Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?
My most recent gig after working for years in React and Angular I've had to move to a new framework (Vue) due to project requirements that I did not write. As a senior contributor I'm expected to handle the complex stuff but after five months on the project I feel fatigued - like I just don't care enough to work on this project. I don't know if it's JS framework fatigue or the project itself or even depression. But I feel like after 15 years of doing this I'm getting "dumber" to the point where I question the most basic things in coding. It's rather discouraging.
My boss is pretty cool and has kept an open door to let them know if I want to switch projects but I'm worried (without evidence) that if I say anything I'll be put on something even "harder" when I can't bring myself to write some simple JS these days.
Anyone ever experience this? I'm in my mid 30s.
325 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 280 ms ] threadThere are always new things to learn and you've shown that over the years. Once you have the reason you can try to address. It might not be clear, the reason and everything might feel like a drag but try to narrow it down, sharing with a friend/relative/mentor helps.
Think it's time for a career change, no idea what to do. This field has become tediously complex and saturated, no longer have the desire to keep up.
I don't know if this applies to you, so please remember this is an stranger on the Internet sharing an experience and not advice.
In my case if is just a project, I get on with it because when is done I can move to something more exciting or inspiring and that's my motivation to move forward. If it is just what I can expect of that role from that point on, I look for a change (move to a different team perhaps, or just change jobs).
It also helps me if I can do something different at home, in my free time. It has to be challenging and exciting, because otherwise the negative mood from work can take over and nothing will happen (and may make things worse; e.g. guilt for not working on that personal project).
Just like when learning a new spoken language resulted in me having two worlds of understanding and only later built the mappings between the two, which is why jargon is such a challenge.
So I try and learn without productivity and external expectations and by using curiousity.
I'm at the exact same point with Vue3. 10+ years of experience, created two fulls stacks sass'es as a Tech Lead but i feel so slow learning this new stuff.
Just installed a starter kit and been endlessly fiddling with a simple test frontend and couldn't get basic reactivity to work. I feel the documentation is riddled with advanced concepts and everything is way, WAY more complex than it has to be and there's no diagrams of the lifecycles and dataflow or what actually happens from user interaction to screen print - it's like theres a million steps now in a black box both in the build and on the user end. So many concepts, tools and atomisations to do rather simple things.
Hope its just lockdown-world fatigue that will heal or that these new conventions will "click" soon.
Does anyone have any good resources that made them enjoy the Composition api, Pinia etc?
Because it is. Mostly because it is relatively easy to create a complex system/framework. But incredibly harder to make a one that does the same but is simple to understand and use. And even among those, even less have all that well documented.
Oh, and writing good docs requires a separate set of skills. If the person that writes docs doesn't have years of experience in technical writing - there is a good chance you will have hard time understanding docs written even for a simple thing.
Also, I believe with age our bar for the quality of products and its docs raises as we don't have a ton of time to waste on digging into it.
In retrospect I actually knocked that project out of the park, but I was miserable for a number of reasons, burned out, and siloed off on a project that the company was bizarrely apathetic about. I developed a bleak outlook on what I was doing, and as I hit obstacles I think the bleak outlook increasingly extended to myself.
It was a great learning experience. These days I'm fairly sure I'll continue to learn because I love what I do, so long as my brain's still working at least. I might slow down here and there, but it's a mistake to think you've actually hit a hard limit or something. It's almost certainly external.
When I feel down or like I can't do my job well enough, I just remind myself how far I've come despite how low I've felt before, and how things have continued to go well. Don't let yourself get overwhelmed. Do let yourself take a break, though. You might need one to get a fresh perspective on things.
Good luck!
Both of us got CoVID at the beginning of the year but recovered fine. My wife suffered from depression as a teenager and suggests that I should consider seeing a therapist as it helped her but I don’t even know if what I’m feeling is depression.
You most probably haven't recovered fine, and I'd recommend discussing it with a doctor. I've been dealing with COVID aftereffects since early 2021. It's insidious and very, very real.
Edit: Until you've verified that post viral syndrome is not the cause of your problems, please IGNORE all the advice people are giving you to exercise. If you have post viral syndrome, your return to exercise needs to be very slow. Graded over months, not weeks. Overdo it and you'll regret it.
