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This sounds like burnout to me. I am in my mid-40s and used to have spells like this, but no more. I needed some kind of large change, back then, to get myself sorted out, but this could be pretty destructive because if I waited too long, the change I'd need wouldn't really be conducive to staying on whatever project I was on. The key to not having to deal with this problem anymore, for me, was starting to proactively switch things around to break the routine of consecutive work-weeks. One of my tricks was to do some kind of mini-vacation every 6-8 weeks, go somewhere new, leave work behind for 3-4 days. Even smaller things like regular social events can work wonders - anything that breaks the weekly routine. Back when I'd get myself into burnout periods the most effective way to recover enthusiasm was to pick up a new skill, work-related or not. I was in my mid-30s in the late aughts and not entirely sure I wanted to keep coding - so I signed myself up for an 18 month "executive MBA" program to find out if I might want to do something else, and instead came out of that with a whole new outlook on how and why to write code. Then around 5 years later I started writing code on the side, for myself, to gradually improve over the long term, and this can be absolutely therapeutic. Try to switch things around a little bit, do something new, see if that helps?
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Burnout has become such a catch-all term as to be effectively meaningless by now. In our professional lives, we are used to set quantified KPIs in a SMART way, and I wonder, why is it that our expectations are so comparatively low in our personal lives?
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Take one full day every other week where you play around, learn and explore.
If you have not been able to do this at least 5 times last quarter - why not? What can we do to allow for that to happen. This is an example of an actual goal I have for members of my team - it is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic/Relevant and Time-bound.
It's also tangential to the OP's topic here in a couple of ways. Good things happen when you allow for slack, but we often put too much pressure on ourselves, and won't allow it. I'm looking at it as a bit of "lucky lotto": https://danlebrero.com/2021/06/30/cto-dairy-lucky-lotto-chao...
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it's an acronym, Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. So if you're struggling to read books say, "Finish this book by the end of the month" is: Specific: read the book
Measurable: no ambiguity as to whether you've read it
Achievable: a month is a reasonable amount of time to finish a book in
Relevant: read a book to improve your reading habits
Time-bound: it's not a project that'll hang over you for ages, you're done at the end of the month
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Getting fed up with all the stupid technology grind is not necessarily burnout though. One could call it wisdom or experience too.
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Yeah always switching tools basically resets your experience to zero, so you have to do the same mistakes over and over, no wonder it's hard to stay motivated. And the "senior" jobs have zero power, so you can't stop people from making mistakes, and trying to "influence" just makes the experience even more exhausting and frustrating when people have no reason to listen to you. I wish there was real senior roles you could grow into where your experience is actually valued, and you would gain certain power to make decisions, but then the argument is that you can't hire juniors anymore because they think it's too uncool to have a boss. It's really rigged for shorter careers.
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I'd like to see it that way for my own situation. But I have no alternatives for making decent money. It's not wise to be a slacker without a contingency plan. I'm just dumb.
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Shooting into the dark here. Maybe you’re demotivated because this isn’t really learning, not in the real sense. The difference between Vue and React are almost arbitrary. It’s like Python vs Ruby or C# vs Java. There’s details that are interesting and useful sure, but most of it is boring. It’s entirely horizontal. What I suggest, because it works for me, is to focus on the layers above and below. Above you find high level decision making, design, information architecture, visualization and so on. Below you find protocols, runtimes, browser/os internals and interfaces, distributed systems and much more. All of the mentioned things are vast and interesting. And there’s much more. You work primarily on frontend, how solid is your math? Graphics programming? There’s so much stuff that is genuinely useful, interesting and has a much higher impact that keeping up with library ecosystems.
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Ecosystem-fatigue maybe? I don't know if there is an existing term for this but it's got more and more common and it's going to get a hell lot of more. As a junior engineer (20+ years ago, for me), anything new is enjoyable. Damn we even enjoyed .NET, J2EE, Perl.. whatever crap. You name it. But today there are so many frameworks, paradigms, tools, services... and sad thing is in many cases the differences are nuance-grade which for senior engineers might become incredibly exhausting, at least in my opinion. "Why would I want to spend 6 months learning Vue if I can do this in React in 6 weeks?", "Why should I learn Rust if I just can do this in C++?"... I think there are big differences in how industry evolved in the early twenties to today. I think today's evolution can feel rather disappointing.
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"Ecosystem-fatigue" Nice. I'm going use this in my next 1-on-1.
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I'll pile on to the burnout suggestion with my own personal solution to how I fixed that problem. I'm early 40s, started coding around 13 or so, so it's been 30 years of software for me. About ten years ago after living in the web programming world for a few years I got kind of the same feeling you have. I missed my forms and windows app development, so I went to another company doing what I remembered enjoying. You can guess what happened next. I hated it. I remembered all the things that annoyed me about windows app development, and realized I was just tired of coding every day. Coding has never been what I like about coding, it's building things that do things. I started focusing more on the building side, this time with the team around me, and also just some non coding fun projects like learning auto mechanics, etc. I drifted into a management role by accident and found a ton of fulfillment in coaching and mentoring. After a while I started to miss the coding side, so I went into an architecture role where I still got to do coding but it was mostly exploratory POC stuff to decide on new technologies or not. I took a role after that as a principal engineer, and while these are all mostly just title changes, it gave me enough variety to be exciting again. Today I tell prospective employers that I am someone that drifts between IC and leadership roles. I believe experience in both helps both. My drive waxes and wanes but I think that's totally normal for humans. I just came to terms with it and stopped worrying about it, and now I'm very satisfied in my career.
