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I've been doing this for 30 years and I'm more jazzed than ever.

Wanna know the biggest difference between you and me? I'm pulled. You're pushed. Let me explain...

I love building stuff. Nothing gives me a bigger rush than getting something working the first time (well almost nothing). But I couldn't care less about the technology. If an abacus, two tin cans on a string, or some BASIC code on a Kaypro II did the job, then that's what I'd use.

What I really care about is how my software is used. And who uses it. There's an endless stream of people who need stuff and an endless stream of problems to solve. For individuals, groups, and businesses. When I encounter a new problem to work on, I use whatever I can apply in my tool box. Sure, I have to upgrade that tool box every so often because I need more to solve my problems, not because I love the toys so much.

You sound like the opposite. You love the toys and look for places to use them.

My suggestion: Take a break from the technology and put yourself in more situations where people can share their problems. This will give real human meaning to the technology. I bet you'll be chomping at the bit to build something for someone in no time. For me, being pulled by a demand motivates much better than being pushed by a supply. Maybe it can be for you too.

This is an important distinction, its a subtle change in perspective but very satisfying.

I would also like to add that perhaps the reason why it sometimes feels like nothing revolutionary is coming out is that it happens so often now.

The main motivator and source of satisfaction for software developers is the human aspect, not the technology itself. Is your product making a difference in someone's life? Who are your customers? The difference between these two approaches explains why college grad developers go into finance thinking they'll work on 'neat' problems and a few years later hate they jobs because at the end, their contribution to society is simply a number that indicates profit and not a single person's life has been significantly affected. In the end, we all just want to be appreciated. Like edw519 pointed out, go solve people's problems. Everything else will fall into place.

[edw519] What I really care about is how my software is used. And who uses it

[heliodorj] The main motivator and source of satisfaction for software developers is the human aspect, not the technology itself. Is your product making a difference in someone's life?

I think these two statements show a profound misunderstanding of what motivates a lot (if not most) hackers.

What gets a lot of people into this field in the first place, and is a source of major satisfaction, is, "wow, I can make it do this!"

A true hacker will be say things like:

* "I just turned my toaster oven into a TV remote control!"

* "I just made fully-functional web browser using COBOL!"

No one will ever use the above creations, but the satisfaction is still there for person who accomplished them.

I don't think, at least in the early stages, people who go into this field get excited by who or how many people end up using what they did. It's the pure thrill of getting things done that were not possible before that excites these people.

Of course, there is a second source of major satisfaction, which is to see your creation being used by many other people. This is huge, but I think is a distinct source of satisfaction than the one I mentioned above.

The third distinct source of satisfaction is, of course, making a ton of money from your creation.

I don't know about young programmers these days, but, when I was programming my first Amstrad CPC, I was being motivated mostly by the first type of satisfaction: getting this box to do what I wanted it to. The thought of my programs being used by others and making money from them didn't really cross my mind at the time.

Maybe what the author of the OP is starting to miss is the pure thrill of making something new, something exciting. Building another social networking website, even if it gets lots of users, simply isn't technically challenging or exciting (it is extremely challenging from other points of view, but you won't be breaking any new technical ground)

I think the software industry may be going through what others went through before it:

* Airplanes: In the beginning only "hackers" where in on it, trying to make planes get off the ground. In a few decades, most of the major advances had been made, and new people entering the field just wanted to find ways to use the existing technology to make money (e.g. Frequent flyer miles)

* Telephones: In the beginning, there were lots of technical problems with getting great phone quality over landlines. In a few decades, most technical problems were solved, and people came in to use the existing technology to make money (e.g. "Call 555-1234 to hear your horoscope for $3/min")

Maybe something like this is happening with computers today. Most of the major non-AI problems are solved, and now people are coming into the field to use existing technology to make money (e.g. Facebook, Yelp, Groupon, Youtube, etc)

If and when we get to some decent level of AI, the bar will be raised and a whole new set of problems will be attacked. So, AI-type problems (speaker-independent and accent-independent voice recognition, image search, natural language search, translation between languages, etc) seem like a great area to be in for someone who gets a thrill from making something totally new. Unfortunately, the whole AI field seems a bit stagnant at the moment. It will take someone with a totally new take on how to do things to take AI to the next level.

Innocent-looking question from an ex-AI researcher:

Take a moment, and disregard your technological know-how (the fact that you think you know how it works), and consider Google strictly as a black-box.

Which functionalities of a strong AI have they not delivered (or are not well within the way to be delivering) so far?

If we go by the following definition of Strong AI (from Wikipedia)

Strong AI is artificial intelligence that matches or exceeds human intelligence — the intelligence of a machine that can successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can

then there are lots of things that Google can't do that many human beings can. For example, when you do an image search, the results are sometimes laughable, and that's because Google doesn't understand image content and just reports results based on the tags on the image or based on surrounding text. Lots of human beings would have understood the search query well enough to not return the results Google returned in many cases. So, Strong AI it ain't

Not to mention speech to text on Google Voice (usually laughable results) and translation (works a bit better, but breaks down hilariously e.g. http://groups.google.com/group/shibboleth-users/browse_threa... ).

Anything with a bit of judgment call about the kind of site you want returned is really bad, imo. Say I asked someone to search for blackberry-pie recipes, but specified I only wanted recipes from individuals, e.g. stuff posted on personal/university/etc. websites, not on content farms, TV cooking shows' websites, aggregators, etc. A human could trawl through a few dozen pages of results and pull out some recipes, but afaik there's no search term on Google that will do that.

It's also bad at summarizing information. I can get a scattered set of results for lots of topics, but it can't synthesize those results into a nice executive-summary paragraph for me. Never mind even better summarization, like searching for a topic that has no Wikipedia article yet, and having Google's algorithms write the article for me to read!

I think bioengineering is one field where real advances are being made. If I could go back in time, I might tell myself to get into developing software and hardware for abiogenesis and genetic engineering research. I'd say to myself, "There's a lot more to learn than cloning a sheep." I expect to see some exciting discoveries in this area over the next decade, like artificial lifeforms, using base life-related chemicals to produce alternative fuels, etc.

