Or how it can be managed to be useful, not disabling? Please help, if you have any experience coping with this...
201 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] threadAlso: have you considered contract or consulting work? If you have the freedom to travel around for work, it can be more dynamic and rewarding than your current pattern.
I do see therapist occasionally, but it is quite expensive (especially given my loads of debt) and doesn't help much. I was diagnosed with ADD, and therapy helps with some focus related issues, but not with novelty seeking behavior. :(
What helped me is outsourcing the administrative stuff (book-keeping, taxes) to an accountant and forcing myself to meet with him once per month physically, best is to make an appointment a month ahead. Insisting on the physical meeting is a trick to force myself at least once in a month to prepare for the meeting (getting all the documents together, travel receipts, invoices, letters). It costs a lot of money but it is worth it for me.
The next trick has a similar pattern: find somebody to spend talking time on a regular basis, at least once per week. Not necessarily a therapist, but a friend, partner, colleague with whom share some common interests. Then force to keep those talking meetings. This helps, because you can talk about your anxiety, talk about what new things you have found, etc. I do it with a friend on a weekly basis and with a psycho-analyst at least once per week - if I don't travel.
The third trick I discovered only lately when being under huge pressure, in a situation in which I didn't know a way out: I started writing as a form of talking to myself. It worked best by "switching off the screen", i.e. typing without seeing what you type (either by literally switching off the screen, or by putting the font to same color as background - I made color scheme mode Vim), it gives you an additional motivation to re-read it later. When I first discovered this, it felt later like magic. I use this trick only when under big pressure - didn't make it to a habit, yet.
Maybe this advice helps.
I wish you to find a way to cope with your life and get to a situation where you can have a decent and more stable life, but still learn new stuff. Good luck.
That's really interesting. Have written to get stuff out before but there is always the reading, writing, rereading, editing flow that kind of makes it a pain. Going to try 'switching off the screen' next time.
I'd be interested to know how it worked for you.
I spent a long while, and still do, thinking about what am I heading towards. I know a lot of people don't know this and there is no way I will ever know all the details to make a decision, but I prefer the 'fail to plan, plan to fail' montra. Thus I plan, but am willing to scrap my planes in the wink of an eye, contingent on new infromation.
This is what I did and maybe you'll find something helpful in this method. Find what makes you tick. Make a list of things you enjoy doing. Try to be specific as you can. (You like novelty. Okay then maybe something like 'I like to learn a new trade skill (wood carving, stained glass, etc.) every 6 months.') Try to begin to boil it down to a long list. Keep adding things to the list, and take a break from the list every now and again (just to bring a fresh pair of eyes to it). If an idea seems broad, try to break it down (when I did/do this, I try to be able to tell someone the idea and they would be able to go out and do it exactly how it is in my head).
Then next to the list make columns like 'Financially sound ideas' (buying 32 Raspberry PIs to make a large cluster computer is not as financailly sound as Learning how apache2 works), 'Speed of doing' (you can learn how to write C at a basic level in an afternoon, but learning how to weld may take you longer), 'Practical for you to do' (if you weigh 400lbs and wanting to go backpacking through the Rockies is not as practical as learning how to write better on a whiteboard), 'It would bring me immediate gratitude', 'it would bring me long term gratitude', etc.
After you make a large list rank each column with 1-5 or some other ranking system (I liked the 1-5 because I could say I really hate, sort of hate, neutral, like, love an idea). Then you can hopefully start to see things that rank high in each category you made. (e.x. I really want to take a trip around South America (drive for two weeks or so through the Andes). It isn't practicle, it isn't quick to do, it isn't finacially sound, but it would be one hell of a memory. It is something I want to strive towards and go one day.)
What's killing me is inability to stop learning and start focusing on doing, intensely and persistently. When I have a job, I can't focus on the job. When I try to run my business, I can't focus on administrative side and routine (and successful routine is the essence of every business). I only want to learn, even if it is self-destructive, even if there are many more urgent and important things to do.
So, novelty seeking, I do this: - work part-time on something i'm passionate about as it's products that help others. Research based, which brings more novelty naturally. Also, passion for me was the most important thing to keep my focus, not "interesting" as "interesting" gets boring. - spend rest of the time mostly building random side-projects that won't be finished, but I don't care, that's not the point.
Seems to be working well.
And very often, it is. But sometimes it ends up being the type of problem that requires a much more involved architecture change to solve correctly. It's not just a one line change, but something the whole team will have to sign off on. Which will require at _least_ 100 times the work of the usual two line fix. By this point, I already 'know' how to solve the problem, and it could be very easy to lose interest. But the error emails keep on coming. And they're easy to ignore because "they're just those weird errors we get from that 3rd party API we use so there's nothing we can do about it."
