Ask HN: Is it always rosy in hacker land?
I don't really know how to express the confusion that I have right now, but its a new year so I would take advantage of this artificial milestone and try to seek some answers, even if they are given by someone else.
I do not want to do a long back story as it is dull and might deter people from reading the actual problem. Suffice it to say that I was once very interested in web development, learned a lot of RoR (and even ruby in general) and tried my hand on a lot of websites. But it started to bore me and I moved on to doing other things. I started gaining interest in electronics and chose Electronics and Communication as my college major. I don't really liked my classes(due to bad teaching and no choice based credit system), but I liked the subjects so guessed I made a right decision in leaving computer programming behind.
But even when self learning EE I was more inclined to the fine line where hardware meet software. I did a lot of microcontroller programming as a hobby but as was the case with web development I never got to doing serious projects.
I started on a one month internship at a robotics based start up 3 weeks back. With only one week left to go, I can safely say I have learned more here than I did in 1 and a half year of college classes (out of which first year was wasted in subjects like "Elements of Civil and Mechanical Engineering" and stupid topics like details of how a boiler works or how you do a land survey, I still cannot why a EE guy has to study elements of other disciplines in such detail).
But this is where the problem appears in a the foreground. While working there I realized I wasn't really happy 100% of the time. As anyone who has done any EE stuff might know it is really hard to debug as we cannot just look at the variables in a finely made screen as we do for software. I find myself feeling miserable when I am stuck with one problem for 4 days and don't have a clue where I went wrong.
When ever I see posts on HN I get a feeling that the people who really love their job are happy in it all the time. But I am happy for like 70% of the time. The other 30% I am very frustrated with the work I am doing and sometimes even doubt if I am in the right place. But my being unhappy may have a lot of other factors
1) I am not really a genius and this was the first time I was exposed to real engineering problems as opposed to simple (copyable from book) assignments.
2)EE is hard as it is, you cannot debug it easily. The problem can be anywhere from the power supply to the measuring instrument. You have to check each and every source of error, which quite a painstaking process.
3) I am not exactly working on my favourite problem all the time. This is an internship and I have to work on every problem that is handed to me, whether I like it or not.
4)I have never actually worked for 9 hours straight and this might be the period of adjustment I need. So the training may be over before I get accustomed to it.
So I ask HN, is the hacker land always rosy or even the best of the hackers some times do not enjoy what they are doing?