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Comment by kstenerud | Hacker News Reader

In 2 days time I'll mark my 27th year as a professional programmer (and just over 40 years since I started programming). I've worked in small companies, big companies, and mega-corporations. I've been a programmer, manager, team lead and CTO. And in doing so I discovered that I don't like managing people, I don't like meetings, and I don't like paperwork. I like long periods of focus.

So I'm a software dev/architect again, working in esoteric and interesting spaces, and will continue to do so until I "retire" (meaning that I switch to full time on my open source projects).

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I used to love the long periods of focus in my 20s, but ever since more life started happening, I can't do those anymore. It turns out my stress tolerance is incredibly low and when the life outside my work is not completely in order (like it rarely is after the 20s), being able to get into the flow state gets very difficult.

I wish I was one of those people who could just forget the problems at home, etc. when they sit in front of the computer and start coding, but I can't, and as a result my ability to focused work has gone down a lot, and nowadays I do more "people work" simply because that's easier to do when my head is not in it 100%.

On flow: back when I started my blog (2004) I soon realized that nothing had ever turned on the "flow switch" as predictably as preparing and publishing posts: for 4-6 hours/day, 5-6 days/week, I was in heaven.

Reading the comments on vjk800's comment led me to focus on my state of mind today (I'll be 75 on June 8) as I work on my blog in its nineteenth year.

Though I spend perhaps 2-3 hours/day 3-5 days/week on it now (I post 3x daily, 7 days/week, down from 8x daily 7 days/week when I started), my flow state is as automatic as it was at the beginning.

I feel fortunate to have found something so reliably rewarding that has persisted throughout the ups and downs of everyday life.

Love this. After 19 years I imagine your blog gets some traffic. Would you mind sharing how it's worked out? I think its pretty rare outside of newspapers to see someone publishing content for this long.

Love this too! Super interested in this story, I'm seeking inspiration for this kind of activity and you seem to be hitting the "sweet spot".

Indeed, somehow or other I found a perfect combination/distillation/outlet for:

I really like to write about things that catch my interest

Being an enthusiast

Being extremely interested in people/things that are surprising/clever/beautiful/original/funny (not all at once necessarily)

My traffic history: started in August 2004, up to 15,000 pageviews/10,000 visits/day at the 2013 peak, when blogs were at their zenith.

I'd get 10 or 20 comments/post, often.

Then a slow decline until January 2015 when I became clinically depressed and barely functional such that it took everything I had to post one sentence/day just to show proof of life.

I recovered completely in October 2016 and resumed multiple posts daily as is the case today.

Traffic when I started back in in late 2016 on a regular multiple posts/day basis was around 100 pageviews/day.

Current traffic is about 600 pageviews/day, with 5-10 comments/week.

Still, a couple times a year some popular blog/website picks up something I've posted and links to my post which results in a sudden spike to 3,000-8,000 pageviews that day, with a regression to the norm over the next week or two.

One thing I find interesting is that things I post today I would've posted back in 2004, and vice versa.

It's amusing to discover a couple times/year that something I'm about to feature or just featured appeared 10-15 years ago.

Occasionally a reader from back in the day will point this out, to my delight.

As best I can tell, the only popular one-person blogs that still update regularly and go back as far as I do are https://www.swiss-miss.com/ [March 2005] and https://kottke.org/ [1998].

I take pride in publishing daily including weekends and holidays, unlike pretty much every other blog/website.

Always something new at boj if you can just make it through the night till the next morning....

As to making money from the site: when I started I thought perhaps I could do that, so the guy who set up my blog (I have 0 technical skills or knowledge of coding etc.) made it so I had Google AdSense on my homepage along with an Amazon Associate banner/link.

At the blog's peak I was generating about $300/month from each of those two sources, with a couple anomalous checks from Amazon in late 2014 for $2,000-$3,000.

Just when that happened is when I got depressed, and income collapsed to the point that I removed all ads from my homepage and left AdSense up on individual posts.

Currently Google deposits around $120 into my bank account every 6-12 months, though I may have failed to update my AdSense agreement such that my Google payments are kaput.

I checked out the blog and noticed the book "Quantations".

> How does the theoretical world of quantum physics create our everyday life? "Quantations" explains this with wit and clarity, making the imaginary real.

