Ask HN: Experienced dev having career lull

If you haven't already start a family and you'll stop being bored. You will wish you had the time for malaise and boredom. And you will create happiness for yourself outside of your career.

Start your own company.

Your question has already been answered by your own post.

Quit. Pack your bags, move to low cost of living area and just code.

Seriously, if you're > $200k comp last year and this year should be at least equal to $200k comp and you're not at the point of being able to retire with already 15 years of work behind you then you're doing something wrong.

You make 200k+ a year, you should invest in me.

Maybe find a co that you like, and if they can't offer you the 200k+, bargain on extra vacation.

And then use your vacation to get out. I find I sometimes fall into a lull if I don't balance constant tech out with other things.

Find a well-funded post Series A or B company that you really believe in. Make it clear you want work as a technical contributor who writes lots of code (they will like this). You'll still make $150k and have equity in place of the extra bonus cash. But, if you like the team and believe in what the company wants to do, and you write code every day to help push the company there, you'll probably be a lot happier.

My (totally subjective, anecdotal only) experience has been that a lot of developers who have moved away from day-to-day coding tend to have less of a sense of what's new and interesting in technology. This would make sense, given that the pressure of keeping up with the latest and greatest is removed somewhat when you don't have to work directly with new technology and compete with other developers and their experience.

The main downside of this could be that you'd slowly develop a jaded feeling, and start to think that nothing is really new and interesting, or worth working on. I think the only cure for this is likely to get back down into the trenches and start working on a coding project at the same level as more junior developers, who may be less skilled, but might also be able to provide you with a connection to new areas that will interest you.

Or you could do what most experienced programmers seem to end up doing, and write a book or two.

If you like working hands-on, pick a company which highly values that, even at the senior level.

In my experience, you'll have a hard time doing ONLY tech stuff at a company with <10 people even if you're not a founder, but you might find an acceptable level of deep-problems.

I'm really enjoying being in a 50-250 person company (CloudFlare; it's around 110 right now). It's big enough to let people specialize, but not so big that there's a lot of bureaucracy. You wouldn't get near $200k in cash comp in a company of this stage (outside maybe sales), but equity upside can exceed $200k/yr total comp easily.

You probably have to live in a top-tier city (SF, maybe NYC, maybe London) to have a large choice of different 50-250 person companies which highly value senior devs (without forcing them into management), but there are individual companies in all kinds of random places which do; it's just that you're locked into a less competitive job market and switching costs can be higher. I'd recommend SF for this reason, even though I personally hate SF.

Step outside of your domain and learn something new entirely. If your job takes up too much of your time with 'busy-work', find another one that emphasizes a better work-life balance (it's worth taking a pay cut for this). Or alternatively, gather some savings and go on a sabbatical. Just do whatever you can to go off and study music/painting/writing/photography/design/cooking/whatever, and then take on a totally different branch of programming (like games or front-end work) to explore some new challenges, or abandon programming as a career altogether and save programming only for stuff that you're actually passionate about.

Starting a business is also an option (like others have pointed out), but while it isn't exactly 'boring', it can become grueling if you're not passionate enough about the specific idea you're working on. But whatever you do, make sure it is a major shift -- don't expect that just changing where you do the same 'dull-work' will suddenly make it feel like 'awesome-work'.

You probably have some savings. Quit work. Take a few weeks or months off. Pick up some old or new hobbies. Then decide.

Another approach by Hunter S. Thompson: pick your way of life first so you're guaranteed to enjoy what you do. Then pick the gig.

http://www.yourfriendshouse.com/2014/hunter-s-thompson-on-fi...

I'm not as experienced as you are but I completely understand your situation. I'm 26 years old and I was making $190k+ / year - bur I was bored! I was doing more and more management and I was slowly loosing my passion for computer science. After interviewing with a bunch of companies, I found one that I really liked and I joined it. I can't tell you how happy I'm. I'm working on interestong problems, doscovering new technologies (there is still a lot of computer science related problems not solved yet), slowly learning about machine learning, working with talented people, etc.

My salary is lower but still very good compare to a lot of people outside of the silicon valley and my passion is coming back extremely quickly.

Find something different, forget your $200k, money is here to help you, and it is clearly not helping you here. Go outside, on interviews, talk to startups, big companies, who ever you want. A lot of interesting things are going on!

It's the same post as yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8177259.

Developers that probably have close to half a million on the bank account complaining that they don't know what to do. It sounds a bit like you want to self-actualize yourself, but you don't want to put in the work. So if you want self-actualization, you need to work hard for it. That's the whole reason why self-actualization is so satisfying, because you have worked so hard for it.

I hear you. I'm just at 15 years professional experience as well. Did a startup early on in my career, was acquired (more of a firesale) and I'm still there. Things are OK, but not great. I've learned new languages (Scala, Javascript, Go), but still feeling unfullfilled - I think I'm more after the bigger picture, and regardless of what language, frameworks, etc, if you just aren't into the big picture (anymore) it gets old.