Yes, I'd say you pretty much hit the nail on the head.

Spot on. Couldn't have put it better myself.

Oh and the next big thing : Skynet

They said it couldn't be built...

That's a Patrick-level post right there. Make it half as long and you can successfully impersonate our bingo card hero. :)

Welcome to the law of Diminishing returns. Your choices fundamentally boils down to the following:

-Take the blue pill. Stay in wonderland. Pick a technology, any technology. Drive yourself into it deeper. The rabbit hole goes much, much further, than you can imagine.

-Take the red pill, and wake up: the rabbit hole goes the other way, too. On first basis, you have the ever-exploding number of scientific disciplines ( http://www.turtlshel.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/43056172... ). Even further, society isn't merely a collection of engineers, and scientist: other people have all kind of different jobs.

Furthermore, they are equally convinced, that their field of choice was the right one; and from their own perspective each one of them was right.

Since you're HN, you might have a particular interest towards this field we call "business". Now, this is not what people around you -who are called "managers" btw- do. A good working definition for engineers is: Business is the ability to actualize a job that needs to be done, on which you're retroactively hired (or fired) by society as a whole. Or, as PG put it: doing stuff what people wants.

Regardless of how you choose, a good partition of it is going to be soul-searching. There are 2 pieces of media I'd strongly recommend for that:

-Randy Pausch Last Lecture [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo], and

-wishcraft, which is a short book, available freely from http://wishcraft.com/.

On an ending note, I feel for you. Every time I've been down to this alley, I always always wished I'd have done it earlier. If anything, you should know this: the direction of your life does not boil down to singular moments, as you've described in your initial post. It's something that must must must be constantly evaluated, and course-corrected based on any new piece of life-data you happen to stumble across. And it's never to late to change things.

I'd toss in another piece of media, Elizabeth Gilbert's short (20-minute) TED talk on creativity and "genius":

http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html

(I tend to re-watch that one whenever I feel like I'm stuck in a creative rut, have run out of ideas, or just aren't talented enough to achieve my current artistic goals.)

Also useful advice: Find ways to hang out with a peer group. Try browsing meetup.com in your areas of interest.

I think the "loop" is indeed moving on. The last real mini-revolution this side of the line probably were torrents. The whole social web is just wrong. It's centralized. It's not the web - it is a corruption of it. It is like the great minds who could design truly de-centralized, robust, reliable and truly social structures have all just vanished. There are so many difficult and important problems around but no one wants to solve them just because there is a huge ??? before the profit step. It is indeed a bit sad.

But there is some real fascinating stuff happening in hardware. We have freaking humanoid robots and private rockets. And nothing excites me more about the future than 3d printers. And there is a real and true to the soul open source like effort going on in there. Reprap, makerbot and that awesome 75k inr 3d printer from china... printers that can print themselves! Hardware specs that are shared and re-shared. Ideas and insights shared with gay abandon. No major patent threats anywhere in sight so far. It is the free world.

I have to disagree with you to an extent about the state of the net today. I look at it as something like a movie studio. You're getting upset at all the big blockbuster stuff. The things that have little to no plot but yet rake in billions of dollars. What you don't get is that it allows studios to invest in things that have more risk, because it has potential to sell and there's a market for it.

The same could be applied to the net and to software tech. I mean, look at ycombinator and all their startups. Things like Facebook, Twitter,etc; their popularity is only natural because we all can't design a website. They give the average joe the tools that they need and they go crazy with it. The more money they make, the better, because it gives the little guys the chance to make something better. Maybe not revolutionary, but some original idea that solves a problem and gains revenue from it. And who knows, maybe out of all of that something revolutionary will come out of it. But it's hardly winding down as you say.

This sounds like something to look into. Are there any resources in particular that you can recommend?

Sure. [2] talks about reprap's philosophy and is a good a place as any to start. Not many are talking about this yet but this is the new revolution. It has to be!

[1] http://reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page

[2] http://vimeo.com/5202148

[3] http://www.makerbot.com/

[4] http://www.boingboing.net/2010/09/06/cheap-portable-perso.ht...

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_printing#Comparison_of_3D_pr...

[6] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=350708

[7] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1061260

[8] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=760466

> There are so many difficult and important problems around but no one wants to solve them just because there is a huge ???

I have thought about this the other day -- "what has happened to P2P technologies?". There used to be a lot of excitement about it, there was flurry of academic research on distributed consistent hashing, lots of P2P networks appearing, and now, it seems, bittorrent is all that is left of it.

All the porn probably took the shine off it. Looks less like the future and more like a grubby swapmeet in a red light district.

"I call this my Greatest Zukes album... all great artists that asphyxiated on their own vomit! You can't get this in stores, man!"

It's not that these projects/people have vanished, they've just been eclipsed by the much louder self-promoting "social web 2.0" community. It's much easier to write naive single-actor code than mutually-suspicious distributed applications.

(also, you're forgetting at least git)

I actually probably have nearly the same history as you. Graduated about the same time as you. Been fascinated with computing as long as you. And just about as fed up with the current state of things as you.

I think the difference between us is I've got some notoriety so I'm looking to at least try to tear down the current situation before I get out of here. I figure might as well give it a shot, and if it doesn't work out I'm smart enough to change careers.

So I say, if you're not interested in it anymore, then try not doing it for a while and do whatever else you want. Even if this 2nd career is a total failure you at least tried.

The hard part here, of course, is coming up with something else to do. While basically sound advise, after years of a wakeup-work-eat-bed cycle while worrying about the negative content of the bank account, thinking around a corner is hard, let alone thinking outside the box. But I'll try not to force the issue and see what comes up.

> thinking around a corner is hard, let alone thinking outside the box.

Well, thinking around a corner means you're already on the outside of the box. ;) Considering you posted this to HN, you're already thinking around corners. I think you should give yourself (and HN) a bit more credit.

Though you never used the term "bored," you more or less described yourself as being bored and your situation as being boring. I'd like to share a wonderful piece of wisdom given to me by my friend, Reginia Riley.

