Comment by throwaway_stuck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway_stuck | Hacker News Reader

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throwaway_stuck

This is serial. I've lost a couple of jobs in a row from this.

Luckily I still have a reputation earned from some years ago. Plus, I interview well. People still give me jobs.

Managers don't seem to have a response here. In my experience most managers only have one bit of information devoted to programmer ability (ROCKSTAR xor SUCKS). They have alternately told me to try harder, or threatened then fired me.

I had felt like I was deceiving employers so I took a nine month break and did an artistic project. However even with a whole day to do nothing but that, I wasn't able to achieve much. I worked with a small number of people and lef that project, and it got done, but not very well, even though it was my "full time" job. Still, I felt that I had had enough of a sabbatical, and also had made some progress in psychotherapy, so I returned to the workforce, only to run into the same problems I had before. I now think the psychotherapy was not addressing the right problems -- it's more about what I do than how I feel. And it's clear my attempt at a sabbatical didn't clear up the fundamental issues.

I have friends that are able to learn programming languages on the side or take blacksmithing courses and otherwise have full and exciting lives. In other words they have reserve energy. I am so behind on just the basic requirements for my project, I feel I can't do any of this. I schedule more and more and more and more time for work and yet still nothing gets done.

As for happiness with work; I have a pattern of working with codebases that are in great need of refactoring and I am feeling a great need to stretch out and do something more original. So that is a problem.

That said, the guy who sits next to me has enough energy to actually satisfy those needs both at work (gets managers to agree to major refactorings) and also code up some great things in his spare time. Whereas I'm perenially playing catch-up and my code is ugly.

Someone mentions this below, but, are you trying to engineer the most perfect elegant solution known to man when you could get by with something more simple?

Working with existing code that someone else wrote is harder than a new project. I've only really gotten into heavy testing in the last year or two, but having tests also improves confidence that your changes are not bringing down the entire system.

Finally, what I would say is you need to get into a habit of mentally stimulating yourself after work. I found that when I was in a rut, I thought that I was burnt out and needed to "veg out" more, but I later felt that vegging out only bred more laziness and more procrastination. Once I started to get my brain stimulated in any way, whether it was reading a book, or trying something to learn something new, the effects would carry over.

Summary, laziness breeds more laziness, and stimulation actually recharges you.

You took a sabbatical but you kept programming. That didn't address your burn out at all. You should have taken blacksmithing courses. :) It's not that they have reserve energy it's that they refresh themselves by changing modes.

Personally I'm pretty prone to burn out. I work as a developer and have lots of programming side projects I work on. My advantage is that I can sense the burn out and when it happens I stop all side projects and try to do mostly administrivia at work.

I did stay in one programming job while burned out for over 2 years (this was before I realized what was it was). I produced practically nothing in that time but the act of sitting there trying to force my way through made the burn out get gradually worse. I stepped completely away from programming for about 30 months to get over it.

Another thing that made my burnout worse at that company was that the environment was so incredibly awful. Are you sure you're actually happy where you are, or do you say that because you fear being fired again? I would have said (and if fact did tell someone) that I loved my job during those dark two years, but it was because I felt worthless and unable to get anything better. I wasn't trying to trick the person that I told, I was trying to trick myself into believing it.

Working on existing, bad quality code is the biggest nightmare for me. My philosophy is to think about a problem a lot, and write as few and as concise code as possible. Even delete code if not necessary. I am working alone on 180.000 lines of really bad quality Java code with copy-pastes, and its own 'web framework' and using all the buzzword technologies like Spring everywhere. The business requirements are not that complicated (although boring like hell) 20.000 lines of really high quality code would solve the problem I think. It has been created by 3 people for not too much money. I've reached the point that it is impossible that I can ever refactor this alone, as there is no time for that an my manager is micromanaging very much. It is extremely hard to put in new features because I have no mental model for how to do things in this 'framework' (an undocumented mess. and I've spoken with the author: he could not explain the philosophy behind it.) I am so unmotivated that I go to math/programming forums and I solve math/algorithmization problems for some fun when I should work. At the darkest times I find out math quizzes for myself or just think about P vs. NP (which is depressing as there is no chance to solve that). But I need the money, and there are not much interesting jobs where I live.

And I feel that there are people who could be a bit better at what I do now: people with very very good memory. Maintaining a huge illogical mess needs very good memory and nothing else. I don't have very good memory. That's why I love logical and conciese solutions which have 'philosophy' behind them.

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