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Yes went through this. Early 30s my dad died, completely changed my view on what I was doing. He was self employed and successful. I started to hate working for someone else. I really started to dislike being a developer. Kept trying to find a way out. Was depressed that being a Dev eats my life, all free time I felt I should be learning technologies
Anyway fast forward nearly a decade and I'm really happy in my job. I really appreciate being a developer. It's interesting work. No clock watching waiting to go home etc. Not sure what changed, maybe I just got older. Maybe I just had a kid. Maybe seeing how crap so many people in the world have it while I sit here and earn good money and have nice co workers. It felt like I went through a mid life crisis in my 30s. Sorry this isn't an answer, just what I experienced.
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You had a depressive episode, and you recovered. It's not getting older, but the fact that time heals most brains just like exercise and antidepressants do. About 70% recover within 12 months [1] [1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12204924/ Edit: OP said "Was depressed that [...]" and also mentions death of a loved one. Even if I'm wrong, personally I really wish someone mentioned MDD as a possibility to me earlier. I felt similarly, and I thought all my focus and motivation problems were because I was lazy; but it was quite the opposite, I was fighting depression very hard. I lost so many years of my life reading about death coping skills, optimizing diet and exercise, learning how to be less lazy (?) when it had absolutely nothing to do with any of those.
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> You had a depressive episode, and you recovered. You’re quick in jumping to conclusions.
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Agree. I hate my job and clock watch. But I enjoy other things in life. When I get screened for depression it never comes up as a problem. So it seems you can be fine and still watch the clock.
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Have you considered living frugally and investing most of your income into stock index & crypto to become financially independent?
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Not attacking you in particular but responding to a sentiment evoked by your comment, that I think is all too common: The pathologization of everything is what's abnormal. So, what happened? Guy went through some grief, had normal emotional responses, understandably reconsidered what's important and felt suffocated in a workplace as an employee, after facing the fact that his dad spent a huge chunk of his life in a similar situation and then was gone...highlighting how many missed opportunities there were in that retirement that his dad worked for and never got to enjoy. It's a completely normal emotional Arc to go through and I think it would be abnormal cognitive processing to not go through those emotions and thoughts in the face of an event like that. Subsequently the guy probably found a new relationship and then, falling in love and he forgot to some extent about the depth of the sadness, and life began to take on a new hope, brightness and meaning and, like he said, he had a kid and that would have changed his perspective again... and now he's happy what he's doing and appreciative, and grateful. Maybe him going through the trauma of losing his father did result in him making some sort of subtle internal attitude adjustments or discovering a perspective that ended up with him having more joy in life. That's one way that challenge in life is supposed to work. Anyway so that's the story: the guy had a completely normal Arc and then what does society make it mean? Society (or the extent to which our culture pathologizes normal experience), makes it mean that it this guy's arc must be abnormal or the guy must be mentally ill or it must be depression. That's the crazy thing. People come along and say, oh my God that's depression, or that's some sort of mental illness. And it's like, no it's not: that's someone experiencing normal human emotions and living for real in their life and feeling it and thinking about it. The idea that normal is just a constant smooth tone of some collection of happy emotions and an upward trend and then anything else is like depression or any sort of reconsideration is some sort of abnormal, or mental illness kind of case, I mean that is the sick, crazy thing and I think it's a sickness, it's a mental illness, of our Society... at least the extent to which our society has a culture that views people's individual emotional arcs as abnormal.
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I find it sad that instead of designing mood-enhancing small molecules and making these available to anybody so desiring, we have to text each other with long screens of elaborate copes. This concrete cope presented in the parent comment denies existence of depression, which is really a non-sequitur when we have a solid evidence for substantial heritable differences in baseline happiness: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4346667/ Every human being deserves happiness, it should be an intrinsic natural good, not a scarce lottery prize it is now.
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I mean... you're extrapolating very hard. The results are not controlled for a completely unchanged lifestyle. Plus, the study specifically shows that people undergoing primary/mental care recover sooner.
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I know exactly what you mean. As a counter point to the many "burnout answers" here which I completely agree with by the way. It could also be an example of "neuroplasticity" (hear me out). I'm 40 and been coding like it feels forever, I find it "relatively easy" to learn new frameworks or languages. What is much harder are new paradigms; example OOP vs functional. The last few months I've started to learn Clojure. Man what a frustrating journey it has been ! I keep telling myself I'm a seasoned senior dev, worked on all sorts of systems Web/Non-Web/hardware/software you named it ! Why is it so damn hard for me to "get it" or "become comfortable" with Clojure. Only answer I can come up with, is that I have become too comfortable or "set in my ways" as a dev over the years (decades). I've been thinking and coding and "aligning-my-neurons" in a OOP and Imperative for decades. I don't really have a solution yet except for "don't give up" and keep learning "new" (unorthodox) things more regularly. Oh and definitely take a vacation and be happy with smaller wins more frequently !
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I don't know from your post if learning Clojure is for work or not, but if it is in your spare time, I would really ask myself why I'm actually learning clojure, and spending my free time working outside of work.. If that makes you feel exhausted and burnt out, then just stop learning clojure for goodness sake, and sit by the pool in your free time.
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> I keep telling myself I'm a seasoned senior dev, worked on all sorts of systems Web/Non-Web/hardware/software you named it ! Why is it so damn hard for me to "get it" Could this be the problem? Being open to what you don’t know and taking a “beginners mindset” is really important for learning. If you think you already do know how to do something then it’s hard to learn how to do it!