Further edit: In case it helps with googling, the symptom you may be experiencing is medically referred to as "brain fog" and the risk with over exercising is experiencing "post-exertional malaise".
To you're original question I'm sure you can still learn, it's just that you can't, at the moment, learn what you think you should be learning. There's undoubtedly a complex mess of social and physical and psychological reasons behind this. Doing the work that's required to understand this mess and find a way through is hard but you can do it. Take care of yourself.
I've been coding professionally for 25 years now. I've made many transitions to new languages, technologies and platforms. This is only the second time in my life that my enthusiasm suffered (the last time was due to a bout of acute depression a decade ago).
Don't give up. Things will get better. And remember to get regular exercise; it helps a lot!
Thinking about a pandemic or a third world war really bugs people out, taking them out of a creative mind mode, I guess.
I have no advice to give, because none of it seems to really work for me. Just letting you know you aren't alone in your feelings, because they mirror mine.
That's what saved me in my then mid 30s in a comparable circumstances.
Maybe he meant something else
Testosterone increases dopamine in a lockstep fashion - increase testosterone any way you want and you'll increase dopamine level too. Dopamine, on its own, increases the desire for exploration.
Testosterone is also linked to improved logical thinking, you wouldn't believe.
I also mentioned walking. Walking increases serum level of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, BDNF. Serum level of BDNF i positively associated with the volume and density of hippocampus, which is responsible for the ability and quality of learning.
Basically, you need to walk (jog, run, bike, swim, row - whatever suits you) as much as you can to be able to learn as good as you can and you also need to lift heavy to increase testosterone. You need to lift heavy to balance catabolic processes induced by endurance exercise and to make yourself seek something new.
As a nice side effect, you will look and feel great. ;)
Deadlift does not generally activate or train muscles that you can use to move your ears. All other muscles will be used in deadlift.
It is single most taxing exercise. Even squats are less taxing: you can perform barbell squat without using hands [1], you cannot do deadlift like that.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg8D90wUvAo
The key to not having to deal with this problem anymore, for me, was starting to proactively switch things around to break the routine of consecutive work-weeks. One of my tricks was to do some kind of mini-vacation every 6-8 weeks, go somewhere new, leave work behind for 3-4 days. Even smaller things like regular social events can work wonders - anything that breaks the weekly routine.
Back when I'd get myself into burnout periods the most effective way to recover enthusiasm was to pick up a new skill, work-related or not. I was in my mid-30s in the late aughts and not entirely sure I wanted to keep coding - so I signed myself up for an 18 month "executive MBA" program to find out if I might want to do something else, and instead came out of that with a whole new outlook on how and why to write code.
Then around 5 years later I started writing code on the side, for myself, to gradually improve over the long term, and this can be absolutely therapeutic.
Try to switch things around a little bit, do something new, see if that helps?
In our professional lives, we are used to set quantified KPIs in a SMART way, and I wonder, why is it that our expectations are so comparatively low in our personal lives?
Basically just one of those meaningless buzz words that gets thrown around.
https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/ot...
Virtue signaling should be banned.
Specific: read the book Measurable: no ambiguity as to whether you've read it Achievable: a month is a reasonable amount of time to finish a book in Relevant: read a book to improve your reading habits Time-bound: it's not a project that'll hang over you for ages, you're done at the end of the month
1. Mood diary
2. Time spent on social media, negative
3. Hours of sleep
4. Steps walked, number of repetitions in exercise, calories burnt
5. Psychometric tests (help measure mental clarity) https://openpsychometrics.org/
6. N-back: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0220...
7. Active vocabulary test to measure available crystallized intelligence
8. Biomarkers, for example the simple Levine PhenoAge clock: https://michaellustgarten.com/2019/09/09/quantifying-biologi...
You don't gave to measure every one of these, of course. In my experience they are more or less correlated: good lifestyle interventions improve many measures at once.
SMART goals regarding these KPIs are pretty obvious.
My advice to OP: whether it’s burnout or not (and it does sound like it), you aren’t liking what you’re doing right now, so if you can, stop doing it for a while. Summer is coming. Can you take a sabbatical? If not, can you quit? If you are able to regain your energy and enthusiasm you will surely be extremely employable, so your overall risk seems low.
Use the time to nourish your body and your spirit. Get off the internet and into the outdoors. Don’t measure your steps or your sleep duration, instead, reflect on how you feel. Lay back in the grass and watch the stars and ponder your place in this vast universe.