Fascination is a choice. When you choose to be fascinated, you are fascinating. When you choose to be bored, you are boring. In essence, when you say "I'm bored," you are actually saying, "I'm boring." At the same time, fascination is the source of motivation.

If you find yourself being often bored, the above is tough to accept. Some even find it insulting. But it is true and the sooner you accept it, the sooner you'll no longer be both bored and boring. On the other hand, fascination with something tends to be contagious for others and tends to lead to fascination with other things.

If you've done half the things you've claimed, then you are motivated by challenge. You were fascinated by the challenge of figuring out the technical bits (pun intended). Sure, far too much of HN is "money this" and "money that" for startup-du-jour. Sure, money is a way to keep score for businesses, but few ever realize their real driving force is the challenge of entrepreneurship. In this regard, the fascination with the challenge of technology is extremely similar to the fascination with the challenge of entrepreneurship. The root cause is the same.

In technology alone there are countless challenges just waiting for you to choose to be fascinated by them, but it doesn't end with just tech; countless challenges and fascinations exist everywhere.

Your own curiosity and fascination are priceless. When you decided to give them up, what were you given in exchange for something so priceless?

Yes, I know this post may strike too close to home. I know it might hurt. I know you might resent me for it, well, at least at first. It was like that for me many decades ago when I needed to learn this lesson. None the less, by sharing what I learned, I do have your best interest at heart. You're asking to treat the symptoms, but I decided to treat the cause.

As someone much smarter than me once said: "Work doesn't necessarily make you happy but it may give you the means to do something to make you happy"

Diversify your portfolio. Don't be all tech. Go sit in a park, learn how to draw (really, more learning how to see), take art or music classes. Realize how rich the world is.

I took a few-year vacation from I.T. quite a while back, and spent the time as a climbing instructor and in outdoor industry retail. It was a lot of fun, I met a lot of great people, and to this day I'm glad I did it.

There are a lot of different opportunities out there that don't require having to deal directly with technology, so go get away from it for a while.

All you do is work, eat and sleep, you're on a corporate treadmill, your bank account is negative, and you're fed up? You should be! Sounds like even though thinking around a corner is hard, you need to plan more! You need to plan to get out of debt, to live within your means and to do things more fulfilling than just working.

I would start by being less pessimistic about your own experience. What are you good at? What problems are you paid to solve today? How could you solve them better?

I'm younger than you by a little (or about the same) I think, and I'm not overly impressed with "social media" either. It feels like we've just been renaming the basic things computers can do with fad names since the turn of the century.

It feels like the endless potential has been wasted. All of the amazing things we could have done with computers and we used them for like-buttons and lolcats. Wow great, another app to tell people who don't care where I am and what I'm doing at this very moment. I'll try to contain my excitement.

Maybe its just classic burnout or a more troubling creeping pessimism that affects more than just me.

What gives me hope is that these things seem to happen in fits and spurts and the biggest jumps seem to start in the down times and recessions. When they arrive they are fast and unexpected and usually made from bits of the ordinary that had seemed boring and innocuous until put together just right.

It seems like we're about due. I don't know if it will come from open source hardware, desktop manufacturing, DIY biohacking or something I haven't even considered, but I expect it, and soon.

Hey, someone has to stick up for the lolcats!

I'm only half joking when I tell people that computers were invented so that my wife and her family and I can sit around drinking margaritas and watching Jan Terri videos on YouTube...

"I've recently had the possibility to escape the constant mental treadmill that comes with working in most IT departments"

You wrote some pretty prose but you did not really tell us what you know or what you have been really doing with your life for the last ten years.

When someone says "IT Department" I think large (or small) corporation supporting a group of people who actually bring in the money. The key reason these places are so soul crushing is that many times management does not know how to use them effectively to help the bottom line by making smart technology choices. You are just a cost center.

The other reason they are soul crushing is that 2/3rd's of your colleagues are probably all kinds of incompetent and should have been fired or never hired in the first place.

In any case the trick is to get out of there as quickly as possible. (It took me 10 years too and I'm still not recovered career wise or personally) Get yourself employed by a technology company working on their core products. All the sudden you are not supporting anyone (except maybe your customers.) and you may find it a much more pleasant experience.

I would also suggest making friends with some people more successful than yourself and really try and learn from them how to manage you finances correctly. It's something that many families just don't teach.

Finally I'd recommend reading "The wealthy Barber"[1] to get an idea of what a healthy financial situation and practices might look like.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Wealthy-Barber-Updated-3rd-Commonsense

>the constant mental treadmill that comes with working in most IT department

I think: >my honeymoon with computers and IT seems to be over

should read: >my honeymoon with IT seems to be over

Be careful not to confound a distaste with IT with a distaste for computing in general. Thinking about negatives in a global terms rather than a specific terms is one the key depressive thought patterns.

Thinking about a negative as a global\general state is highly destructive: I did bad on this test, because I suck at studying\am dumb. The end result is learned helplessness.

Thinking about a negative as a specific event allows you to view problems as solvable: I did bad on this test, but it was because I didn't study or prepare enough in this specific incident. The end result is positive, you will study more in the future.

From your post it is clear you are getting stuck in the former thought pattern, I wish you the best of luck getting out of it.

I was born in China and all my first memory is about little me saying "I'm going to join the red army and become a scientist and save the world". The world, which is China. And then, I've moved to Europe in the early 90s. I've discovered something new: my dad's mac. First, I was only playing Go and dark castle on it but then, I've started asking myself how to make my own games. My parents are all engineers and they told me a lil' about Dos, FreeBSD but also Linux. I've received my first PC at 11 and the first thing I did is playing Fallout. The second thing I did is using a hex-editor to crack the save to get the best weapons :p And I've also received Internet at home! Life changing! I've actually met people "like me". Very smart people indeed. And I've learnt much more on the web than at school and I felt I was apart of another world. IRC was more real than IRL. And thanks to the Internet, I've read a lot of tutorials and ABCs so I started writing my first lines in C/C+ and ASM at 12 and never stopped... well, I've actually stopped. One day, at 21, I discovered I wanted to do something else. I mean, I still like technology in general but I've actually stopped reading hackers blogs, cookbooks and I stopped trying every crackme challenge over the web. I was fed up with all of these things. I felt I was just a rebellious kid trying to prove to himself how smart he was. So I stopped. And so I've asked myself exactly this question same question: what now?