I also took a peek into the book. I'm sorry to sound negative, but this is just full of fluff that has nothing to do with actual quantum physics. It's all pseudo-philosophical fluff and that stuff is the reason my aunt thinks she is a "medium" and communicates within some kind of "sixth dimension". Sorry to say, but this is all BS.

>I'm sorry to sound negative...

You don't sound negative to me but, rather, accurate and factual.

I am no physicist but rather a retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist (38 years until 2015).

The only physics I know I learned in 1966-1967 Physics 1a/2a/3a at UCLA, which was the easier physics sequence for non-physics majors who planned to go on to medical school or graduate study in other scientific disciplines.

I made up the word "Quantations" for my book to describe a compendium of quotations I'd been gathering since I was in college in the 1960s (indeed, I actually used yellowed cuttings from newspapers and magazines I'd gotten in the habit of keeping in file folders back then) that in large part centered around quantum physics.

I included many of my own thoughts, "pseudo-philosophical fluff" being a perfect description and one I'm going to use in the future, BTW.

Since my teenage years the mystery of quantum physics and its related tangents and intersections with so-called "reality" has been of much interest to me.

The philosophical explorations and musings of Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Bohr, and their peers and successors continue to offer glimpses of other possible ways of viewing the universe and being.

"BS" is a fair way to describe non-mathematical, non-quantitative attempts to render quantum mechanics into everyday language.

As Richard Feynman remarked in 1964 in The Messenger Lectures at MIT, "... I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."

I actually crossed paths with Richard Feynman in 1980 when I was an anesthesiology resident at UCLA Medical Center: he was about to undergo surgery for removal of a cancerous abdominal mass and I happened to be standing in a corridor as he was wheeled into the operating room.

He died in 1989 at age 69 of sequelae of that cancer.

This is a fantastic response. Just wondering, if they exist, what would you say are the broad overlaps between anesthesiology and QM are? I know Stuart Hameroff, another anesthesiologist, did a bunch of speculative work on the Orch OR front, so I'd assume there must be some connection of ag least some quality that makes both fields attractive to the same kind of person.

I'm SO glad you commented because it prompted me to look into what Hameroff has been up to recent years.

He and I are contemporaries: he's a year older. I've followed his career since his early publications in the 1980s when he was an assistant professor at the University of Arizona Medical School Department of Anesthesiology and just beginning his exploration of microtubules that later became the focus of his and Roger Penrose's investigations.

Hameroff's inquiries began with what is still a mystery: how does general anesthesia work?:

https://anesth.medicine.arizona.edu/news/2019/anesthesia-and....

A zillion theories have come and gone and we still don't know.

I suspect that the answer is intimately linked to how consciousness happens, still the "hard problem" as David Chalmers so perfectly described it in 1995.

I don't know of any other anesthesiologist(s) interested in the confluence of QM and anesthesia.

Someone better get on this horse 'cause Hameroff is 75 and I'm 74 and who knows how much longer we'll keep banging on this drum.

Below, a guide to exploring the work of Hameroff and Penrose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Hameroff

https://hameroff.arizona.edu/research-overview/orch-or

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24070914/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33232193/

I feel like I’m somewhere in this comment. For me, the stress and worry about things going on in my life eventually led to full burnout. Those periods of flow were what kept me going, and when I could no longer find them, it only compounded the stress.

I ended up going on a self-funded sabbatical to focus on sorting out my personal and internal life, and the #1 change that has led to rediscovering deep focus was starting a mindfulness meditation and yoga habit each morning. These core habits led to changes in how I was relating to the worries and created space for me to sort through the underlying stressors.

YMMV, but I realized that some of the things I was worrying about were just consuming energy (despite being legit concerns), and I started actively reframing worries using some of the exercises in the book “Learned Optimism” (Martin Seligman, 2006). This book also made me realize how deeply hardwired my pessimistic defaults were, and these defaults were the source of a lot of my daily rumination and worry.

All of this to say, if you are at all similar to me, it might be worth considering the lack of ability to find flow a big red flag worth actively investigating. I don’t know if I could’ve avoided burnout, but I’m sufficiently convinced now that internal work is one of the most important (and accessible) ways of addressing this.

> All of this to say, if you are at all similar to me, it might be worth considering the lack of ability to find flow a big red flag worth actively investigating. I don’t know if I could’ve avoided burnout, but I’m sufficiently convinced now that internal work is one of the most important (and accessible) ways of addressing this.