I wish you good luck and if you are able to start this journey, I’m excited for you.
Otherwise taking a sabbatical is a nice decent feel-good advice.
> If you are able to regain your energy and enthusiasm you will surely be extremely employable, so your overall risk seems low.
And that's a big if.
Compare "take at least two weeks of vacation, where vacation is defined as not checking any email or voicemail and engaging in purely arbitrary activities not directed by an external authority, within the next six months" to "you need a sabbatical."
Heck, even your own wording is already edging toward SMART. Staying off the Internet and not measuring steps or sleep duration are quantifiable goals. Binary, but still quantifiable.
Those things actually help reduce burnout, in my experience. An hour of sleep can make a big difference.
1 - Wake up happy each day?
2 - Do not use social media?
3 - Sleep 8 hours per day?
4 - Walk 3000 steps per day?
5 - I fail to see how a personality test can measure mental clarity? Even if they aren't useless constructs. Thought "core self-evalutions" if taken regularly can be a good indicator of issue.
6 - Not sure what are you measuring. Work memory?
7 - "Available crystallized intelligence". Isn't this an oxymoron?
8 - Only if our bodies didn't show signs of aging.
1. Mood diaries are more about trends and avoiding depressive episodes, it's better to rate your mood in the evening so your professional life is included in the rating. For example if your manager stresses you out on your job, you may not think about it in the moment, but it may show on your mood diary as a week-scale trend.
2. Completely avoiding social media is an unattainable goal, thus usage should be limited to 0.5-1.0 hr.
3. Yes, and sleep well, which is quite hard.
4. 3000 is too little, I'd aim to 5000-10000.
5. There are various tests, I'm specifically interested in IQ-test https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/FSIQ/ but it's more or less interchangeable with N-back. IQ is a scary number, but it's a good barometer for how good you really feel. A difference between "a good day" and a "bad day" is clearly seen on such test.
6. Working memory and attention, yes. These are degraded by lack of sleep & stress & aging.
7. Again, lack of sleep & stress & aging tends to degrade active vocabulary, in my case.
8. Of course we age, but this aging process is malleable: some interventions are shown to decrease (!) the value of various aging clocks. Yes, the aging clocks themselves are imperfect, but this decrease is often correlated with subjective & objective improvements on other axes.
If you accept fundamentally mechanistic view of nature, biology and ourselves, you might as well position yourself to reap the benefits.
You're missing my point. What I deny is the usefulness of presented frameworks and tools. But it's fine if it's working for you and can work for others.
To be honest I don't have much energy either, unless I take stimulants. Which I don't do often due to reasons.
This is an example of an actual goal I have for members of my team - it is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic/Relevant and Time-bound. It's also tangential to the OP's topic here in a couple of ways.
Good things happen when you allow for slack, but we often put too much pressure on ourselves, and won't allow it.
I'm looking at it as a bit of "lucky lotto":
https://danlebrero.com/2021/06/30/cto-dairy-lucky-lotto-chao...
If you can phrase explain your problem in those turns there is a good chance it is burnout.
If not, it might be depression or something else.
In answer to your question though, speak for yourself. My personal goals are far more ambitious than my work ones.
In your opinion do you think that's been working well for the industry?
On the contrary, at larger scale (starting from middle management and all the way to the top), I have an educated opinion that structured measurement of KPIs and clearly defined goals is what differentiates "tech" companies from all the rest - which is to say, tech-companies are known for their powerful growth.
It's really obvious in the hindsight: managers are usually pretty disillusioned types and will avoid doing hard work unless properly incentivized, thus fine-grained unforgeable growth-adjacent KPIs are really at the heart of the tech-company's success. Overall corporation's fast growth is a direct consequence of the synergy of KPI growth across the org-chart.
I wish there was real senior roles you could grow into where your experience is actually valued, and you would gain certain power to make decisions, but then the argument is that you can't hire juniors anymore because they think it's too uncool to have a boss.
It's really rigged for shorter careers.
Tech is removing the root of the knowledge, migrating from understanding the solution, to quick copy&paste from some places.
This means 5 years of experience is the maximum you can accumulate.
Maybe years are not a good metric for experience.