But these emails are really annoying. So I find I have to reframe the problems from understanding how to fix the issue to how to get buy in and get the fix actually deployed, and I haven't run out of these types of problems at any company I've worked at, and that works for me to keep my attention.
I would suggest you set up with a consulting firm - Thoughtworks for example tend to try out a lot of new things across the entire company. This means that getting from 0 to somewhere, quickly, is something they can really sell. The downside is the poor bastards like me who have to deal with no one wanting to throw out the 'prototype' version of the solution.
With your generalist skills, you may make a great developer evangelist who can give overviews and demos of new technologies at developer talks, internal corporate trainings, or online trainings. They get paid well and I have come across some right here on HN.
My Java code: https://github.com/atemerev/pms/blob/master/src/main/java/co... (saved me probably man-years in my consulting projects).
Code samples for Javascript, Matlab, Haskell and Go available on demand. :)
If, by maintainability, you mean "looking at the mess I did some years ago in some large project and see how it turned out", then yes, I avoided such projects and large teams. Most of my code was written either by me alone or as a part of 2-3 persons team.
So a new approach I am trying is the "GPU Pipeline of side projects". First, I choose to trim my list of side projects to a few important ones (4 is a number I like, so four). I work on them in a parallel pipelined fashion. So I have one that's more advanced, one that is being setup, one that is being fleshed out, one still in ideation phase (you get the idea).
Secondly, I realize that when building things, the novelty can come from "recursing down to the details". For example, setup a AWS pipeline for code deployment would mean, learning how to setup an Ec2 deployment, then a Chef or Puppet instance, then easy config management of them, best way to document our setup (gitbook etc) and so on.... So if we use our boundless curiosity, which is both a strength and a weakness, to look a little deeper, we will find enough novelty to keep going even in a "single" project.
What I realized is that one single project is like a LISP S-Expression. (project). You (eval project), and it returns (list sub-project1 sub-project2 interesting-research3 wonderful-idea4) All you have to do is keep eval'uating the sub-expressions till you hit an "atom" of truth to share with the world.
I'd perhaps recommend doing an MBTI personality test (there's a bunch of them on the internet). This might help you to understand the mechanisms behind your behaviour and most importantly give you some hints how to make yourself useful.
I recommend to consider psychologist only as last resort.
Other thing - become a remote freelancer. Get in to projects that last 1-3 months. You can make good money while doing what you like.
Also the short interest period on projects is not part of your personality, but it might be a stage. I had same thing, but turned out to be good for me. I used it to my advantage - I learned everything I could. I would jump from niche to niche making money along the way. My base would be marketing, from there I could freely move to tech, programming and consulting while making money. It took a while but I grew up from it. Now I am full stack startup owner - I do everything from programming, through customer service to marketing - and it is awesome.
Other possibility would be ADHD or some weird version of autism. ADHD would often have difficulties to stay focused even in new things. Autistic are often very picky about their interests and get easily bored about everything else. Which isn't exactly neophilia, but might appear like it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ENTP
The long-term passion and commitment come after some level of success, not before.
Steve Jobs didn't dream of dedicating his life to Personal Computing. It was his early successes that fed into his self-image and a feeling that it was what he was meant to do.
Maybe you need to find the right project.
Turn your weakness into a strength by publicly launching a new project every week. A new mobile app, web site, screencast, open source project, whatever. They don't have to be good, just a bit useful. Make things that you want and try to give them away and/or sell them to other people.
There are a lot of ways to make a living as a skilled programmer. Most people have trouble finding the right kind of project, and that's mostly because they don't iterate quickly enough.
PROS: 1. Your energy level would match the students 2. You could make sure the curriculum stays up to date, and every few years transition some large parts of the curriculum to a new language/framework. 3. You have tons of experience to draw for the many left-field questions you would get 4. The consistent new influx of students might feed that need you have for novelty
CONS: 1. Not sure if you could teach each session knowing 80-90% is the same content as the last, but you're just changing 10-20% for this batch. 2. Could you handle answering some of the same newbie questions every 3 months? 3. They would, like most jobs, want you to stick around, but this isn't a total CON, they are likely more amenable to you leaving than almost any corporate gig.
So maybe it's something to consider!
I do think you might need some more help in managing this, but in the meantime, you can always find work that fits what some part of you needs right now.
There's also academia -- though even there, you will need to follow through and translate your learning into something you can communicate to the scientific community.
You can look for research jobs or freelance, where you can try lots of things quickly.
Alternatively, find a business partner or team that complements your skills/interests.