Don't you worry, I have plenty of other red flags besides inability to concentrate to keep me worried :).

I've tried meditation before, but didn't really "get" it. The instructions always tell me to let go of my thoughts and concentrate on a mantra or my breathing, but not a single time during the two months I followed a meditation program was I able to do so properly.

Exercising is one of the few things that even remotely work for stress relief. I've also done yoga and it works, but not any better than jogging or weight lifting.

I also had some false starts with meditation and didn’t “get it” until I found good resources on mindfulness/Vipassana.

I used the “Waking Up” app (not free but has a 30 day thing that’ll get you through the introductory course), and it was as if the content was targeted at people who’ve tried and didn’t get it. Mantras are not the focus.

There are many types of meditation, but the kind getting all of the attention in studies (for good reason) is the mindfulness variety.

The reason Yoga suddenly clicked for me was that I brought the mindset from meditation into the Yoga practice. Exercise (cycling and long walks) is always beneficial, but my body awareness increased so drastically with Yoga that I feel like a different person.

That may have more to do with my history of dissociative tendencies, but I do think there’s a connection between a good meditation practice and Yoga becoming something more than just exercise. It becomes an entry to flow.

The instructions always tell me to let go of my thoughts and concentrate on a mantra

I’m confused all instructions you found said this. This is the opposite of what you’re supposed to do.

When you calm down your hamster wheel of a brain will get bored and pull out a thought naturally. There is no point in fighting this.

The point of meditation is usually to become aware of the thoughts we have, metaphorically holding them in front of us and observe them without judging. You’re supposed to think “oh it seems I have that thought, interesting” without analyzing, just being aware. This is similar to hearing someone out instead of immediately trying to solve their problem or argue with them. What you will find after going through some obvious thoughts is that some will appear that you didn’t know you had anymore, because you pushed them away into your subconscious mind.

Hmm, interesting. I'm 39 and used to have amazing flow sessions in late 20s and early 30s but not seeing them much anymore. I can't tell if it's because of stresses of life or simply because I don't have enough time (with 3 young kids) to allow myself to fall into a state of flow. I really hope it's not stresses or my brain changing because I really valued those periods of focus.

Have you tried going back to the theory of Flow, and the conditions for it to happen, and compare&contrast your current situation with earlier ones?

I suppose that the differences might be subtle. For one example, for the condition that you have a sense of doing a good job, your metric for good job might have changed: it might no longer be simply make an algorithm to do X, but include larger context, including the reason X is being done.

BTW, keeping in mind that techbro ageism is a thing, especially in YC-type circles (that's how YC started), I suppose that HN comments by over-30 people can be fodder for confirmation bias by 20yos.

"Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990)

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/66354

https://positivepsychology.com/mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-fathe...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi

>BTW, keeping in mind that techbro ageism is a thing, especially in YC-type circles (that's how YC started)

Can you elaborate on 'that's how YC started'?

As PG was getting into angel investing, he started by soliciting ~20yos to be founders, and wrote about his reasoning for that.

I don't think it's time, it's priorities; your work is, naturally, a lower priority (both in terms of your focus and your actual time) than your kids, spouse (if any) and yourself. Whereas in the Before Times, it was just you and your keyboard.

Having family as priority compared to work is more than fine, it makes you (potentially, not necessarily) a good human being, a good parent or husband. This world needs that 10'000x more than another code ninja optimizing some corporation by nanofraction of a percentile.

The opposite is extremely valid too (to not leave any room for misunderstanding - folks prioritizing work over their kids are shitbags, no exception, and every single one I've met in their later years deeply regret that... apart from outright sociopaths and similar careless crowd).

Focus on career if thats your calling and spent whole live in it if you want, but then please don't have kids. Every kid with missing/bad father figure I've ever met later in their lives was a mess in one of myriad ways, endlessly compensating for this and never actually coming over it, permanently. If you know what to look for, you can start seeing it around you quite easily. It breaks my heart a little every time I see it. These folks often repeat same mistakes of their parents too.

Also 39, also three young kids. It’s hard.

One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that my difficultly in getting into a flow state is more often than not because of a subconscious hang-up about the approach that I haven’t articulated yet.