As an example I can think of:
- jQuery, Backbone/Knockout, React progression
- C++03, C++11
- Qt Widgets, Qt Quick
- SQL to NoSQL and back again
- Windows NT, 2000, Server
On the other hand, AWS Lambda seems like CGI/FastCGI all over again, but with proper automation, so I have at least one data point on 20 year cycles (to confirm we need someone who is in profession for at least 40 years).
Seriously? Amending a trash fire with a mound of glowing embers (that can't all be extinguished because precious backwards compatibility -- e.g., `auto_ptr`) is "just reinvention"?
You can only hold that view if you don't understand C++11. :p You're more accurately complaining about "invention" (well, in the C++ world; in the Rust world, it's "C++ implemented our stuff").
I know I am stretching things a bit here, but IBM mainframes, multi-user Forth systems, and distributed QNX systems ranging from the 1970s to the 1980s -- not to mention UNIX systems -- could all support remote procedure calls or interprocess/interapplication scripting across standard APIs to some extent (for a loose sense of process or application, especially with Forth). Even Smalltalk back then could do that to an extent but mostly from a single-user perspective in the sense that Smalltalk is mostly about message-passing objects. Essentially, you could have a system that could talk to itself or other similar systems in standard ways.
Yeah, there have been so many cycles of forgetting and reinventing with new generations of programmers. Although it is true some things improve even as sometimes other things decay for a constantly changing kaleidoscope of opportunities and risks (a bit like host/parasite arms races in evolutionary cycles).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_CP/CMS
https://www.forth.com/resources/forth-programming-language/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX https://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/qnx_4.25_docs/tcpip50/pr...
And also from the 1960s-1970s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_%28computer_system%29 "Although PLATO was designed for computer-based education, perhaps its most enduring legacy is its place in the origins of online community. This was made possible by PLATO's groundbreaking communication and interface capabilities, features whose significance is only lately being recognized by computer historians. PLATO Notes, created by David R. Woolley in 1973, was among the world's first online message boards, and years later became the direct progenitor of Lotus Notes."
And from a different perspective, what is email but a standard way to do a remote procedure call to hopefully invoke some behavior -- even if a human may often be in the loop? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email
And from the 1930s an earlier Paul Otlet invented the idea of using a standard 3x5 index card to store and transmit information (mainly metadata): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet "Otlet was responsible for the development of an early information retrieval tool, the "Repertoire Bibliographique Universel" (RBU) which utilized 3x5 inch index cards, used commonly in library catalogs around the world (now largely displaced by the advent of the online public access catalog (OPAC)). Otlet wrote numerous essays on how to collect and organize the world's knowledge, culminating in two books, the Traité de Documentation (1934) and Monde: Essai d'universalisme (1935)."
For another example of cycles, my current favorite UI technology is Mithril+HyperScript+Tachyons for JavaScript (although Elm is great too conceptually, and likely inspired Mithril and React in part) which is so easy to use from a developer ergonomic point of view in part by (simplifying with a very broad brush) re-inventing the OpenGL video game paradigm of redrawing everything ...
"By the late 1980s, polyFORTH users such as NCR were supporting as many as 150 users on a single 80386-based PC."
Do you have any idea how that was done? I do not know any hardware way from that era that was able to connect 150 terminals to a single PC.
For anyone interested, there is a nice book about Paul Otlet: "Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age."
So if you had 6 of those, you could support 96 users. You could get expansion units too for the main bus: https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/dpt47y... "It takes up one ISA slot in the main PC, and then hauls the signal to the external box, where you can plug in up to 7 more cards, plus some RAM"
Which mentions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_XT#Expan...
So, using 6 slots in the first box, and 6 slots in the next, and 16 port serial cards, that's in theory 192 users on RS-232 lines. Anyway, this is just a guess. I vaguely remember hearing of some actual (lesser) systems with lots of RS-232 ports, but don't recall exactly how they worked.
