Ask HN: Overcoming an Inferiority Complex
I’ve hit a bit of a brick wall in life recently and for the first time in my relatively short life (24) I’ve been diagnosed with depression. This has spurned me into doing a bit of self reflection and soul searching.
I’m a hacker at heart. I love to code and have done since my early teens. By the time I left high school to start university I had already taught myself C++, written games and worked during holidays as a developer for a small local company. I guess that lead to an anti-climax when I went to study Comp. Sci. at university. I attended a reasonably good university by UK standards, top 20 for engineering in the UK. But throughout my time there I always felt like I was missing out, I pretty much walked through the course. Don’t get me wrong I worked hard, real hard but I was never mentally challenged. I would deliberately over-engineer assignments to challenge myself. I was the go to guy for classmates when they were stuck with assignments. I left said university 2 years ago with a 1st class honours degree and average class score of > 80%.
After graduating I took a job working at a large financial organisation in the UK. My day-to-day work is focused on patching and extending a large CRUD application. For the first year I was on a roll, I quickly learnt the twisted innards of the codebase, patched and extended the life out of it and was rewarded with a promotion within 18 months. But it brings me no joy.
I guess where I’m going with this is that I’ve always achieved. I’ve always achieved everything I can within my circumstance. But I’m never satisfied. I always compare my achievements to those of others and dismiss what I have done. This has lead to a feeling of worthlessness and inferiority. Applying this to my current situation I feel stuck. I’m in a secure, well paid job but with little opportunity to learn or develop. I live in a pretty small UK city where all the local software jobs are maintenance of legacy apps. I read HN daily and aspire to be a part of the startup culture and learn by immersion. Yet the more I read the more I read the less confident I becomes in my own ability. I don’t know ROR, I haven’t learnt Haskell and my algorithms skills are rusty at best. How would I ever be good enough to work with these guys?
HN how can I address my thought process and gain more confidence in my ability? Has anybody else overcome anything similar and how did you achieve it?