Well, "now", after 3-4 years, I'm doing a business degree. I've also met the girl I love. I've also played in a French TV series. Oh, yeah, I've also been all around the world. Actually, I did many things. Much more than expected. I thought, when I stopped living before my PC, that I'd maybe find a new "hobby" and just farm it like I've farmed C/C+. Nop, nothing about farming just "one" thing but doing, sometimes casually, many, many different things.

But guess what? I've started a Web-startup (elive.pro)! Just like that. Because I can. And because I still like technology. And because if I was fed up with the hackers' environment 4 years ago, now, it's pretty different for me: I don't know much about the so-called Web 2.0 and I want to learn, to do something. And meet new people. Smart people.

You know what? It's all about love. Technology is for many of us, our first and our real love. You will rekindle the flame. But sometimes, even if you really love something or someone, you have to let it or her/him alone.

So, let the technology stuffs alone. Try new things and one day, you'll automatically come back to your first love. Maybe not as a developer but definitely come back somehow.

+1 for patching save games :)

I hex-edited my Commander Keen save games to get effectively unlimited lives and ammo. I'm glad to see at least one other person was motivated by the same concept.

I have a very similar background. Scary similar. I'm older though. I've had similar feelings at various times. Is this it? Really? Lame...

I used to get excited about new technology and it did seem that something cool and amazing would come out all the time. Just an endless stream of wow. I just can't get hyped up about some mash up, retread, or social widget. I don't think I've changed I think the industry has.

That isn't really a bad thing though. It is an opportunity. I used to wait in anticipation for someone to come to market with a product or solution I foresaw. That rarely happens now with market driven development. That is the opportunity. Don't languish that the amazement isn't there. Make it. You have the skills. I'm sure you see the deficiencies. The industry is now so stagnant in true innovation, this gives us, the technical entrepreneurs the opportunity to innovate.

How to rekindle the flame? I don't know if this will work for you. This is what I do. I buy a new toy and hack on it. A computer or phone. I find a new programming language or something like pfsense (router) and play with it. Find some software that sucks and build one that doesn't. Scratch an itch.

What itch would I scratch right now if I wasn't busy. I'd build a soft bios driver that would emulate a CD/DVD drive. This would load an emulated CD/DVD driver into a PC bios just like a SAS card loads its driver into the bios. This would allow you to select multiple iso images from a usb drive and then boot to that emulated CD/DVD. Right now you can't really do that.

This is kind of a useful sign actually. When things look bleak like this, it usually means you're on the verge of something radically new ... and that's exciting to think about. Its like the guy who said "lets close the patent office 'cos everything that can be invented has already been invented."

This might be useful too -

A long time ago, someone on HN wrote about a similar give up point he came to in his life (sorry can't locate that post, but I recall it quite well). He decided to take a year off the industry - completely cut off. Just doing stuff like rock climbing, traveling, etc. .. until one day he had an epiphany that he'd taken up software in the first place because he loved it. He then got back in, full of enthusiasm.

So looks like taking a total break for a while can make things clear.

Ive done something similar in my life.

I took a year off from working the web and did things like courier work, bush regeneration and bus driving.

After a couple of months in each of these jobs i would get mentally restless and i soon discovered that the reason that i was working in the web world is because it is interesting and i am good at it.

Sounds like the OP took a step back to see all the other amazing possibilities in life, but didnt step back long enough to appreciate his own position.

I'm nearly a decade younger than you, so take this for what it's worth.

You said when you were young, you were fascinated by computers and learned everything about them. Try to imagine again what it is like to be young. What would fascinate you if you were growing up right now? Maybe it's not even computers. Maybe this really is the end of that rabbit hole for you, who knows. Is that such a bad thing?

Try getting out of your comfort zone, too. Join a sports club, go on a long trip, meet new people, pick up a hobby. You may feel that way, put you're not stuck by any means. You can do whatever you want now. How liberating! You can reevaluate what you want from life and set sails once again.

I've been in software since I can remember. I'm super enthused by the opportunities I see right now. Yet, I hope that one day I will get to do something entirely different. I think life is too precious to do just one thing.

Oh, and another thing: If you don't like the social web, skip right to the object web. Why can people understand that tables are MADE of wood, HAVE four legs, are MADE in China, which IS a Country REPRESENTED by a Flag that LOOKS red, which IS a color that IS ... and so on ... and computers can't understand that? How can we teach them? That's my current favorite fad ;)

I think you have to remember that the future is already here but not evenly distributed. What you perceive as boring other people may view upon as almost magic. There are so many markets left to disrupt and improve with technology. There are so many problems yet to be solved, so many people yet to be helped.

Maybe if you apply your knowledge of computers to new domains the spark will once again be there.

Empower the non-technicals. Help students and researchers in medicine, law, humanities, communication and the arts make better use of technology.

There are boatloads of abandonware tools and libraries that real people depend on for their research, work and livelihood. I am talking about things as varied as sensor data capture software running on MS-DOS, to high-schools that have one PC for every 100 students. There are opportunities everywhere, look around and give someone light.

Open source still makes a big difference, especially in 3rd world country. I went once to an open source conference in India, it really opened my eyes to a whole new way of looking at the movement. Maybe that's what you may want to look at: software which really makes a difference today for many people.

it really opened my eyes to a whole new way of looking at the movement

Interesting. Can you share more details on the new perspective you got from being there?

Most projects I have been involved with were related to my PhD at that time, numerical computing kind of stuff in python. Going to the conferences in Europe or the US, it is already quite exciting because you see a lot of people, in academics and otherwise, using the softwares you contributed to. You make some tasks more enjoyable because the tools are more powerful, etc...