One thing about Forth is that it could cooperatively multitask essentially (almost) by just switching a dictionary pointer to one for each current user (along with a small terminal buffer of say 80 characters). https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.forth/c/Rh3stETjMls https://forth-standard.org/proposals/multi-tasking-proposal
So, that's 12K to support 150 input buffers, plus probably at least 1K for each user dictionary on top of the shared dictionary (12K + 150K = 172K total). That is probably low -- if users might want 4K each that's 600K. Throw in 28K for an extensive base system to round things off and that is 640K for a great low-latency system supporting 150 users all simultaneously having a command line, assembler, compiler, linker, and editor. And I'd guess probably a database too on a shared 10MB hard disk. And it might even feel more responsive than many modern single-user systems (granted, expectations were lower back then for what you could actually do with a computer). So, yes, "640K of memory should be enough for 150 anyones." :-)
Related: "Why Modern Computers Struggle to Match the Input Latency of an Apple IIe" https://www.extremetech.com/computing/261148-modern-computer... "Comparing the input latency of a modern PC with a system that’s 30-40 years old seems ridiculous on the face of it. Even if the computer on your desk or lap isn’t particularly new or very fast, it’s still clocked a thousand or more times faster than the cutting-edge technology of the 1980s, with multiple CPU cores, specialized decoder blocks, and support for video resolutions and detail levels on par with what science fiction of the era had dreamed up. In short, you’d think the comparison would be a one-sided blowout. In many cases, it is, but not with the winners you’d expect. ... The system with the lowest input latency — the amount of time between when you hit a key and that keystroke appears on the computer — is the Apple IIe, at 30ms ... This boils down to a single word: Complexity. For the purposes of this comparison, it doesn’t matter if you use macOS, Linux, or Windows. ..."
Thanks for the Otlet book reference! Go...
I agree that years aren't necessarily a good metric for experience, although I have decades in IT - started when I was 19 and retirement is a real thing I have to consider.
Years do give you some experience that isn't translatable to the resume: after a while, you've seen through most of the tricks that management likes to try but which the younger colleagues haven't learned. Having older folks around can spoil the surprise.
My personal theory of the roots of ageism has this as a pillar.
Yes the former changes every 1-5 years. Doing the latter well is much harder, no single tool can solve these problems, and I think years of experience really does help.
Only if you define your profession as knowing the latest front-end frameworks. In terms of concrete technical knowledge that half-life lengthens as you go down the stack. But beyond knowledge of existing tools and frameworks, there is also the understanding of systems and how they interact with the real world. This is what you need to understand to really give yourself a life-long career. It can still be hard tech (distributed systems, scalability, etc), or it can be a little softer (UX, maintainability, collaboration, etc), but these skills will give you the ability to dwarf the actual business impact of the 25 year-old who has maximized knowledge of the latest tools.
In my experience, the only way of getting some decision power is moving into management. Even team lead roles don't count and don't give you any ownership over the product direction.
In big tech engineers are generally trusted more, but still product ownership is dedicated to management.
Uhh... who are these junior people who don't like having a boss? I read the first part of this sentence and wondered why wouldn't a lower level colleague not want a senior helping them avoid potholes in the road...
Because they become much more influential in a shorter time, if they make a coup d'Etat by paving a completely new road, now they are the new road master. The old potholes are gone so they don't have to worry about those, and the new potholes are still unknown and yet to be discovered.
One simple page, with login, logout, some search, and navigation nowadays require a few plugins, router, state management, lib for requests, lib to handle cookies, lib for JWT, etc...
Now I have used react at a few different sized companies, taught it to some students and completely stopped using it for personal projects. It just seems like too much added complexity for almost every situation and people just see everything as a SPA now.
Vue 3 kinda tanked all that though.
Also there's now two competing APIs. The new one that they want you to use, and the old one that people like better.
Also a lot of time your objects are actually proxies, which I'm sure there's good reason for but that's kind of annoying (personal opinion).
I accept (demand, really) TypeScript but I've become allergic to any attempt to add much more on top of JS than that. I can just see the next poor bastard coming along in a short year or two and going "oh god, WTF is a '.svelte' file? What did my piece of shit predecessor fall for?"
I'm looking into Vue today. Possibly I'll settle on something even simpler.
React's certainly out, and thank god the mood is finally shifting enough that I can abandon it without harming my career (much). Slow, janky, and god they've made some weird choices with it in the last few years. It was always a bit heavy, but it felt like it had some degree of elegance to it before that—if only in parts of the API itself, not the implementation.
[EDIT] Oh good lord, '.vue'. Don't any of these just use normal-ass code? Sigh.
I'll admit it's annoying but it's still just "normal-ass code". Vue, for instance, is just html, JavaScript and css. A .vue file is just all three in one file with special syntax to indicate each section.