You are lucky though with such a high salary. I'd think you could quit and take some time, travel a little and perhaps rediscover yourself.

And a bit unrelated, what localities does one have to live in to pull in $200k a year? I'm a bit sheltered living off in the sticks I guess.

Go find a well-funded and growing startup building a product which interests you.

Most startups really need people who can write lots of code effectively, so if you go that route it can be entirely possible to get great compensation without going into management.

Yes, there will be a minor hit in cash comp initially (you'll probably pull around $150k at a startup), but the equity upside allows for more interesting growth than in a BigCo. Importantly, the growth factor in startups also means you can grow in comp (equity & cash) without having to move up the management chain.

If you can't find any interesting startups, take some time off to build your own ideas.

(Pure self-promotion, but if you do want to go the startup route I'm currently hiring: http://cafe.com/developers)

Few questions:

1. Are you making more money than you actually need?

2. Are you happy with the amount of decision making power you have? Or do you frequently have to subject your own judgement to corporate policies, management, marketing and bottom line considerations?

3. Are you really really sure that there's nothing you want to work on?

I broke out of a somewhat similar situation last year (10 years in very nice, well paid, senior but eventually boring position) and I've done spectacularly well since, if I say so myself. The only difference between you and me is #3 -- there were so many things I wanted to do but didn't have time for. So I specifically negotiated for a new job that gave me oodles of free time, even if it meant a temporary drop in compensation. As a result, I've done more things in the past 12 months that I had in the past 10 years. The boredom's all but evaporated!

So whether anything further I have to add will help or not, depends entirely on the nature of your problem #3.

You should take a sabbatical right now.

I had a similar bored moment who rapidly turned into a destructive burn out situation that almost destroyed both my relationships and my reputation as a good developer.

When started showing depression symptoms I took care of the situation and made some changes in my life.

- I resigned my job;

- I convinced my wife to join me in a 3 week retreat in the woods w/o phone, tv and internet. Just books, wine and conversations.

- I took a really long vacation period away from keyboard/internet (sure, you won't lose the next big thing if you turn off a few weeks - the internet, HN & Reddit are always recycling their contents)

- I went to some US universities just to hangout with people, I managed to know a bunch of nice people just hanging near the MIT campus and even visited a couple of labs.

- I started taking small weekend-trips to places that I've always wanted to visit but never had time.

- Managed to get a new job with amazing people.

- Adopted a crazy Dog.

Now I know I'm still not 100% but every day I fell better than yesterday.

Don't work for the man. Work for mankind.

Focusing mostly on #3:

Might be worth interviewing or just chatting around at a bunch of different places (big companies, startups) and see whether something grabs your interest. Passion is often a bit contagious.

I've been pretty happy changing teams every year or so at Facebook, so also consider whether your employer has any internal transfer options available.

Focusing on #4:

If you don't think you have people to learn from in your team or sufficiently close to you in your company, you should move - either within the company or without.

If your company doesn't offer an IC-only track, you probably should make a move elsewhere.

#1 - you'll only really find out about comp once you've got an offer (and then negotiated on it), so you'll need to get out there.

#2 - Tell your manager what is eating up your work time on things you don't enjoy. If they can't make a difference on that, look around. And also just opt out of things. Also might be useful to be more clear here on what is eating up your time.

I just noticed something after I posted my previous comment. Your username -- throwaway.cpp -- I'm assuming you're a C++ programmer or have been at some point? Then you and I have a lot in common. C++ is a great language, but after about 10 years, you can reach a level of mastery where there's not much more interesting things left out there for you to learn and play with. If you're someone who started developing because you enjoy it, this is around the point where you should probably consider rebooting yourself into a completely different technology stack (or stacks). I did this and it worked out very well. Not only that, after working with something like C++, almost every other language is a cakewalk (and also more pleasant to code in).

I spent 21+ years at Microsoft. From college hire to partner level. Finally got fed up and left for a smaller company 2 years ago. Sure, I'm making less money but I'm working with great people, building cool stuff, and not wasting my time on bureaucracy & management. Don't get hung up on the $$ if that's not what makes you happy.

I recommend you read Richard Feynman on how he went from burnout to Nobel prize https://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html.

Get outside yourself and go help someone else out. Donate to a charity, go teach code to high schoolers, go help your neighbor paint their fence, go volunteer at an animal shelter, go visit the elderly, spend time with your family, run a marathon, run for office, plant some trees, help build homes for the poor in Mexico - get out there and do stuff that doesn't involve YOU!

Get outside yourself and go help someone else out. Donate to a charity, go teach code to high schoolers, go help your neighbor paint their fence, go volunteer at an animal shelter, go visit the elderly, spend time with your family, run a marathon, run for office, visit the kids at a Boys and Girls club, visit the sick in a hospital, plant some trees, help build homes for the poor in Mexico - get out there and do stuff that doesn't involve YOU!

I'm curious what other people would say about #4. The only two answers I've ever heard are to become a chief architect (that seems to be the only seniority path that isn't management), or just go into consulting.