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I think you on to something; Things that "seem similar" could very well not be ! I.e OOP vs Functional. Sure they both "programming" but very very different !
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In addition, it can also because the more experienced we get, the more we forget about the initial struggle we had to overcome to become experienced. When we develop expertise, we go deeper and deeper, each new learning experience reinforce our previous knowledge.
But when we have to operate a paradigm shift, we don't go deeper, it's a lateral movement. We start back at the beginning. For some people it's the other way around. They learn a lot a various things without deep expertise and they struggle to dig into a specific subject. So keep moving and keep digging!
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I think there's definitely something to the neuroplasticity thing. Learning does take longer as we age, that's just a biological fact. > Man what a frustrating journey it has been ! I keep telling myself I'm a seasoned senior dev... This right here, that's something you're misunderstanding. Learning something new is supposed to be uncomfortable. To learn most effectively, you want to shape your mental behavior to minimize surprise (i.e. grok things) while shaping your outward behavior to maximize surprise (i.e. challenge / update your understanding). That's frustrating. Even if you've learned other things before. The only thing you're missing is a healthy set of expectations. Accept and welcome the discomfort, and you'll learn like you've never learned before. Thinking you should be exempt from this just adds internal resistance to an already uncomfortable process.
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I think the neuroplasticity angle is vastly underestimated, and we should seek (and also design, research & fund if there is none) neuroplasticity-upregulating drugs & therapies. As far as this field goes, this is a remarkable paper: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24348349/
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>Thinking you should be exempt from this just adds internal resistance to an already uncomfortable process. Wow, thanks ! That sounds like real practical advise ! I think you hit the nail on the head here ! > To learn most effectively, you want to shape your mental behavior to minimize surprise If you don't mind, could you expand on this part ? I'm not 100% clear on what you mean ?
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You've already got that part down pat. "Shaping your mental behavior to minimize surprise" is just a really complicated way of saying "attempting to understand a thing". There's no secret technique here, I was just trying to tie the process of learning back to surprise.
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The point is not to learn something "cool" that may appeal you (like Clojure). The point is to learn something you truly believe is worthless, but you need to learn it to get your job done (e.g., an outdated version of, let's say, PHP or Angular). In the latter scenario, learning becomes more difficult.
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I write clojure all day every day for my job. Here's my tips: 1. Get on an nrepl. Not like, the non-text-editor repl, hook your text editor (or Cursive) up to the network repl and start evaluating sexprs from the text editor. doesn't have to be emacs, I do it on vim with conjure all day every day 2. Don't write too many macros 3. Use a lotta let-statements and threading macros (->, ->>, as->, cond->, etc), that's the idiomatic way to be composing a buncha stuff 4. All the async stuff is real good (with perhaps the exception of agents) but it's like a spice, not the main meat, you know? Clojure is actually a pretty bad language if you write it like Java. You gotta write it like it's the lisp that it is
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Good tips :) >You gotta write it like it's the lisp that it is Haha ja, getting to that skillset is the main challenge for at this moment.
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> The last few months I've started to learn Clojure. Man what a frustrating journey it has been ! I think calling this neuroplasticity is excessive. Clojure isn't trivial. For a young person who doesn't know how to code it will also take significant time. Knowing how to code means you have to re-evaluate/re-categorize a set of root assumptions which is objectively hard and there is not really a curriculum fine-tuned for your exact set of existing knowledge. Maybe you're just more aware of the potential improvements you haven't achieved yet.
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I am still in my 30s and due to antecipating this issue, I started doing basic formal mathematics based on Spivak's Caluclulus book and this small blog post [1]. The mindset needed to prove things is novel and came quite hard at first, but i feel it flowing faster and faster. I even started making my own problems, and proved my first algorithm. Funny enough I also started with clojure and for me the meta-character mnemomnics are the hardest parts, not necessarily the way paradigm is. [1] https://medium.com/swlh/why-a-0-0-and-other-proofs-of-the-ob...
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The learning process builds structures and systems in your brain to process information. It's the difference between greenfield and brownfield development, only you can't demolish the old structures: you need to work around them. That's the thing with the brain, there is no "delete" function. You have read and write capability, but no control over "forget".
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I am almost 30 and attempting to learn Clojure was to me like swimming through mud. It is definitely not just you.
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>swimming through mud You describe it perfectly !
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> I have become too comfortable or "set in my ways" as a dev over the years (decades) If OP has been working in React and Angular for years and now has trouble learning Vue, it's not due to this. Vue is pretty similar to React.
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Having gone all the way and back, I will say this: Undogmatic imperative programming (with objects) is superior to pure functional programming. You can still use functional constructs and immutable data where it makes sense. You never want to shoehorn a problem into a niche programming paradigm.
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Down in the commments [1], OP has said they had COVID earlier this year. There's a strong possibility that the symptom OP is experiencing is "brain fog" due to post-viral syndrome. As a PSA: People are recommending exercise in the comments. If you are experiencing symptoms like OP's, do not start vigorous exercise unless you're sure that post-viral syndrome is not the cause. If you have post-viral syndrome, return to exercise needs to be slow (months) and graded. If you overdo it you are at risk of "post-exertional malaise". I've been dealing with these problems since early last year and it has had a profound impact on my life and work. If you're experiencing symptoms like OP describes after COVID, talk to a doctor. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31282305
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I suffer from Post Exertional Malaise but from before Covid. Though Covid has made it worse. Really a horrible predicament because the more you try, the more you get punished. Currently thinking about taking a break from running and lifting which is incredibly hard because well, i'm a white collar worker that's already too sedentary. If you or others have tips to get out of the cycle of crashes please share your tips or sources!
