Ask HN: Career Advice for a Struggling Dev
I'm about to "give up" on my goal/dream of having a career as a software engineer (indefinitely)
I've been out of work for 3.5 years (Covid end of 2020). I was struggling in the office, but everything going remote was too much for me and I hit a breaking point
I've spent the past almost 2 years trying to get back to working shape. I've tried so many things: open source, freelancing, starting my own coworking discord, timers, schedules, systems which emphasize randomness, pomodoros, side projects, going back to my roots and passion for programming. Basically trying to "figure it out" and gain enough confidence to convince me that I can "do it" full time
I'll say what it feels like is going on is this: when I sit down in front of a computer alone to do work, I experience a level of anxiety that is intolerable and makes it impossible to work productively
I'm about to "give up" and go apply to McDonald's. McDonald's is appealing because it's a fast paced environment. I'm constantly surrounded by people, constantly moving my body around, constantly monitoring/keeping track of lots of stuff. It seems like as long as I'm constantly stimulated in this way with lots of variety and I can apply my OCD-like self-monitoring to my environment, I can do that
One of the most solid things I've noticed these past two years (and looking back at my last job) is when I have someone with me, I can work fine. At my last job when my coworkers were sitting RIGHT next to me, I was fine. But if I have to work alone, then that's when I lose the ability to work
At my last job, I excelled most with monitoring-type stuff, like building dashboards to monitor systems. When stuff broke, I would quite enjoy debugging in kibana (very stimulating process). I enjoyed times of general chaos when our systems broke. But when things settle back down to normal and I have to code and proactively build features, I procrastinate and go downhill
It doesn't just feel like software engineering is intractable. It generally feels any kind of knowledge type work where I imagine myself in some "back office" alone, away from everyone else which feels impossible
In college, I was a great student with all the structure of classes when there were definite deadlines and lots of structure, things kept moving forward. I really struggled with open-ended projects
Anyway, just posting this on the off chance that someone else has gone through something similar and can provide some advice, words of comfort, anything