I’ve learned to recognize and lean into this, and actively look for what’s bothering me about a design. Usually while doing other things.

I suspect it’s actually saved effort overall.

I can relate to this.

Sometimes I have to detangle a bunch of loosely related spaghetti code in my head for long enough to fully grok it and relate it to the business context. And then bring it all back together as one cohesive unit of work. In the end the code is easier to understand and maintain than if I layered on more spaghetti code and called it a day. I've done that too and months later not understood my own code.

Late 30's no kids, no stresses beyond the threat layoffs and still being single.

I recently tried playing some video games adjacent to ones I've loved before, and I found it really hard to get into them. The games are Red Dead Redemption and SimCity 4, so the graphics and gameplay mechanics are ok. It's just been hard to really get into them.

The same for me. I still sometimes find games that I can really get into, but it's much harder than it was 10-20 years ago. I think part of that is because I've played so many games that many new games just feel like the same old again and again. The other reason is, of course, that the general inability to concentrate hard on stuff makes it so much more difficult to immerse myself into the game world.

Some exceptions in the past few years have been Zelda: breath of the wild and GTA V (yes, I know both of them are a bit older, but I only played them relatively recently).

Same here. There is one game though that for some reason I've replayed over and over through the years.

I played the original way back of course. Probably once. Settlers 2.

I had to look it up but apparently the "Settlers 2: 10th anniversary edition" came out in 2006. I don't even remember the original graphics and I'm so used to the 10th anniversary edition look. But once every year or two I delete my profile and play the campaign again over a week or two. It's the only game I've come back to again and again so often. Even with kids in the mix.

Try Cities Skylines. The newer SimCity games really botched it and Cities Skylines came along and ate their lunch. It's a fantastic game with a vibrant modding scene

I find that my taste for games and tv reflects what is missing in my life. If your life is relatively peaceful, maybe you would enjoy more action-oriented games like FPS?

big into the star wars and hogwarts games recently, both open world rpg’s of a sort

No kids here, but similar in that I remember sessions of long focus, and being able to do them repeatedly, for multiple days in a row. I typically can't do that as much now. Perhaps more to the point, I can't do them on demand. I do still have periods of 'focused flow', and they're great, but they just 'happen'. But... I never could just turn them on/off in the past either - they just happened far more frequently.

I predict you'll have more, just not as frequently as you used to. :)

FWIW, many of the things I used to have to spend long periods of focus on are now simple/common libraries that just didn't exist 30 years ago. Or, if they existed, there wasn't any convenient way of discovering them. So I find my productivity is still comparatively high, even with fewer number of flow states.

I think it's your kids. They should be your priority for now. You really can get back to tech stuff later. Phases of life and all that.

Fwiw, I've never had good flow states. :p

When I code, there's always so much stuff I don't know that I have to look up or so many big design/refactoring questions that I'm discovering in real time and have to grapple with. It's as flowy as your car getting stuck in the mud every 2 miles and having to get out and push. It's as productive as having a bipartisan Congressional hearing on the best posture to use every time you have to push it out of the mud. Incrementalism and time management are my friends cuz it's exhausting to do that for too long without breaks!

Nevertheless, programming remains my favorite professional and hobbyist activity.

I also think that having a messy personal life that you CARE ABOUT is really important for fostering good people management skills. I’ve never had a good boss whose primary identity was work.

Really interesting point, looking back it holds true for me as well. My last two bosses were single dudes with no partner, family or even dog and their management style was impersonal and difficult. It was like working for an AI trained on the most popular management books.

I don't have problems at home, yet I am also drawn to people management for similar reasons: when dealing with people rather than code, your brain doesn't have to be 100%; people aren't as exacting as the compiler. I find it a fine compromise when you don't want to give your best to a job.

I am not sure what I want more anymore. I love these periods of flow, but I am so good at integrating other people's work, making them agree on the best while being happy and feeling productive. Also flow makes time fly and I feel I would just die very soon, heh. Anyone feeling this too? But I crave this feeling very much anyway.

This is my exact feeling :D

I love coding and problem solving, but during my career I noticed that I'm _really_ good at getting technical people to communicate with each other and integrating their work.

I try to do both, but I still don't know which I like more. I tried the full manager / chart drawing architect -route and I hated it. Just coding was a bit boring too in the long run, because I want to make an impact on the org-level and I'm incapable of shutting up if I see any inefficiencies that could be improved by communication.