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Don't discount the pandemic fatigue. Creativity and drive in general has suffered immensely over the past couple of years. I notice it in artists I follow. I notice it in co-workers. I notice it in myself. As of four months ago it's been almost impossible to build up any enthusiasm for my open source projects, even when someone is handing me a PR on a silver platter. I've been coding professionally for 25 years now. I've made many transitions to new languages, technologies and platforms. This is only the second time in my life that my enthusiasm suffered (the last time was due to a bout of acute depression a decade ago). Don't give up. Things will get better. And remember to get regular exercise; it helps a lot!
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I also had the feeling that there just were one or two years where I got nothing done at a normal speed. Thinking about a pandemic or a third world war really bugs people out, taking them out of a creative mind mode, I guess.
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I experienced this in my early 30s. I really thought my career was over, I felt I was making such poor progress in various tasks and learning what I needed to finish a fairly large project. In retrospect I actually knocked that project out of the park, but I was miserable for a number of reasons, burned out, and siloed off on a project that the company was bizarrely apathetic about. I developed a bleak outlook on what I was doing, and as I hit obstacles I think the bleak outlook increasingly extended to myself. It was a great learning experience. These days I'm fairly sure I'll continue to learn because I love what I do, so long as my brain's still working at least. I might slow down here and there, but it's a mistake to think you've actually hit a hard limit or something. It's almost certainly external. When I feel down or like I can't do my job well enough, I just remind myself how far I've come despite how low I've felt before, and how things have continued to go well. Don't let yourself get overwhelmed. Do let yourself take a break, though. You might need one to get a fresh perspective on things. Good luck!
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I think it is more to do with your maturity allowing you to see more of your weaknesses. When you are young, myopia makes you think you know it all and can solve everything. Young devs run gun ho into things and they focus on happy paths and ignore a lot of the complexity that you learn from experience, noting there is some exceptions. The second problem is scope, when you are a junior you normally have a single project and a lot of guardrails to support your learning, and typically just need to think about a small bit of code. As you become more senior you are suddenly responsible for a P&L, other people, lifecycle management, stability and scalability. Last year I was feeling overwhelmed and couldn't learn Quarkus and Java. Turns out I just needed a week of focus. I was able to take my years of .Net, PHP and JavaScript experience and produce amazing code in Java. My biggest blocker to learning was managing other people, projects, scope, budgets, requirements, approving leave requests, preparing status reports, managing vendors, interviewing candidates, dealing with shareholders, backlog grooming, workshops, committee meetings, CAB preparation, ARB negotiations, and the desire to be instantly good.
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I'm pretty much in the same boat. Mid to late 30s, professional for 15+ years. I've noticed recently that I just don't care about work and technology anymore.
I have things that I need to get done, but I'm pulling on that starter cord and the engine is just not firing - no motivation to really do it. I've been chatting to some friends about this, and I've come to the conclusion that I need to make a Dr's appointment - just to see if there is something glaringly obvious (either physical or mental) that can be treated. I've also taken up building a model railway - my son loves trains - and I actually enjoy doing the building, I think because it is away from a computer and screens. I've also pretty much cut out all TV time, cut all ties to social media (that's helped), and only check the news in the morning to make sure we haven't slipped into a new WW.
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Not caring about work and just getting things done is what 90% of the population does. Do you really think they all need to check it with the doctor?
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No? But I think I do. I loved coding, I loved my job, I loved technology. Now I don't. I did care about my job, and I wanted to get the projects done, Im just saying that now I find it hard to care about it and actually get those things done. I was just relaying my experience to OP - I think you might have taken that part of my comment the wrong way.
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I think it's absolutely normal. There are few people who can retain spark about their field for longer than a couple of years (let alone decades). The rest of us is just trying to do a good enough job to make the boss and team happy, and go home.
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like I just don't care enough to work on this projectThat's why. Motivation comes from a sense of purpose.
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I've been in this situation for a few years. Tried changing jobs, took on new responsibilities, just to conclude that I am dead tired of the SpringBoot/Angular mononculture and teams devoid of the sense of ownership. Around me, SpringBoot and Angular are the default choice, accompanied with Spring Cloud (or AWS for hipster companies). This means that you tend to work with people who do not care what they do and how. Finally, I just quit and started building a sauna in the basement, doing some long due repairs in the house, learning a language and happily coding in Go at night. Life is good, again. I am now applying to new gigs, trying to steer away from the kind of projects I used to do before. P.S. Vue is actually great, I used Angular and React but could only grasp Vue at the end. That's one only humanly sized framework out of the three, IMO.
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For what it's worth, as a 34yo who has also been doing this for ~15 years professionally, are you me? Because I probably could've written this post. Don't feel alone. Just remember to take advantage of your strengths. You may not be able to keep up with the 24yo's, but the 24yo's really suck at "choosing the right problems to work on." You know, the most important thing. It's very natural to feel overwhelmed, even 5 months into a project. I'm also at the 5 month mark, and it surprises me how much other people around me know. One important point -- I have a lot of experienced people to lean on. Do you? It sounds like they may have yeeted you into the deep end alone and said "go write Vue." If you have no colleagues, and (most importantly) no intellectual curiosity about Vue (which is a totally valid way to feel!), then that sounds miserable. So my point is, the difference in our situation is that even though I feel overwhelmed, I don't feel demotivated (yet), because whenever I'm stuck on something, I have a colleague who loves to pair program and is happy to hop on Google Meet at 10pm, and a different colleague who basically designed and wrote most of the entire infrastructure that we use day-to-day. Coworkers like that make it super easy to look forward to the next day, because their enthusiasm is so infectious. If you don't have anyone like that, don't worry -- it just means you're in the wrong gig. It happens. The solution is to remember that you are not your job. Downshift mentally. Treat your professional requirements as exactly that: a 9-to-5, and be sure to have side hobbies and a life outside work. During work, force yourself to focus on the simplest possible next step, and do that (and only that) until it's done. Repeat. Best of luck friendo. Feel free to DM me on twitter (https://twitter.com/theshawwn) if you ever want to vent. Happy to listen.