Now, in India, the dynamics are really different. You don't just do something that make people life simpler. You really enable people to do things they may not have been able to before. When the de-facto standard software costs one year of a post doc in India, having open source alternatives do make a difference.

Thanks. Always good to learn new things. I'm an Indian but wasn't aware of this particular advantage OSS is bringing out here. (May be because I have never been involved in a Masters/PhD program.)

Fossee (http://fossee.in/) was one of the association which helped organizing the conference, and you may find more information on their website if you are interested.

You know what I find pretty amazing is how much data is out there in the public nowadays. It wasn't like that 10 years ago. For a very long time AI has suffered from lack of automatically extractable knowledge about the world, lack of sources from which to learn, lack of feedback loops. And now, suddenly, we have so many sensors everywhere and we have so much public expression of knowledge, intent and action.

Shouldn't we be able to build machines that are much more capable of interpreting every day goings than we used to be? There is still so much boring routine work that people do. I think the next revolution in computing is imminent and I think the very recent abundance of data from which to learn will be what makes it happen.

The way I (as a robot) look at social networks is as a source of interactions from which to learn about humans.

Well, computers and the web are just tools, like a hammer. Due to its fascination and novelty when we were young it's easy to forget that while we're here discussing the intricacies of building a better hammer, others are out there erecting cathedrals with it. Maybe take a look around and see what you can actually do with it, learn something not related to IT and see if you can push it forward by improving the IT side of it.

There are several big things you didn't mention, AI and neural networks, for example. You could also try robotics and engineering stuff (watching how a piece of silicon and metal becomes alive is priceless).

This is good advice, the problem is that you are suffering burn out. !0 years sounds about right. You need to get back to your roots and one way I recommend to do it, is to get into embedded. It gets you back into a small reward loop where little things net positive feedback. The other thing that I recommend to people is get closer to a research discipline. If you are really that burnt out, try applying your trade to a secondary science that you are interested in, chemistry, Bio-Engineering, astronomy something like that. There are a lot of cool projects that need help with code.

How do you suggest getting started with embedded programming?

Jack Ganssle is an embedded guru and a great writer, check out everything he's written - books and online.

Start here: http://www.ganssle.com/startinges.htm ("How to become an embedded geek")

Get yourself a simple all-in-one hardware/firmware environment, like the one my company (Silicon Labs) makes: Look for the "MCUniversity Kit", it's $55, here: http://www.silabs.com/products/mcu/Pages/MCUniversity.aspx

Or check out http://hackaday.com/2010/08/11/how-to-launchpad-programming-... for info about Launchpad, a cheaper, similar solution from TI.

I've actually used Silicon Labs' MCU University kit, and I highly recommend it. I don't get any money directly from it, but Silicon Labs does pay my salary.

Spark fun has a good set of tutorials that cover all of the basics.

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/tutorials.php

The nice part about their tutorial is they take you through all of the details such as building you own PCB and other items where some of the kits have all of the electronics built for you. It depends on your interest but I find designing the electronics to be as rewarding as actually programming a micro-controller. I am also the kind of guy that likes to understand ever small detail as well.

I start using PICAXE(http://www.rev-ed.co.uk/picaxe/) few years ago. It's incredibly cheap and easy to use. But i think it's essential to have electronic/mechanical knowledge in order to make interesting project.

Pick up an Arduino, or one of it's derivatives (like Netduino). Then span out. Once you've gotten 'in', you'll soon find other interesting platforms to develop on.

Strangely enough, if I had the money, I'd probably go back to university and study one of the splinter-subjects genetics must have exploded into during the past 15 years. I've kicked myself over the past years repeatedly for not staying in university and getting some research job there. Maybe I can have a look into the DIY aspect of biotech, that someone already mentioned.

How do you suggest getting involved in Bio-Engineering. I'm a programmer, I've applied to a few opportunities but no one has replied :-(

You need to first educate yourself on the subject at hand. Then when you know enough about the subject join one of the open source projects.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/cmiss/ http://www.physiome.org/

there are countless others just use Google. This will help you establish a network of individuals in the industry. Software skills along will not get you that far. You need domain knowledge as well as contacts in the industry.

AI (neural networks/fuzzy logic/genetic algorithms) were actually part of my focus at university, and something I felt pretty exited about back then. That never went anywhere afterwards though. The realities in the job market here are pretty much anti-innovation for the most part ("We can't do that - we'd be one of the first companies in germany to work with XXX" is something I've heard pretty much verbatim more than once).

Maybe I should read up on my differential equations and give Kohonens "Self-Organizing Maps" another whirl, just for kicks.

Strangely enough, this happened to me 4 years ago. I think they called it middle age crisis? Anyways, what I did then was switched from being in IT field to aquaculture. I built a fish farm, raised some fish, learn all about aquaculture, built a profitable little business.

And yet... something techies deep inside me keeps stirring. The need to create something shiny and new and the feeling I get when I say "I made this" is just indescribable. Thats why early this year I sold my fish farm and started an IT company... again. :P

Can you provide more details about your fish farm? What type of fish? Size of tanks? Time to "harvest"?

Wow, that sounds amazing. How on earth do you get started with something like that?

I wouldn't worry about it too much. Accept that you need a change for now and re-look at it every so often. I've been coding since '84. I've found myself very jaded by computers a number of times in the past and I'm definitely not chasing every technology thread I could be. But hey, sometimes it comes back and you see the same stuff in a new light, or you discover areas that really do interest you, or you combine what you know with a new domain.

Don't force it. Let it go until you enjoy it again.

Can you provide details of your personal experiences in this regard? (Very curious, not trying to pry.)

Hard to answer. I went through a phase while working for others where I just wasn't coding at home anymore. I did the time at work, but my main interests were elsewhere.

A few things that worked for me:

- Changing to a developer-focused company, where developers aspired to be craftsmen.

- Creating my own app. I can pour my heart into one part of it, no deadlines unless I want them and I learn a million things outside of the code.

- Going to b-school. Lots of ideas/new people, new domains.

- Contracting instead of being full-time. I like the time balance more.

Whatever it was, I rediscovered why I like developing.

