This experience seems to have confused my brain. I am questioning old patterns of thinking and having to establish boundaries for negative thought-patterns again. It feels very odd and I feel I have gone backwards many years in my mental health development. My thoughts go out to the many people suffering from these problems, indeed many much worse than I.
Even before Covid I was already going through a bad phase, I think I will never be as good as I once was in my job. I make stupid mistakes, I have a hard time focusing, I used to be one of the top performers of the team and now I struggle to do basic tasks without making mistakes. I stop and check my phone or the news every 15 minutes.
I have a partner, a baby and a small kid and absolutely no family members to help with anything in an 8.000km radius. Kids can't go to school so wife is even more miserable by being stuck taking care of them the whole day while I attempt to work and fail miserably. I feel horrible that she has to take care of the kids while I'm here in the office absolutely failing to do my work.
My mother just did a Covid test yesterday and she is also showing sign of Alzheimer's. I can't travel to the country where she lives to see or help her.
I am honestly afraid of losing my job for being so unproductive. I even like what I do, I get excited thinking about the things I have to learn, but when it's time to sit down 9am to try to do work, I am just mentally exhausted to even begin to start. Then I check my phone.
I can't just quit my job due to the need for money. I don't think switching jobs will be any more helpful since I am in such a bad productivity stage right now that the new employer will probably fire me upon realizing how crappy I am.
I feel I will never be the productive programmer I once was, and this scares me.
Thanks for the attention.
I think switching jobs does not help because it's the not thing demotivating us.
It's so hard to break the spell called daily routine. I know because I'm in the same spot you're in.
Coming to the table with low inherent trait extroversion and even lower trait neuroticism I was primed to do just fine.
Mix in a decent home office space coincidentally already setup, a job that lets me work from home, a great wage, absurdly low rent, decent savings, a caring partner also fine working from home, and top it all off with living in a country with a more help-others than individualistic culture that happens to be in a more progressive swing of the political pendulum, and I feel like a right lucky S.O.B.
While I’m extremely lucky, I’m also at a very uncertain period in my life - as I assume most of us are.
Working from home (not being able to go to a coffee shop or co-working space) makes it hard to transition in and out of work, so days just feel a bit of a blur.
I know there are people doing way worse, going for months without jobs, so I don’t mean to diminish their situation - but this whole period just feels like waiting.
It's a self-resolving paradox though. Later in life we're wiser, and most of us can better understand our life thru complex layers of abstract models. Like how good are we with diminishing risks and what kind of and how many options we can generate for ourselves. Life is good after that. You trust yourself, you have control. For now just enjoy the ride!
TL;DR: stoicism rocks. the best thing I've adopted ever.
Secret? First of all, stoicism. When COVID started, I got into and quickly merged into my philosophy. I still have a lot to learn, read and internalize (finish the big 3 stoics, yudkovsky, taleb, kahneman), but even now it works pretty well. It successfully moves away from the orthodox version, so I'd recommend you to meditate a lot about the statements it gives instead of just accepting them. For example, I think I started to understand how all this "you can shape reality with your mind" stuff works. Nothing magical, just a proper mindset which is surprisingly similar to the stoic one.
Second - of course, I have savings. I anticipated a crisis long before so I started to stash money. In the best case, I have a couple of years of runaway (and even more if I return home).
Third - I have some ideas to build. So I plan to enrich my github / cv and in the meantime apply to interesting jobs (yes, I'm still picky). I planned to build the stuff anyway, so why not do it in a comfortable manner (and not tired after day job in the evenings). Plus, I can rehearse the proper escape to full-time tinkering which I hope the future will allow me to do.
Fourth - the upside of being a small asocial country is that it has already removed the quarantine. So I've already started going to coworking and got an awesome boost to productivity.
He’s as far from stoic as I can possibly imagine. His hairtrigger easily offended argumentative twitter presence is maybe even more sensitive and reactive and thin skinned than trump.
Regarding his online presence, anyone knowing his works also knows that he's using Twitter purely to mess with people. He stated that many times in his Incerto series.
Sometimes it's easy to forget what is the actual core of a given philosophy / enterprise / etc. Hence my whole comment. It's worthwhile to know, I think, that stoicism has a very important component comprised of pure logic, which Taleb seems to be hyped about (not without a reason).
I wouldn't call Taleb a member of the top-3 stoics though. He's balancing on the verge of being an outcast rather than hanging out with mainstream stoic crowds.
You can say he’s promoting “logical stoicism” just like Ayn Rand fans can say that “it’s okay to be ideologically against handouts while taking them,” but we both know deep down that these people aren’t practicing what they preach.