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Thank you. Your comment (among many here) is incredibly kind and I will take it to heart.
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Some of the worst periods in my life were due to jobs that, in hindsight, I just wasn't suited for. I felt like I had to stay at them, because reasons. But the truth was, I probably could've found something else, if I'd decided to look. So just remember -- "deciding to look" is often the hardest step, and the easiest to forget. After all, the default is to just keep working at the same job, and to feel bad about yourself. But that's no way to live life. Seek out happiness, and follow it wherever it leads. I'm rooting for you.
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Similar here. In my case I learned stuff like Neoxam and FileNet that I will never use again. It feels like all my knowledge has been throwaway work. I'm 10 years in, a midlevel with no career path, have an MS, and make under $100k. The company has also screwed me over a few times. I feel like why bother trying if it's not rewarded, and why bother learning if I'll never use the knowledge again? Just go back to the other frameworks that you already know. Either talk to your boss about switching projects or look for another job. At least you have that option and are making excellent money.
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Create something and publish it. For some reason, it helped me a lot. Also in my mid-30s. You're probably pretty good at the things you know, just whip something you could easily do but useful and you'll get a lot of satisfaction. I also think it's burn out. I personally struggled to learn React and perhaps had some burn out but persevered because I was building things on the side. It was fun and great distraction and motivator while struggling to learn React. I think I'm pretty good at it now but I felt like I was in a rut for a long time.
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sounds like you just don't like the project - I wouldn't read too much into it. If it becomes a trend of "new ecosystem = burnout" then I'd start to consider a specific cause.
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This really does sound like burnout. One of the most helpful explanations I found was that burnout isn't just (or even in an individual case, at all) caused by 'working too much'. Instead, it's a mismatch between your values and your work. A classic example is wanting to make a positive change in the world but instead having to wrangle JavaScript frameworks for some incredibly dull (although potentially still valuable to others) business application. Or, alternatively, you know your intelligence could simply be put to better use, or you're simply intensely curious about truly different things for which there is no real current market. You must take an extended break to reflect on what exactly you want to be doing, where your career needs to go, and so on. I say must because the only alternative is extended burnout and very possibly health and psychological issues. Don't ignore the signs! Doing so always ends badly. If you can't yet due to financial reasons, you simply have to start devising a strategy to do so. Otherwise you're making the best of a bad situation and you'll have to move to coping strategies instead which others have explained in this thread. Such coping strategies can mostly only attenuate the burnout, they probably can't solve it on their own. Personally I got burnt out from caring too much about something which ultimately was literally the opposite of all my values. I didn't become burned out from working too many hours. The crucial thing with the 'burnout isn't exclusively from hours worked' realisation is that you can burn out working only 10 hours a week on something if you've come to truly despise it and all it represents.
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Sounds like a mild burnout. I don't know your personal situation, but if you've been earning tech salaries for 15 years, maybe you can afford to take a sabbatical? Six months to furbish a nice home, get some therapy, connect with family. Should at least help put things into perspective.
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Slow down. Dedicate less time to work and more time to leisure and relaxing. Go on holiday. Don't think about work for some time. You have to do this until you feel recharged. The first time it will take longer because you amassed lots of stress. Once you learn how to do it, you'll incorporate slowdown days in your routine and feel energized
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I agree with what others say
- it sounds like you are running a burn-out schedule,
and your body has just informed you it is not designed to
function that way.
You must get more physical exercise,
more rest, and more switching between 'running and not running'.
You cannot persist only on 'running/sprinting' activity,
it is like teaching a horse not to eat.
It will work for a week, then the horse dies of hunger.
The rest periods is the 'price' for it being
possible to do the sprints.
This is why europeans do things like 37h working weeks.
It is because if you want to work a human body for 40-50 years (ie 20 to 70),
you cannot operate it in a way that ruins it in one or two decades. Companies like amazon might find it amazing to
run people like F1 race cars, where the body stops working
after 15 years, but you are not amazon, you a a human ape
with needs.
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Try meditation, Yoga Nidra, NSDR, whatever works for you. You'll really be amazed by the effects it has on your mind. Especially NSDR/Yoga Nidra. It has been life changing career wise and just in regards to how I view the world, how I think about code and just everything in general. It'll help you clear your mind which is one of the most underrated things in life but at the same time crucial to performance. That's the only advice I feel is suitable except the for the common sense (switch jobs, projects, take a break, etc.).
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I left the industry and just can't make myself look back. Shooting my shot at solo gamedev, because at least I can be happy and hungry instead of miserable and hungry. Never could quite keep my footing in the industry, anyway, despite my experience, because of multiple contributing factors leaving resources I need out of reach (no degree, lifelong mental health issues = jobs with the benefits and pay I need just aren't there). Late 30s. I have no advice to give, because none of it seems to really work for me. Just letting you know you aren't alone in your feelings, because they mirror mine.