"The Open Source revolution seems to be over"

http://github.com

> The Open Source revolution seems to be over; [...] And it seems that the children of the revolution turned the gold to chrome, scrambling to squeeze a buck out of anything a buck can be squeezed out of. Instead of the free sharing of ideas I grew up with, I'm encountering more and more the attitude of a guarded sharing of general topics, but the real knowledge and experience seems to be held back because it has to be regarded as a personal asset that might be used to turn a profit somewhere.

Too true. Some of the newer "open source" projects seem to be run by suits posing as geeks, where the source is open, eventually, but nothing else.

"everything" isn't going to be free until everything is free. It's not fair to expect people to just freely give away software for nothing in return when the rest of society doesn't work like that. People say "oh but you can just use the credibility of your free software to get a higher paying job". Great, so I'm back in a cubicle. I'd rather be writing software I'm interested in.

There was actually nothing new learned in free software from a capitalist point of view. "Loss leader", thin and thick margins, it's all been covered before.

Living in a capitalist world is frustrating but not redeemable in the near future.

What do you do, other than computers? A "hobby" may seem like a lame suggestion but in reality, hobbies is all we have apart from people (and those are harder to come by).

Thought about breaking things instead of making things? The security industry is an interesting place to be at the moment.. researchers continue to push the envelope and come up with new ways to abuse / bypass 'the system' and - if you dive deep enough, some significant technical and meatspace challenges to deal with. Privacy, or lack of, is increasingly an issue with various specific challenges to be addressed. Consulting adds a twist too; I definitely get a kick out of helping people / organizations realize what process & technology vulnerabilities they have and determining the best way to address them.

And I find that snowboarding, mountain biking, hiking, and running help avoid feelings of drudgery.. do you have hobbies that get you away from a computer screen for a chunk of time every day?

Buy a round-the-world airfare and take a holiday.

If you had to re-create social media for non-social people, what would it be? I'm a big believer that social media is still in its infancy, with huge innovations yet to happen. let's take an anti-social topic, say, coding. if i were to create social media for this, I would probably create a site where programmers learn from each other. can you assign points to a person based on "likes" and "tags" and promote them to an expert of a specific topics? can you count how many facebook questions they've answered? just a thought, but if you don't like something, maybe it's an opportunity to mold it to your own vision!

You seem a bit obsessed with "socializing." Until it becomes required by law, there will always be a percentage of persons not wanting/willing to participate.

If only I could make everyone attend church...

Thanks, I'd rather be the one who's obsessed than being the one who doesn't care. FYI. social media is not synonymous to socializing.

Instead of being motivated only by technology have you considered trying to create a product or starting a company? (this is HN after all).

Lots of people using (and maybe even liking) something you built can be pretty compelling.

Starting a company: Yes, I tried that during my freelancing time. The plan was to freelance on the side to keep myself afloat until the company could carry itself. Except things didn't work out: not only did the company not find any clients, as a freelancer I didn't get enough contracts to actually keep myself afloat. The timing of me trying that was incredibly stupid in retrospect; 2002/3 would have to be the worst years in the past decade to try something like that.

The main thing I did learn from that entire episode is that I suck at marketing/selling. While trying again is not completely off the table, I would definitely only try it again with a co-founder who is a good sales person.

Or go to a small company where you actually can see people using your work.

As others have suggested, instead of being driven by tools/technology maybe focussing on the product can be satisfying.

first, where are you?

I have found that moving to the valley can be very inspiring... I know this isn't a social hobby, and I myself am an introvert (though maybe not quite as introverted as many of the better people I know.) living in a place where there are other people excited about this work can change your perspective a lot.

I guess my other piece of advice, from the time when I was burnt out is to try to get a job in another field for a while. I know for me, the low pay and high expectations for things like showing up on time meant that I got over my burnout pretty goddamn quick.

So many comments, have not read through them all. There are so many cool things to stick your head in, so you ask if you are getting too old; YES. I am 46, and predates your career by 15 years, and I am still fascinated over the new possibilities that presents themselves year after year.

Sharing of ideas in Open Source; Happens all the time, maybe it is now too technical for you to follow, and family interests keep you from digging in enough to catch up.

Sharing of ideas of the future; Happens all the time, in blogs, tweets and what not. In fact, we are getting drowned by so much information that it becomes a challenge to filter the noise. AND you have a new idea right there; Give me something to filter the garbage out and serve me the gems on a plate. Such tool itself will accelerate ideas collaboration even more.

Privacy concerns; Centralized so called "cloud services" at various levels are going extinct in the future, because of privacy will become a massive sore points, possibly after some scandals (need to brew a decade or so for full effect). So, prepare social network system that is truly distributed and where the consumer control exactly what is shared with whom and how, and can take it off-line...

I think over a week-end with a lot of supply of beer, I think a group of visionaries can come up with 10-20 solid new things that is both doable, and should inspire people who like to GetThingsDone.

So, the final question to you; Are you the consumer or the producer of the great things to come??

Sounds more like burn-out at this point. Try a related, but different job if you can get it.

I moved from straight up developer to a technology analyst to sales to product management (with some minor development) roles and this kind of movement has really helped keep things fresh. It also didn't hurt that I cycled between huge mega-corps and small companies -- each have radically different environments with their own pluses and minuses. Stay until you get tired of the minuses of one, then jump to the other.

One nice thing about my particular moves is that I've dragged along entire skillsets from my previous guises that most people in that field don't have while learning new ones from that job that I can then carry forward. It's amazing what kinds of old skills I never thought I'd use anywhere else come up again and again, except nobody else sees the application in their domain because almost nobody who grew their entire career in that particular field has had any exposure to it.

(I remember the first time I taught regular expressions and production rules to a fellow analyst co-worker, once he "got it" his jaw just hit the floor. He now has carried that forward into another analyst job where, just by knowing that one simple thing, has revolutionized operations at his current employer for a large analysis program he works on.)

I wrote my first program in 1965 (FORTRAN). I was hooked and haven't had a dull moment ever since. Then it was Assembler, COBOL, C++, PHP, C#, there's more left for me to learn than when I started.