I like Taleb a lot but it took me a little while to understand that he was writing an idealized version of himself and his philosophy that is frankly fictional but still has great value.
> "but we both know deep down that these people aren’t practicing what they preach"
Actually, it's one of core tenets of his philosophy. "don't tell what to do, show me what you did in the same situation".
Regarding his behavior. I think he just enjoys being human. After all, if he was ruled by emotions he'd not survive the trader job.
I'm also in a good shape thanks to that philosophy, and moreover - thanks to a life I've managed to generate for myself. One can't work without the other.
And I'm not a kind of lucky and happy-face hipster taking success in life for granted. Life has been throwing enormous problems at me. I have no idea what I would do without a proper philosophical backbone in order to deal with that.
Finally got a chance to prove myself which is going well.
The lockdown gave me time to reflect and reset my habits. I am much more into exercise and yoga.
I got more time to talk to my grandparents as I moved in with them during my miserable job hunt.
So yea, pretty good! The only thing I can’t shake is my job hunt experience. I am pretty mad for working so hard at university and people simply brushing me off as inexperienced and later brushing me off as “missing the hiring cycle”
I wish I partied a shit ton more and I regret doing my best, except for the courses that taught something useful. Like the courses on hacking and that one course where they left us all free to learn whatever we wanted (I learned objective-C). But the UML course, bad intro to programming course or the “pervasive computing” course, what a waste of my years.
Spending a few weeks following a tutorial to build some crappy web app will look more impressive to a recruiter than spending a few years going through grueling coursework.
It's not hard to build that crappy web app but it's just weird how it matters more.
I guess being able to showcase what you can do matters a lot more than what you can actually do.
1. It's easy to get up to speed. This has 2 consequences (see 2 and 3).
2. It doesn't feel particurlarly challenging, so you can focus on having a chill life.
An aside: if you live in a country where you're taxed highly, then I definitely recommend taking a 4 day work week as free days don't get taxed. To me, it almost strikes the right balance. I'm learning that I want a mix between a 4 day work weeks and 8 to 12 week vacations per year. I'd get there if I'd go to 3.5 days per week and use 26 free days as vacation days. For me, being able to work 3.5 days per week is similar to being rich and doing whatever the hell you want. Career progress is tougher (depending on what you do in your free time), but you're living life right now instead of later.
3. If it does feel challenging (had this with a previous gig before the 12 months), you have the confidence of having been through something much more grueling before.
Is that worth 4 years of your life? Probably not, but it's better than the psychology degree that I also happen to have :P
I had been making games for mobile since no one else wants to hire me as a programmer, but between making roughly $1.00 on that venture, and the stresses of life, I haven't been able to keep focused on that. Some times I feel that the world feels I am useless, and the problem with feeling like that is that I struggle to keep it from being a self fulfilling prophecy.
I don't really have the option to change. I became an expert (acting tech lead) in our Filenet based application, then they outsourced it. Then I worked with a Neoxam application including ASC work for a couple years (terrible management). I'm on an AWS team working with Python (sort of). The work is boring, the business can't describe their business process well, and we spend more time doing reports or troubleshooting than building anything.
The company doesn't follow it's own policies. I see people get promoted because they meet diversity metrics and work 12 hour days (policy is 7.5 hours). I put in extra hours as an acting tech lead, got my masters, and I'm still a mid level after 8 years. I feel this same sort of stuff will happen at other big companies as the one I'm at is ranked in the top 20 Computerworld best places to work. I'm a mid level developer and would need to find an entry level position. I have a kid now, so I can't afford to take a lower salary. I'm stuck.
It's the side effects.
Most of all my kids have been home and my happy working from home world for me, is horrible. Young kids don't understand working from home, and that's 100% understandable... but then I end up working after they go to bed, and before they get up.
My wife has to work from home.
In the meantime it's summer and there's no baseball, no fairs, no other things :(
I ask since I do something similar semi-regularly now, and I don't find it to be a negative thing for myself. I was always remote even before COVID (and it sounds like you are too). There are parts of my job that aren't time-flexible (meetings) and parts that are (coding). I just tend to code before kid wakes up, when kid is napping, or after her bed time. For meetings, they have to happen in the morning of the work day and that's fine. Overall, I don't really mind the whole bending of my coding hours to work with my family's schedule. I actually kind of enjoy it this way because I know that when I'm coding, I'm undisturbed.
- Great because I have more time to myself, am able to relax faster, I have more time to work on my side project or play video games.
- Bad because my routine is really out of wack now. My sleeping patterns are non-existent at times. I feel extremely tired most of the time.
What helped me was to aim to stop working about 30 minutes before leaving the home office. During that time, just read a book, post on HN, answer/delete emails, all this lighter behavior.