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Actually you answered your own question. You dont care enough hence find it really hard to push yourself. Do it long enough and it will lead to all sorts of problems. I am in the same age group and can tell you from experience that doing what you care about and what your team cares about is the most important thing otherwise it gives one a cog in the wheel type of worthless feeling. Drop the project and find something you do care about, even if its harder. And yes do take a long vacation > 2 weeks to reset.
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It could be mental burnout. But you could also get your blood levels checked! Once in my mid-30's, I found that my mind wasn't as able as it used to be. I could write code fine, but as you, I struggled with learning new things. It turned out that the hemoglobin level in my blood was low, so my head wasn't getting enough oxygen. The cause was colon cancer. The tumour had been bleeding into my colon for months.
Other causes for losing blood could be ulcer (caused by certain bacteria, stress, too much coffee, fatty food, other stomach irritants), or gluten intolerance (unlikely, but does happen).
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It is normal and healthy to take breaks. You do not have to be working on professional skills constantly, and there is some research evidence (citation needed) that taking regular breaks helps you learn more efficiently and enjoy the whole process more. If you can't take a full on break from work right now (be it for financial or deadline reasons) then please try to find more time to do 'useless' stuff like read novels and get around nature. Or, whatever makes you feel calm and cheery. All the best in your next move.
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Very subjective view: I stopped caring emotionally. Age made me want family / emotional stimulus infinitely more than technical one. Especially in mainstream dev where things are not new or high level enough (I'm way more tickled when I dabble in combinatorics or graph theory books, I can sense the blood and motivation rushing more).
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Also 15 years as web/front-end, feel similar. Everything just feels tedious, get irritated by the smallest annoyances. Think it's time for a career change, no idea what to do. This field has become tediously complex and saturated, no longer have the desire to keep up.
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> Anyone ever experience this? I'm in my mid 30s. 100% identical to my own experience, except I'm in my 40s. I've decided to just relax and go with the flow because I figured it's just burnout and unless I take a year off I probably won't get a chance to really recharge. The fact is that you probably already know enough to be really good at your job, but you can't focus enough, or are doubting your ability/knowledge. Don't worry about learning too many new things, only learn something new when you need to, it's impossible to know everything and our industry moves too fast to keep on top of all the trends. You have a project/job in front of you, just focus on that, don't worry about what might come next. If you let yourself relax a little, you'll find it becomes easier to remain flexible and learn what you need to tackle your next problem when it comes. You might want to consider a good long vacation, or maybe a few shorter ones. Getting away from work will help.
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In my experience it’s that I tend to forget the first half of the learning curve and bring expectations and assumptions to the subject which I didn’t have when I first started my career. Just like when learning a new spoken language resulted in me having two worlds of understanding and only later built the mappings between the two, which is why jargon is such a challenge. So I try and learn without productivity and external expectations and by using curiousity.
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Early 40's here. I'm not going to diagnose the problem, but what usually works for me is the following, from high to low priority. But remark that they all interact with each other. - get pleny of sleep. - exercise. - eath healthy and have a healthy bodyweight. - have social, in-person interactions with friends. Have a laugh, etc.
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Im my limited experience of 20+ years in the industry: This is a sign for incoming burnout. You need a long vacation away from tech work.
As you mentioned, you are successful, invest in your mental and physical health.
When you recover your inner strength, you will be able to easily update the tech skills needed for any position. Wish you luck and stay safe.
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I had a very similar problem 2 years ago. I was 38 at the time. For me it was burnout. I had been at a failing startup for 6 years. I took about a year off and removed a lot of stress from my life and took a part time React/NodeJS job, and got really good at react over the past year. I have realized that a TON of the dev working being done on JS frameworks is by people that have no idea what is going on under the covers, they are just following examples and best practices and making applications work. I'm not saying that is wrong, but for people our age we are more used to understanding things at a lower level and that is becoming almost impossible with the current JS framework situation.
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Don’t underestimate the friction required to step into a new paradigm or framework. In my experience, 90% of the effort is expended before most of the actual code is written. Keep on truckin’ and before you know it you’ll be productive again. (Caveat: this is all subject to the warnings others have commented on re burnout etc, if these apply to you then my advice is redundant)
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I haven't been on that exact situation, but close. It has happened to me when I was hired to do X (as an specialist) and that changed substantially when the project got binned after 4 months and was asked to change language and stack. I wasn't as proficient as I would have liked and wasn't really excited about it. I don't know if this applies to you, so please remember this is an stranger on the Internet sharing an experience and not advice. In my case if is just a project, I get on with it because when is done I can move to something more exciting or inspiring and that's my motivation to move forward. If it is just what I can expect of that role from that point on, I look for a change (move to a different team perhaps, or just change jobs). It also helps me if I can do something different at home, in my free time. It has to be challenging and exciting, because otherwise the negative mood from work can take over and nothing will happen (and may make things worse; e.g. guilt for not working on that personal project).
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Before you delve into the complex issues of burnout and depression, you can first try the assumption that you are a bit exhausted and give yourself some rest, this can not hurt, and potentially help a lot.
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This must be very common right now? I'm at the exact same point with Vue3. 10+ years of experience, created two fulls stacks sass'es as a Tech Lead but i feel so slow learning this new stuff. Just installed a starter kit and been endlessly fiddling with a simple test frontend and couldn't get basic reactivity to work. I feel the documentation is riddled with advanced concepts and everything is way, WAY more complex than it has to be and there's no diagrams of the lifecycles and dataflow or what actually happens from user interaction to screen print - it's like theres a million steps now in a black box both in the build and on the user end. So many concepts, tools and atomisations to do rather simple things. Hope its just lockdown-world fatigue that will heal or that these new conventions will "click" soon.