At least, last I looked at vue it was.
And I say that as someone who is currently refactoring a Vue 3 app from JS/VueX to TypeScript/Pinia ... oh the irony.
[1] https://svelte.dev/
Nothing beats adding a script tag in the footer and being done with project setup.
I'm sure some agencies do a fantastic job (those that think about the bigger 'more than just dev' picture). But on 95% of the sites I'm seeing right now the downsides far outweigh the benefits and it feels like dev for the sake of dev.
This is exactly how it looked like when Flash was a popular choice for making web interfaces. We've fought a long, hard battle to finally get back to indexable, interoperable, standards-based HTML, CSS, and JS. It was fine for a while, then Angular happened. Fast-forward a decade and we're right back when we started. Amazing.
I don't see developers making these decisions anymore, not in large web-based tech companies.
My experience has been that management controls a lot of these decisions and/or steers them in the direction that they want them to go. And the more power a manager holds over a team or department, the more influence they can exert to get their way.
As an example, I'm hearing from a colleague in another department that they're being told by an engineering SVP that all new backend services are to be written in NodeJS. These are .NET developers. How does this guy who is 3 layers above these engineers intend to enforce this "rule?" The implication is you can do this or get fired, I guess, so it's happening regardless of how stupid it is. This was all explained to me when I noticed that I had gotten 3 "so long and thanks for all the fish" emails from long-timers in that department.
This is always my thoughts when I start a project with something else .
I mean if you were all in on e.g. Backbone.js or Dojo ten+ years ago, you're kinda running behind now and it'll get harder and harder to find a gratifying job.
I can see it happening for Vue vs React as well.
If that's good enough for you. Else there seems to be suggestions in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31285969 lol
In my 40s, I can hardly stand certain aspects of the tech space... and keeping motivation is all about things I can make, but not make for others.
Find something that sparks your imagination. Skill atrophy is my main thing. Mitigating skill atrophy on legacy skillsets, sub-sets of skills you have used for 20 years, but have no passion for any longer is tough as HELL -- and it makes me feel I can't learn... but the fact is I fail to learn anything I dont have a spark of passion about.
And I am not talking that romantic passion that some billionaire founder is taking about -- I am talking about *enough* passion that your ADHD can be quelled, and that small distractional things dont have undue heavy draw against your attention (passion)
This has been a feature for us – we don't need to be upgrading or fixing for upgrades or learning new "things". We focus on building with what we have and know and it works.
This might sound tangential, but I am at this exact stage in my life. I am in my early 30s and have signed up for the executive MBA program. I will be looking to start my term in Sept. Any tips/suggestions/warnings that you can share?
Here's how I sum it up. Pure CS is about determining what's theoretically possible, then software engineering is "applied CS", about taking what's theoretically possible and making it in the real world, which includes a mature understanding of costs (both upfront to build v1 and long-term maintenance). Thus an MBA is "applied software engineering." It's not sufficient to understand the costs of the engineering we build, because it doesn't matter if it costs $2,000 or $2,000,000 if we don't have the money for it. We also need to understand how to make it actually self-sufficient, by ensuring that it brings in enough revenue to cover the costs. $2,000,000 in costs, let alone $2,000 in costs, may be too much for a college student to afford out of pocket, but if you can show that you can earn it back and more, then you will find investors - be they angel or VC investors for a new venture, or your company's Finance division for a new project in a Fortune 500 company.
Ultimately the skills you get are about convincing people to fund what you want to build, for different definitions of "fund", whether it's literally cash, or persuading people to invest blood-sweat-tears equity by joining you, or just getting work to allow you to put time into it. Instead of working on what others want you to work on, you will learn to persuade The Powers That Be that your work should be funded. The main caveat: working on the MBA may change your mind about what's worth working on.
What's your endgame?
Do you want to be a CEO some day? A product manager? Business development? Work in something other than software? An MBA will teach you useful things and help you get your foot in the door.
Do you want to be a CTO? Do you see yourself creating software down the road? None of the MBA things explicitly help you, and executive MBAs are very expensive to do "just for fun". If you want to go back to school, go get a masters in CS if you don't have one yet.
- The "hard" stuff (with numbers in it...) didn't really grab me at all, I originally studied math and was somewhat disappointed in much of that part of this kind of MBA program, my hunch is that a regular full-time MBA would have been better for this, more immersion, this was all a little in the one, out the other for me because there wasn't much time to practice.
