16 hours in front of a computer (mostly) working 6 days a week
This is not sustainable no matter how much you love it. There is simply not enough time left to live healthy life - rest, exercise, be in a good relationship. Please do not do the same mistakes I made. I used to say what you say and I used to love my work. But I burned out. Love turned into hate. I had to quit - I just could not do it anymore. And I was left with severe depression, anxiety attacks, health problems and worst of all - loneliness. I did not have time for social life and now I have no love in my life, no sex, no intimacy, no meaning, nothing worth living for. I wasted few years of my youth that I will never get back and I just hope that somehow (with a lot of help from my therapist) I will be able to recover and enjoy life again... but it seems almost impossible now. I am in a really bad place right now... and I see you going there as well and loving it.
Sorry to hear that you feel this way. I can guarantee you that you can change your life by 360 degrees if you set your mind to get where you want to be.
Your startup didn't turn out to be the next billion dollar idea? Guess what, life goes on. There is many better things you can experience in life.
Forget the past, just forget about it. The moment you remember something bad from your past, remind yourself that it's not helping you and you have a future life to live. Are you 200000 pounds over the weight you want to be at? Guess what, YOU can change that if you set your mind to do it.
Are you socially awkward? YOU can change that too. Go out, don't limit yourself on what others think about you. Who cares, it's your life and you can live however you want to. Just do the things that you always wanted to do and thought were impossible. Change your mindset, set your goals, and work hard to get there. I promise you they will come much faster than you think.
I joined HN just to post this and encourage you ;)
I fear becoming what you described, I'm feeling what you described 3-4 months of of the year and it seems to increase a bit each year. Trying to force myself a bit less work, and more of the enriching things in life - it helps, just need to be consistent.
The good news for you is that your'e still breathing, so your opportunities to find love and fun exist. Be well...
"This is not sustainable no matter how much you love it"
Agreed, I went through the burn out too.
Got out of it by starting my work day with a 1 to 2 hour walk in the morning. It serves two purposes at once : first your body recovers gently from the hours spent sitting on a chair, second you go to sleep before midnight and can start over the next day.
I completely agree. I'm just 23 and I burned out, last year I decided going on my own, freelancing and launching own products. That was a hard year, a lot of stress, anxiety attacks. I made a huge mistake. Hopefully I'll try to change this.
This thread hits home with me. Its been a year since I went all into building my product. Its taken some time since I'm a solo founder and I am willing to accept that. It sucks. Sometimes you start questioning what you're doing. I started getting sudden anxiety attacks late last year. Abnormally long work/coding hours take a toll on your health. My most recent anxiety attack lasted 3 hours. Anyway, if any of you are in the sf/bay and want to hang out talk about product or whatever, I think there's a lot we can relate to. There needs to be more positive encouragement in our community.
1) I think a lot of start-ups want to hire "smart" people.
What does it really mean to be smart? Lately I cannot stop thinking about it. I have always been considered a 'smart person'. I am a self-taught freelance developer now - it used to be my hobby and somehow (mostly because I needed location-independent work quickly) it became my profession. I get by because everybody thinks I am smart but I feel like an impostor because the more I think about myself the more I realize that intelligence is not some general ability to solve problems - it's more just a set of very different skills that corelate to much lesser extent than people usually think and you can be really good at something that people use to judge your abilities and at the same time really bad at something else that is actually required to get the job done.
I studied sociology and I shortly worked as a data analyst. It seems to me that this kind of work requires... ehm... a different intelligence than programming. You need to be good at connecting the dots, noticing things, seeing patterns. This is my kind of thinking and I have always been good at this - doubting everything, seeing pure assumptions where other people saw 'truths', permanently creating hypotheses and alternative theories, trying to spot logical fallacies in prevailing theories... basically trying to spot things.