"Component has bugs? Rewrite it in a new language!"
It sounds like you need to see a therapist. However I imagine that's difficult if you're in debt, so you probably need to first try to get a job and pay that off.
Honestly there's going to be parts of any job that you don't like. Unless you are filthy rich or have someone paying for you, you're going to have to do things even if they bore you sometimes. The best you can do is try to do them efficiently so you can spend more time learning.
http://www.salon.com/2012/12/01/nassim_nicholas_taleb_the_fu...
Take one of those jobs and spend your afternoons working on your own projects which can be implemented using whatever technology you want and can be as concrete as you want.
Look at your job as a necessary hell, but try to find the fun in it while at work and always remember that you have your fun projects back at home
Also, if you haven't yet talked about this with a mental health professional, you probably should. It may take trying a few before you find someone who understands your particular problem.
My first job in a R&D/Testing type role was working for an application service provider. I was responsible for evaluating new hardware from vendors before it would be released to our data centers. I had to not only test the hardware, but ensure the applications worked correctly, performance test, and document configurations. Each week was something new and I had great relationships with vendors such as Compaq, HP, Dell, and Microsoft that would constantly send demo hardware/software just so I could play. I left the job to take a position at Microsoft, and looking back regret it. I stayed at Microsoft for a little over a year for the same reason as you, I got bored. That is when I switched to just doing consulting.
But, if that doesn't work, I would look for positions in R&D for a company (that is the type of position where I traced my problem back to). Depending on the company/position you actually get paid to find and work with new "toys". Also, look at testing type positions.
I have some of the same tendencies, and infosec has given me all the entertainment I can handle and then some.
(There are other fields adjacent to software engineering which you might prefer as well---consulting, operations.)
Start a project, commit to the technologies beforehand, and deviate under no circumstances.
Facebook was built with PHP. AdWords was built with MySQL. Instagram was built with Django. GitHub was built with Rails. Stack Overflow was built with Microsoft technologies.
It seems there are few instances where a "boring" tech stack prevents the product from being built. If the idea is good enough, you'll make it work with what's on hand.
If you can commit to a stack, yet still can't finish a project, you may have to face some uncomfortable possibilities: that your ideas are no good, or that you're simply not a very good programmer.
Attention span is a requirement for being a decent programmer.
Commitment to stack is some problem for me, but it's OK for 6 months, maybe even a year. Anything longer-term, and I inevitably think something in the lines of: "this Java code now looks like shit, I learned so much new things, why not rewrite anything in Scala/Akka/Go/another interesting stack du jour?"
One could question if you really "learn" those new things, instead of merely skimming over them, since you don't seem to stay with them long enough to really get into the details.
Maybe what you're afraid is really learning? Which involves comitting to a stack, and also getting to the parts where a project approaches being finished, which is where the real and important issues emerge.
I've found two things that seem to help:
1. Start a startup. I started Fogbeam at least in part because it gives me an outlet to pursue things that are interesting to me, and a place to work on really cool new cutting edge stuff, even if my day-job doesn't. Back at my last "boring enterprise software development" job, I found that coming home and working on Fogbeam stuff helped keep me sane. (Note: in my scenario the startup is just a side project, but if you have savings or feel like raising money, I suppose you could just jump into it full time. YMMV)
2. Become a consultant. I started consulting for Mammoth Data back in 2012, and I've found that this consulting lifestyle is quite a bit more interesting than the typical "sit at the same desk, working on the same product, with the same people" routine. I'm constantly working on new and different things... every project is different, and since we focus on "Big Data", analytics, BI, etc., there's a non-stop stream of new technologies being invented / released that we have to try and keep up with. In the past year or two I've worked with Neo4J, Hadoop, Spark, Storm, Kafka, Knox, HBase, Phoenix, Couchbase, EMR, Google's Cloud stuff, Impala, Kinesis, Pentaho, and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. The downside, of course, is the need to travel a lot at times (which is another of those "good and bad" things) and the feeling you get sometimes that you're drowning in all this new stuff. Example: In the past month or two, 3 different major companies have released distributed Machine Learning platforms (Google, IBM and Microsoft). And every day or two there's some new Hadoop / Big Data related sub-project hitting the Apache Incubator. And as a consultant, I feel a need to be on top of all of that stuff.. which, unfortunately, it's pretty much impossible to be.
Another side-note: You may find that signing up for and taking lots of MOOC's on Coursera, Udacity, EdX, etc. may serve as an outlet for your neophilia, and might let you stay more focused at work. Just treat coming home and working on a cool new class on Machine Learning or Synthetic Biology or $WHATEVER as a reward for putting in a good day of hard, focused work at the day-job.