- But, the "soft" stuff on the other hand, was a goldmine, all the personal development, organizational psychology, negotiations, etc. This alone was worth the tuition.
- The best part was gaining a far better understanding and tolerance of why and how pretty much everything we work with in software is more or less "broken", it's actually not broken, it's as good as allowed by budget and organizational circumstance, and if something is to be improved, well, then that background has to allow for that improvement or else the improvement is just a pipe dream.
And you meet interesting people who will do interesting things in the community where you live, assuming you stay put, which I didn't, so I can't say much about that.
I wonder if the VW ID Buzz California Camper van will be great for this. Take it for a drive to wherever. Go fishing, whatever. No need to rent a hotel or anything like that. Just hit the road and enjoy.
What's next? :P
Keep on truckin’ and before you know it you’ll be productive again.
(Caveat: this is all subject to the warnings others have commented on re burnout etc, if these apply to you then my advice is redundant)
Don't feel alone. Just remember to take advantage of your strengths. You may not be able to keep up with the 24yo's, but the 24yo's really suck at "choosing the right problems to work on." You know, the most important thing.
It's very natural to feel overwhelmed, even 5 months into a project. I'm also at the 5 month mark, and it surprises me how much other people around me know.
One important point -- I have a lot of experienced people to lean on. Do you?
It sounds like they may have yeeted you into the deep end alone and said "go write Vue." If you have no colleagues, and (most importantly) no intellectual curiosity about Vue (which is a totally valid way to feel!), then that sounds miserable.
So my point is, the difference in our situation is that even though I feel overwhelmed, I don't feel demotivated (yet), because whenever I'm stuck on something, I have a colleague who loves to pair program and is happy to hop on Google Meet at 10pm, and a different colleague who basically designed and wrote most of the entire infrastructure that we use day-to-day. Coworkers like that make it super easy to look forward to the next day, because their enthusiasm is so infectious.
If you don't have anyone like that, don't worry -- it just means you're in the wrong gig. It happens. The solution is to remember that you are not your job. Downshift mentally. Treat your professional requirements as exactly that: a 9-to-5, and be sure to have side hobbies and a life outside work. During work, force yourself to focus on the simplest possible next step, and do that (and only that) until it's done. Repeat.
Best of luck friendo. Feel free to DM me on twitter (https://twitter.com/theshawwn) if you ever want to vent. Happy to listen.
So just remember -- "deciding to look" is often the hardest step, and the easiest to forget. After all, the default is to just keep working at the same job, and to feel bad about yourself.
But that's no way to live life. Seek out happiness, and follow it wherever it leads. I'm rooting for you.
Second, lifestyle. Oddly enough, keeping super strict schedule (only for a while unless you are naturally routine person) separating work and other time helped. Make sure other time involves sport and activities nor related to coding at all. Learning counts as work time, but also make sure work is work (and not HN or reddit).
The second thing helped to restore motivation. After a while, I started to look forward coding again, started to want to do it.
Around me, SpringBoot and Angular are the default choice, accompanied with Spring Cloud (or AWS for hipster companies). This means that you tend to work with people who do not care what they do and how.
Finally, I just quit and started building a sauna in the basement, doing some long due repairs in the house, learning a language and happily coding in Go at night.
Life is good, again. I am now applying to new gigs, trying to steer away from the kind of projects I used to do before.
P.S. Vue is actually great, I used Angular and React but could only grasp Vue at the end. That's one only humanly sized framework out of the three, IMO.
It was a total mental block. I had designed and built the entire thing myself and just had one more detail to put in place and just couldn't do it.
I think you should listen to the user fleb, it might be burn out.
It's very important to break the monotony of work.
But also it's very important to stay healthy and exercise.
The first time it will take longer because you amassed lots of stress. Once you learn how to do it, you'll incorporate slowdown days in your routine and feel energized
You do not have to be working on professional skills constantly, and there is some research evidence (citation needed) that taking regular breaks helps you learn more efficiently and enjoy the whole process more.
If you can't take a full on break from work right now (be it for financial or deadline reasons) then please try to find more time to do 'useless' stuff like read novels and get around nature.
Or, whatever makes you feel calm and cheery. All the best in your next move.