Programing is very different (at least it seems to me - so different tat it's even difficult do describe it). I guess it's about creating stuff, not just observing stuff. You need to build very complex and abstract mental models, keep them in your head and be able to operate with them - and this is the part of intelligence that I seem to be lacking. It just does not feel natural. I try to solve some problem and I am thinking... if this condition and that condition but at the same time not that condition... and bang!, suddenly I am lost and I don't even remember what I am doing. I cannot keep it in my head. I totally get what OP was saying about passing anonymous functions in JavaScript - I had the same experience. The first time I encountered something so simple as JavaScript closures it took me two hours to get it. And the day after that I had to repeat the whole mental process to get there again because I somehow lost it over night. This is simply not how my brain works and I think I am really bad at this. Yet people pay me for this... which is just depressing (and you understand why I write this under throwaway).
I remember our 'statistical analysis 101' professor always telling us 'remember, you are not really testing hypotheses, you are only testing indicators!' - if HR department picks wrong indicators for the skills that they actually need both company and employee are going to be unhappy - and I think this is very common because our understanding of the indicators for different kinds of 'being smart' is still poor.
The first time I encountered something so simple as JavaScript closures it took me two hours to get it.
Closures are not simple. They are a powerful concept, one which introduces a whole new way of thinking about programming compared to what most people start out doing. It's normal for it to take a long time, over many sessions, for the concept to sink in and become a part of your programming vocabulary.
Freshmen year of undergrad, it took me well over a week to wrap my head around this "public" and "private" concept of classes. I had only written C++ that was mostly C with structs and C++ input/output. I had never had to reason in an object-oriented way before, and it was different. It was completely alien to me that I would intentionally "hide" some parts of my code from myself. Now, it's completely natural to me.
What the author did not see was those same developers learn about closures for the first time. When she sat down with them, they had already reasoned with the concept many times. Don't confuse initial difficulty with some inherent deficiency in your mental ability.
I've been thinking about the same problem for a while, and I'm also a self-taught developer that looks way towards sociology. I have a little different spin on the main hurdles of doing programming. With proper tools and the right mindset, the entire goal of the organization process is that you DON'T have to think and hold 100 things in memory at once. It works okay for some problems, but any problem with a sufficient complexity (like, say a full rich website with lots and lots of features) will be nearly impossible to work with if everything was intertwined.
I find the hardest park of programming is getting over hurdles as they come up, over and over and over again. It takes a while to get over fear of small failure. Also, if you're constantly reanalyzing and have a perfectionism streak you can be paralyzed quite frequently. Have you run into the same problems?
Exactly! I would say that complexity is the biggest problem form me. It makes it impossible to keep the whole mental model in my memory and I need to reanalyze and rebuild it constantly depending on the part of the problem that I am trying to solve right at the moment.
> * I get by because everybody thinks I am smart but I feel like an impostor*
That's a real thing. Almost all of the wildly talented people in my life feel Impostor Syndrome[0] at some level. Three Panel Soul even did a spot-on comic about it [1]
You're conflating intelligence and knowledge. Intelligence is a matter of capacity and capability; knowledge is one of the things intelligent people have a great capacity for attaining and retaining. The main thing, in fact.
Knowledge, unlike intelligence, is in practice infinite. And now you can understand the inverse Dunning-Kruger effect: intelligent people have the capacity to recognize how little knowledge they have, and can ever have, about any given topic.
I don't think I am. I guess that you are probably referring to that stuff about JavaScript because that is the only part of my post where I mention something knowledge-related. But I am not talking about the lack of knowledge of JavaScript closures or functions passed as arguments - I was talking about the fact that it was surprisingly difficult for me to grasp that concept while trying to acquire that knowledge. Let me use your own words - it was 'a matter of capacity and capability'.
If you think I am wrong please explain how I am conflating intelligence and knowledge.
This is not sustainable no matter how much you love it. There is simply not enough time left to live healthy life - rest, exercise, be in a good relationship. Please do not do the same mistakes I made. I used to say what you say and I used to love my work. But I burned out. Love turned into hate. I had to quit - I just could not do it anymore. And I was left with severe depression, anxiety attacks, health problems and worst of all - loneliness. I did not have time for social life and now I have no love in my life, no sex, no intimacy, no meaning, nothing worth living for. I wasted few years of my youth that I will never get back and I just hope that somehow (with a lot of help from my therapist) I will be able to recover and enjoy life again... but it seems almost impossible now. I am in a really bad place right now... and I see you going there as well and loving it.