Later on, you can get business from LinkedIn, mouth to mouth, previous clients who now contact you directly etc.
There are research engineering jobs that also might be a good fit - you deal with a lot of different problems and get to satisfy your need to learn additionally from the researchers.
Sheesh ... what did you all think I was talking about?
I know this is HN, but you haven't really mentioned anything about novelty outside software. Now, I will try to not make assumptions, but is it perhaps that you are only seeking novelty in a very constrained way, which makes you feel uneasy about your choices?
What type of food do you eat? What hobbies do you pursue? Maybe you have a very monotonous life (or at least you think you have it) and try to compensate in your career with novelty.
If I were in your position, I would first write down when and where I experience these 'novelty rushes'. The key here is not looking at these notes after you write them for at least a couple of weeks. After a couple of weeks doing this, look at what you wrote and see if it maybe has to do with other factors in your life (maybe you rush to try something new after an argument with your wife, when you don't drink your coffee in the morning or when you don't go running for 1 or 2 days)
Perhaps it has nothing to do with your life outside this area, but maybe you just like reading documentation. At any rate, writing down what you are doing when you get these 'novelty rushes' would help you identify the problem. Hopefully.
I lived in 6 different countries (going through bureaucracy hell while getting paperwork done each time), visited another 20 or so, tried getting a PhD, founded two startups (failed both), etc etc.
Part of the problem. :)
I don't know if I can think of any practical advice. But I'm in the same boat, and I think this can be a good quality if it means you are constantly thinking of new ideas. I also love starting new projects, and have even been able to finish a few. Recently I even posted an unfinished project on Reddit, which got a few laughs, and that's all I was going for.
If you're up for it, I would enjoy chatting about some of the projects we worked on, and countries we've lived in. I'm still looking for the perfect place on earth to settle down for a while, although I think I might have actually found it this week (New Plymouth, New Zealand).
Feel free to send me an email, my address should be in my profile. And we can also maybe work on some ways to mitigate the addiction to new things.
Can't find your e-mail, contacted you through your blog form. :)
Colleges often offer low cost services if you're concerned about cost right now (with the ACA this should be less of an issue). There's often a waiting list, get on it now.
My story and maybe something for you to explore. I never held a job longer than 24 months when I was younger. Not being able to figure out a career direction and trying to get some direction in 2000 I sought testing at a great organization called Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation. They do aptitude testing and have been for 70+ years. Lots of data and studies on job satisfaction, aptitudes (which are different from both interests and skills), and success. Check out their web site they have some great info.
I tested high aptitude (80 - 99th percentile I think) on about 1/2 of the 19 or 20 aptitudes they've identified in their research. About 10% of the population tests this way. Most people have 3 or 4 max. The problem is if the aptitudes don't get used they agitate. Deeply. Like having a team of 20 sled dogs all fighting to run and no sled to pull or direction to go.
So I have learned I must use them or suffer the consequences. For example, Argentine Tango exercises my musical and social aspects. Engineering aptitudes, inductive reasoning, rapid idea generation, etc... all need expression. Some more so than others. Ideaphoria is rapid idea generation, handy in marketing or teaching, and a real pain if it is suppressed.
Commonly people with many aptitudes have a lot of difficulty with careers. Some use seasonal work or multiple part-time jobs or many different activities in one job to deal with what can often be conflicting drives.
Whether or not you are in this situation I don't know. What I did learn that may be of help was that I needed to respect the cards I was dealt in life. Gifts or burdens depended on how I looked at things. It's okay to have multiple projects and very diverse abilities and interests. Some may get abandoned quickly while others stick around.
Sharing seems to help. Get a blog up and start writing about all your projects. The ones that work and the ones that don't! For some reason sharing project results seems to help regardless of how they turn out. For example, I just had a surprising and inspiring response from HN readers on a blog post I wrote in November. I didn't realize other people would find what I was doing interesting enough to discuss!
I'm going to be 50 this summer and finally feel like I'm getting a handle on things. Keep at it. I hope some of this was useful. Get the help you need as you find the resources. Take care of your health, physical and emotional,and honor your gifts.
I really wish your response was higher up just for this line. It really hit home for me in helping me understand more about myself. Thanks for the response.
I'm definitely going to have to follow up on aptitude testing! I reckon I fit the description of sled dogs to a tee; I actually have absolutely tragic committal issues and I wonder if that might be the cause.
Link to website for Johnson O'Connor: http://www.jocrf.org/
Testing is apparently $675, $750 in NY.
FYI, this particular group doesn't franchise outside of Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D. C. - and sadly I'm in Australia.