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When I started learning React I felt the same frustration but then it just clicked one day after maybe 2 months of struggling. I’m still waiting for the Vue click but it doesn’t seem to be happening.
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>> I feel the documentation is riddled with advanced concepts everything is way, WAY more complex than it has to be. Because it is. Mostly because it is relatively easy to create a complex system/framework. But incredibly harder to make a one that does the same but is simple to understand and use.
And even among those, even less have all that well documented. Oh, and writing good docs requires a separate set of skills. If the person that writes docs doesn't have years of experience in technical writing - there is a good chance you will have hard time understanding docs written even for a simple thing. Also, I believe with age our bar for the quality of products and its docs raises as we don't have a ton of time to waste on digging into it.
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I think you are getting wiser. You start to realize that all of this JS circus leads to unmaintainable code, so your subconscious is telling you "don't do it".
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For me, it's not "how" you do it (e.g. which framework). Important is "what" you are doing. If your new gig is e.g. a random e-commerce software that contributes to the laziness of people or their consumerism, maybe you are the type of person that just don't care for the product, therefore won't put any effort in learning things for that?
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A few years ago I just felt tired at the thought of learning another fad language. I ended up getting an MBA and switching into procurement. Now I just code on personal projects and it's fun again.
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Maybe you just know subconsciously you would be working more efficiently with the frameworks you do already know, so you have no incentive to learn a third (other than unwillingness to change jobs).
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I'm also in my mid 30s and I recently had a spell where I just couldn't work on a specific project. I'd take any task to distract me from what I was supposed to be doing. It was a total mental block. I had designed and built the entire thing myself and just had one more detail to put in place and just couldn't do it. I think you should listen to the user fleb, it might be burn out. It's very important to break the monotony of work. But also it's very important to stay healthy and exercise.
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If you don't have a therapist, it's worth looking for one. Honestly, everyone should have a good therapist, especially these days. I had a similar experience and for me it was burnout compounded by years of ignoring mental health problems. I took a break for most of the pandemic, got a good therapist and psychiatrist and I'm so much more functional than I was at any other point in my adult life. But I really needed the time and space to focus on fixing myself, something that can be impossible when working long hours at a startup.
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Easier said than done. The waiting list for therapy here in Hamburg is more than a year
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Ive experienced this a few times over my career. Everyone has different reasons but try to find the root reason, is it because the work is not challenging enough? Maybe Project is something you've done many times before or maybe you are simply burnt out. Maybe it's time to try something new? There are always new things to learn and you've shown that over the years. Once you have the reason you can try to address. It might not be clear, the reason and everything might feel like a drag but try to narrow it down, sharing with a friend/relative/mentor helps.
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Yes, it's a well-established scientific fact that the age-related cognitive decline begins as early as one's twenties: [1][2][3][4]. As of now there really is no cure for this, except for trying various lifestyle interventions in hopes of modifying the slope of the curve in desired direction (standardized cognitive tests help one select the most favorable interventions). The obvious stuff - exercising twice weekly, cardio, sleeping well & enough, being less stressed help noticeably. Beyond this there is a trove of supplements and drugs that may, though likely not, help. Naturally, highly intelligent people understand this unfortunate truth of nature pretty well, and plan their lives so as to decouple their living standard from their peak intellectual performance. Thus we see smart people becoming managers and investors/rentiers over time. Once your money works for you by virtue of compounding interest, not much intelligence is needed. If we are bold enough to envision long-term solutions to this daunting problem, there really is no alternative to accelerating longevity R&D. If you are interested, feel free to read the FAQ: https://www.fightaging.org/faq 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2683339/ 2. https://sci-hub.se/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19231030/ 3. (excerpt) https://de.catbox.moe/fk9ltz.jpg 4. (excerpt) https://files.catbox.moe/krktzk.jpg
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You probably just need to find something you’re actually interested in to work on.
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I think sometimes people forget how hard learning is. It's painful, frustrating and difficult. Plus it takes a while (long while) to work through the first steps of learning something new. It seems people think learning something completely new is the same as extending the knowledge or skills they already have developed. It's not the same at all.
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It's not you - it's node.js (I'm thinking of getting tee's printed with that slogan).
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Constant work fatigue and an inability to perform intellectually (either in terms of study of producing code) is what a burnout looked like for most of my ex-colleagues. You're about the correct age for one too, according to my observations (which are anecdotal).
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Good comments here about the work itself, but I note you haven't mentioned anything about your personal life. Has anything changed? Just a thing to think about, it may well be that it's purely a work issue.
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Last year was a pretty crazy year for my wife and me - said goodbye our two dogs of 16 years, I switched companies and got a huge pay raise, and we sold our first house. Both of us got CoVID at the beginning of the year but recovered fine. My wife suffered from depression as a teenager and suggests that I should consider seeing a therapist as it helped her but I don’t even know if what I’m feeling is depression.
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Searched to see if anyone asked if you've had COVID and found you volunteering that you had. This is very likely to be the cause of your problem. You most probably haven't recovered fine, and I'd recommend discussing it with a doctor. I've been dealing with COVID aftereffects since early 2021. It's insidious and very, very real. Edit: Until you've verified that post viral syndrome is not the cause of your problems, please IGNORE all the advice people are giving you to exercise. If you have post viral syndrome, your return to exercise needs to be very slow. Graded over months, not weeks. Overdo it and you'll regret it. Further edit: In case it helps with googling, the symptom you may be experiencing is medically referred to as "brain fog" and the risk with over exercising is experiencing "post-exertional malaise".