We have been blessed with an exceptionally rewarding craft. Only actors and jet pilots can match the thrill we get from our jobs. The former are few, and the latter have a short career span. There are always new projects, new worlds to explore. Knowledge is the greatest wealth.

I am around your age and have had similar feelings lately.

I had a Tomy Tutor, and IBM XT, a PS/2 Model 50,a 486DX-33, and others. I started on BBSs in 7th grade.

I've always felt, the majority of those that make it big, get out of the game. We've seen some come back (Paypal mafia), but I feel the majority of the talent exits the industry.

With each cycle of this, we are left with a different group, which I think explains the "chrome" you mentioned.

We saw the dot-com bubble firsthand, and maybe we want to be part of that again? Of course, it was never really sustainable, but the optimism and salaries of the 1990s were nothing to scoff at.

Now, to see again, approx. 15 years later, the same 640x480 screens we grew up with, in cellphones, so we can watch movies while we drive or walk down the street.

We were optimistic about the year 2000 since birth, and looking back, some promised devices are beginning to emerge, like multi-touch input devices and sleek tablets.

The majority of the innovation and technology we evolved with, is now used to license consumers digital goods.

The internet and computers are mainstream now and it is mostly about money. Some BBS operators did it for the money, but the majority did it for the love.

When we were kids, we could stay up until the wee hours of the morning exploring with our PCs, while our parents took care of us. Now we must pay our own bills, and developing software as a job can do this, but when you get home, you don't want to work more.

Some coders I've worked with have a true obsessive compulsion for writing code. They write code from when they wake up to when they go to sleep. Others need to take breaks.

As many others have mentioned, take a break (if you can afford it). Otherwise, you may have to take a lower-paying job in a different industry and trim some expenses, but the mental health aspect could be worth it.

IMHO, the most amazing advancement to come out of any of this is... http://www.khanacademy.org/

Maybe get involved with Khan? That is the one site on the internet that gives me hope this technology can and will be used for progress.

Thank you for posting this. Lot's of valuable insight from everybody.

NO CARRIER

You sound burnt-out. I don't think the problem is the field, I think it's you.

Take a year off. If you can't afford a year without working, find some other job in a completely different field, even if it pays much less. Let technology stop being a daily grind and more of an enjoyable hobby again. You can't force the magic to come back, but if you leave it alone, it will probably do so all by itself.

The OSS revolution is far from over; rather, other fields are being infected. There's Open Source hardware and that field now even has conferences. Biology and biochemistry are going "open source." Media is being released under Creative Commons licensing, etc.

Children of Revolutions always go for the buck. The revolutionaries are the idealists, the pioneers, the groundbreakers. Once the field is prepared, that's when commercialization happens. This is not news: it's human history.

You say you're not fascinated by "...offspring of cell phones." Really? You're not amazed that we have the technology to remotely diagnose your car when it breaks down miles from a service station? That an amateur can put together a device that sends him an SMS when the river level is high enough to go white water rafting?

Having learned the technology for the last ten years, the next step is spend ten years applying the technology to change people's lives, not to idolize it simply for its own existence.

You're an engineer? Go build something!

These 2 phrases:

"Instead of the free sharing of ideas...I'm encountering more and more the attitude of a guarded sharing...the real knowledge and experience seems to be held back because it...might be used to turn a profit somewhere"

and

"Todays big topics leave me pretty much unenthused"

I hear a lack of motivation, not for technology, but for the specific purposes to which technology is being put- squeezing a buck out of things.

But you're mistaking the impact that incentive structure has on your motivation for a lack of motivation about the technology itself. It doesn't work that way.

I suggest finding a way to spend time with organizations that have a different incentive structure. Find someone you know and talk to them about how they use technology. It wasn't entirely deliberate, but looking back, I can say I found a way forward when I started working with non-profits and helping at schools.

It takes a little while, but being around people who have a non-financial mission, and then being able to deploy what are still in those areas incredibly useful and rare technical skills- this feeds the motivation engine.

Making money is really important, and it's very visible; the context in which the work happens is invisible, but it's even more important.

So- it may take some time and thinking, but I would advise- stop thinking about the details of the sausage. Server side, client side, mobile, whatever- it's all just sausage.

Think about purpose and incentive structures.

The note you wrote is evidence that this matters to you, and that, like a vitamin deficiency, you're missing the motivation that comes from a different sort of incentive structure.

I would also respectfully disagree about the open source revolution being over. For technical, social, economic reasons, looking at the trend lines, it is very far from over. Open source, free software- this lives in and feeds an ecosystem that is not about making a buck, and there are healthy and growing areas in which these incentives are dominant. That OSS and FS can be consumed by other ecosystems- that's fine, the world as a whole is healthier when you have a balance of both. This is precisely why FS licenses are written as they are- the act of creating a tool to a certain degree has to be agnostic about the uses to which the tool will be put. But OSS and FS are still growing, and gifts are everywhere being created.

Good luck.

Try to think of how computers and software could make things better and work on that. I don't mean how they could look cooler or play games faster, but how they could help social progress or enable revolution or democracy in the third world or how they could pull people out of poverty and death.

When the social web came out, I wasn't completely enamored with it as well. It was only later, when I started getting into "network science"[1], and began to view social systems and the internet as large complex systems, that the social web really clicked as something fascinating to get involved with from an engineering perspective.

Since, as you say, you're not a "particularly social person", maybe if you step back from many of the inanities of the social web and take a big picture view of the system, including the similarities between social systems, biological systems, and other systems, you may gain a new perspective on it.

[1] See http://www.amazon.com/Networks-Introduction-Mark-Newman/dp/0... for a good introduction.

>but the real knowledge and experience seems to be held back because it has to be regarded as a personal asset that might be used to turn a profit somewhere.

You need to move. If you primarily interact in person, you need to physically move. If you primarily interact over the internet, you need to change what forms you use.

This is not how I see the world, especially the open-source world. From my point of view, the open-source tendency to help people for free seems to be bleeding over into the business world. Hell, my direct competitors help me out. And, of course, if you ask questions with the right attitude in the right places, there is a whole lot of free help to be had from the technical community, too.