> I'm incapable of shutting up if I see any inefficiencies that could be improved by communication

This is one of my biggest struggles. I see so much flawed work and I can't help but voice my opinion, but I can't possibly dedicate time to try to fix it all, so I'm often afraid of just coming across as a complainer.

My "problem" is that if/when I open my mouth, people give me more responsibilities.

"Don't like how it's done? Now you're responsible for it." Granted I usually got a raise to go with it, but it was just admin work and not-coding - which I didn't like.

Just can't help but share: (I Have People Skills!)[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcIMIyQnOso]

Trying new (work) positions is underrated imo.

You could try being a manager for a while and see how it goes - you can always go back to what you know.

Ofc you have to find a company where it allows for such options.

I don't want to feel like I live longer by enjoying each moment less.

My personal opinion:

After looking at my current manager and previous managers in my previous jobs I decided to never become a manager.

Being a manager means that I'll have to fill my day with nothing but meetings I cannot skip, keep talking on and on and on, deal with delivery headaches, respond to requests even while on PTO, do a lot of context switching between Slack, email, calendar, documentation, and other things. I used to like that level of being "busy" but now it seems that having my focus time is the best thing ever.

I made the mistake of entering management WAY too early in my career.

I wish I had not. it relegated my time to many tasks other than tech implementation.

FN having to train CFOs on financially managing cloud environs, managing people, pestering people for status reports, c-level presentations on this that and the other thing, etc...

My biggest mistake in my career was thinking I was "climbing the ladder" when accepting a position as a manager, director etc...

I'm not sure there's a better way to climb the ladder though.

The point being it's the wrong ladder. I'll stick to the enjoying life more ladder

i did it too early.

Were you not climbing ? Was your pay not rising?

gulp

Same path, but for the last 10 years i've been a CTO. Right now i'd kill for fewer meetings and more focus time. Starting to take its toll.

Make the changes you'd love to see. The CTO role is vague and broad and is defined differently in most companies anyway. You can delegate things to an engineering manager or director. Or if the company is large enough to a VP.

find a cross-section of what is valuable for the company and what you like doing

I don't think the Eng Dir will enjoy doing the CTO's job for the CTO. In 6 months Eng Dir would be in a meeting with the CEO asking the CEO to fix the glitch.

Hire an engineering manager and delegate.

Suggest wrong direction. Make teams more autonomous and develop the art of the backlog. Too much management is what's wrong with organizations these days.

I took the same path and came to the same realization, yet my current architect role is still nothing but meetings. Ugh.

"Architect" in most places is basically "code politician".

Me, on the other hand, long to be an architect so that I can influence some technical decisions.

Grass is always greener.

You hope you can influence some technical decisions, but it's not just a title of architect that gives you authority, you need convincing and communication skills as well.

I think that's the best I can do if I want to stay in the engineering track.

Dont be the architect be the guy who tells the architect what to do. Because they are too busy in meetings.

Code is easy, people are hard.

I am on my 26th year as a programmer. I love the fact that I can imagine and also make it happen.

However, I see a constant push from people around me to focus on creating a pipeline of ideas and let others implement them. Unfortunately, I do not see the same level of enthusiasm I have in implementing some of those ideas - could be due to lack of recognition since it is not their original idea.

Once I retire, I will just go back to where it all started. Come up with an idea followed by implementation. The sheer pleasure of seeing your idea working in a reasonable timeframe is exhilarating!

You have twice my professional age, and I have come to the same realisation.

I want to earn enough money from my business ideas to spend the rest of my time on hacking on niche languages, distributed/anonymous networks, etc. and as I grow older, to use computer and programming just to maintain a modern off-the-grid life (so working on my smart grid, automating my cabin-in-the-woods life)

Computers and the Internet have gone from being a lifestyle, to just a tool.

Developers, or good ones at least, are puzzle solving junkies.

Any advice for aspiriing programmers? I work full-time and go to school part-time so finding time / motiviation to practice and learn is incredibly difficult most days.

Any interest in workers coops given that realization? I too realized I don’t want to manage/own workers nor be managed but there is a third way

Do you feel that managing helped you in some ways with your later IC work or was it a waste of time?

It helped me empathize with my manager more. And that's always a good thing.

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