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I think seeing a therapist sounds like a good idea. If you don't know what it is you're feeling a therapist can help with that. To you're original question I'm sure you can still learn, it's just that you can't, at the moment, learn what you think you should be learning. There's undoubtedly a complex mess of social and physical and psychological reasons behind this. Doing the work that's required to understand this mess and find a way through is hard but you can do it. Take care of yourself.
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You're burnt out bud, same thing happened to me... If you're mid six figures you have the money to take a couple months off. It might feel lazy or wrong initially but just do it.
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It seems to me your career had been focusing on how to get things build. Would you entertain the idea of becoming the guy to come up with ideas "what" to build? Put it other way, to identify "problem" in a more general sense
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Do you think this is about being unable to learn, or just that you lack incentive? 15 years ago, I presume you weren't getting "multiple 6 figures".
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Correct re the pay. But it’s true when I was 25 I was far more motivated by a challenge. Everything about web development seemed more fun too.
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I would advise telman17 to immediately go on vacation, at least for three weeks.
Don't play a hero, the quicker you address this issue, the less damage you will do to yourself. Don't wait until it's too late. The brain is very fragile, and your livelihood. Burnout is an awful thing. If your whole life is built around intellectual work, becoming something that has a cognitive ability south of a vegetable is a terrible thing. You lose your identity. The way back from there is long, my friend.
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Walk. And lift weights - all three basic exercises should be done. That's what saved me in my then mid 30s in a comparable circumstances.
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Lifting weights doesn't translate to deadlifting. That's just one exercise of many. Weights and other exercise helped me. I don't deadlift though.
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Deadlifting is fun and worth trying once. You don't have to do ridiculously heavy weights to get the lower body health benefits.
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I don't disagree - I do it, but rarely. I find it does seem to activate every single muscle in my body.
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As noted, sounds like burnout. BTDT, got the T-shirt. I’m 60, and still learning new stuff, every day; but I’m highly motivated.
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this may be the first sign of a burn out or depression - stop for a while and dream, look at other languages
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I'm 40, I'm a skilled software engineer and, here in Italy, I'm really far from making any 6 figures.
I guess that's something wrong with my careers.
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it's just that the market is different in different countries. I'm in France, making 32,000Eur/year with 1 YoE. I had a friend in America making 130,000$ with roughly the same amount of experience. Americans pay much more for the same work. That said, you can probably find some remote jobs that pay US salaries in Italy if you look around a bit.
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I find if my work doesnt fascinate me, it becomes hard to be good at it.
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Peehaps you've just grown some wisdom and realised how meaningless it all is: where kids are excited to build a sandcastle, you see the rise and fall of that sandcastle before it's even built and see no reason to feel any excitment. Most software out there, especially the web part of it, is such sandcastles.
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Have you been tested for sleep apnea ?
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Try mental math, it gives your brain a good workout. There are apps available for iPhone and Android.
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TL;DR - your expections are too high!! You have picked up a hell of a lot of knowledge over a long period of time, your expection or wish is to get to the same level of expertise in this new framework. So you're pushing yourself and become disillusioned with the speed of progress.
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I have no advice but just can say that I'm there right now. I have no motivation to code and no motivation to learn new languages. Maybe you're just tired of it and tired of starting at a screen.
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I'm in this state for the larger part of my life, and I have somewhat succeeded. I can give you advice, but it goes tangential to accepted normie HN happy-go-lucky wisdom.
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So, I had experienced something similar and fix was two fold - first, it turned out I had anemia and needed to fix health stuff. So, that would be first round, take a look at own health in general. Second, lifestyle. Oddly enough, keeping super strict schedule (only for a while unless you are naturally routine person) separating work and other time helped. Make sure other time involves sport and activities nor related to coding at all. Learning counts as work time, but also make sure work is work (and not HN or reddit). The second thing helped to restore motivation. After a while, I started to look forward coding again, started to want to do it.
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i'd guess: - burnout
- world stress
- aging (you getting dumber)
the burnout happens to everyone. whether you end up killing yourself, or taking a few months off, or switching careers completely or just internally like going to product, or getting fired/pushed out just depends on all the usual stuff - how stubborn are you? do you listen to friends? do you have friends? do you have any sane friends? and/or family? do you have any money saved? did you find a good therapist who told you the truth (you're burned out and you need to change careers or stop for at least six months)? etc. the world stress is caused because we're all more likely to die more horrible deaths every day that goes by but no mainstream news is talking about our imminent deaths by nuke or gw, and we stay distracted with nba or serials or crypto or drugs or metaverse. you have to find indie news that hasn't been canceled yet to hear anything that is compatible with what you're seeing with your own eyes every day. aging makes you dumber in the computing sense at least, and also because brain fog creeps in more quickly on a standard garbage western diet. saying this true thing got zuck some pushback ten years ago precisely because it was true, and it's more true today.
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> aging makes you dumber in the computing sense at least, and also because brain fog creeps in more quickly on a standard garbage western diet. saying this true thing got zuck some pushback ten years ago precisely because it was true, and it's more true today. As a big tech worker I find it insane that so much focused intellectual effort of my colleagues is poured into creating "metoo" competitor products and optimizing ad revenue. We finally live in an age where we have the necessary scientific tools to tackle the hardest problems, such as aging, and yet we mostly waste our efforts on rewriting a product that will be forgotten in a few years. What saddens me most is pretty smart people who prefer to ignore the reality of aging and disease and feed themselves and others with various life-affirming copes.
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Participate in any RNA experiments lately by any chance?
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