I was in the same position as you about 3 years ago. You know what I did? Quit my job sold my house and went traveling for a year.it literally took 3 months of travel and quiet contemplation before I was able to start thinking creatively and having fun.

If you can, take a long chunk of time off and go away (this is tough to do if you have a family). You can get so beat down, and stuck in the 'don't think just do' mindset from working a job, and that's not so easy to fix.

Since coming back I've started my own business, and while I'm not rolling in money I reserve at least 50%! of my time for creative projects (which right now happens to be a. Ruby on rails beer site) and I'm more excited about technology than I ever was.

Happens to everybody. Take a timeout. In the 12 years of my career, I have taken a total of 3 years off - and I am certain that in the 9 remaining years I achieved more and better things than what I would have had I worked the 12 years straight through.

It is like when you have been staring at a computer screen for long hours at a stretch trying to solve a problem. You stand up and move away from your desk and within a few moments all the answers and solutions storm through.

Your career and personal life are no different. Perhaps you are trying to hard to find the answers - so stand up and walk away for a little while.

Interesting.. Could you elaborate at which stage in your career did you take 3 years off? How did you deal with family/relationships? So, if your kid comes along and says he does not want to go to school,what do you tell him?

I took it in 3 blocks of around a year each. After 2.5 years of working, after 5 years of working and then after around 7-8 years of working. Completely changed my life.

I am a dropout, so if my own child doesn't want to go to school I would support him/her just as my parents did with me.

I think I know how the OP feels. I have a similar history with computers and I get bored maybe once a year.

But in my case, some new and interesting problem always appears before long, benefiting from the use of new and interesting technology. This year it has been mostly NoSQL. Next year it might be something completely different.

Technology by itself is only fascinating for a short while. Finding interesting problems and real-world projects where to use it is the cool part. I consider my own job a great one because the environment and people often make this possible.

I think that if it seems that "there is nothing new under the sun", you're probably looking at things from too far away. Try looking into more concrete matters (best: a specific problem, easiest: specific technology). In my experience I know that at times I have been engrossed in what would now appear to be awfully boring things, just because I dug deep enough.

[Corollary: if you think that revolutions in your field are happening every month, you may want to have a look at the state of things from afar.]

Similar background 15K miles down south of you, though the same thing happen to me earlier this year and I had it coming. Too much work on things I didn't like. I took some time off to figure it out and it worked. If you can, don't rush it and try to focus on what you really enjoy, no matter how hard or crazy may seam at first, and you'll find it. The shallow scenery is an opportunity to us, oldies. Lets show we still have a few tricks and cooler than ever.

It took me a bit over a year of job-independence and several projects that didn't work out to find something I could really get passionate about again. To do it, I really had to move away from "new tech for it's own sake" types of ideas and instead indulge a specific vision - something more _artistic_ than technical.

Work on your life, and then work on your work. That will make you strong enough to see past the hype cycle.

I can definitely relate. I'm doing two things to combat this. First, I'm taking a year off to travel. This doesn't take that much money if you do it frugally. Second, I'm studying an entirely new problem domain. I picked machine learning, but I think anything that requires you to learn some new fundamentals that don't necessarily have directly to do with tech can work.

When I get a bit tired of working on software, I work on my hotrod ('72 Dodge Challenger), which has no computers (or even electronics) of any kind in it. It's very refreshing to work on totally mechanical systems with my own hands, and have them come alive.

After a while, I'm ready to go back to the keyboard.

I think by the time we reach 40 we should move to manufacturing or agriculture sector.

Yep, the social web is a misnomer, and cellphones are nice and all, but who has the stomach to learn another gui toolkit? How about biology? Study biology, perhaps at a university, build the geneticist's philosopher's stone...

Try creating something new instead of learning about what other people have created.

Teach?

I completely agree with this... Your excitement will be renewed 10 fold by the excitement you see when tutoring the next generation of nerds. Nothing beats seeing the lightbulb flip on when an 8 year old "gets" binary math or writes their first program under your guidance. Nothing.

Already did that. First teaching evening courses at community colleges while at university, then doing freelance jobs for a well-known IT teaching center during the episode that nearly broke my financial neck.

However when I did this I was (obviously) in a different mindset, so the experience would be different this time around. I'll have a look into revisiting this aspect.

You graduated shortly after 9/11/2001 and you feel old already? You're just a kid! Take some of the great advice here and be glad you got to this point so early in your life.

I thought the likes of iPad will reboot computing. A lot of things we imagined in the past has suddenly become possible. Why not see what's there?

I'm 45 and I think I giggled like a 5 year old when I first started using the Star Walk application on my iPad.

Make something people want.

I'm being presumptive but your post talks only about technology as if you care more about it than just means to an end.

You're probably mostly correct with that assumption. For me the exploration of new concepts was the driving force and the main endorphine trigger. Actually applying what was learned was more of an afterthought.

It's probably no coincidence that I studied theoretical CS and minored in math :)

Have a holiday then do stuff with computers that you enjoy and try to find a career that is perhaps not in computers.

You should just become a journalist: your writing is readible, sincere, succinct and honest.

Start pushing forward yourself. You've spent 30 years consuming the knowledge of others, now it's time to start giving back. Identify the real source of your disillusionment and dedicate yourself to fixing it.

Congratulations! Discovering the giant treadmill is a huge achievement.

Now You should accept the facts, step out from it, relax and fall in love with something still unknown and unexplored, and doing it just for fun. Or just fro lulz in a newspeak. ^_^

Today Open source is just another name of business. The next evolutionary step toward literally nothing. So, accept it and relax and try to find something that you could love.

I'm, for example, going trough MIT and Berkeley online courses after 15 years of being UNIX sysadmin and system engineer, without any ambitions to shake the world, just fro lulz.

btw, your question itself contains a big bold cue - just fins a new love. ^_^

You may also try to search in a realms outside CS, but I wouldn't advice you to do so. After so many years spent, it is better to stay in the field.

Ask HN: After almost 30 years the romance is over - What now?