My most recent gig after working for years in React and Angular I've had to move to a new framework (Vue) due to project requirements that I did not write. As a senior contributor I'm expected to handle the complex stuff but after five months on the project I feel fatigued - like I just don't care enough to work on this project. I don't know if it's JS framework fatigue or the project itself or even depression. But I feel like after 15 years of doing this I'm getting "dumber" to the point where I question the most basic things in coding. It's rather discouraging.
My boss is pretty cool and has kept an open door to let them know if I want to switch projects but I'm worried (without evidence) that if I say anything I'll be put on something even "harder" when I can't bring myself to write some simple JS these days.
Anyone ever experience this? I'm in my mid 30s.
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?
Across your entire description of your situation you never once mentioned what it is you are actually working on but called out the income you hit and frameworks you are playing with. I humbly submit that your problem is that you have lost the plot.
Hate to break it to you chief but the libraries and frameworks and techniques you use to work are not the point. Creating stuff that people want to use is all that matters. Doing it with finesse and craftsmanship is how you go from good to great but if nobody gives a shit you will always feel empty.
Switching projects and doing something "harder" isn't going to fill that void.
Build something people want. I promise your drive and all the rest will follow behind once you are making them happy and get hooked on solving their problems and improving their lives.
That is what this game is all about.
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.
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.
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.
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 !
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.
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!
However, another thing that could be happening is that as you become more senior, you start being used to knowing things really deeply, and so when you learn something new two things happen. First, you are comparing your knowledge of the new thing to your knowledge of the old thing. When starting out, you don't know anything, so when you learn a bit of React, for instance, it seems like you are learning a lot. But if you know React deeply and learn a bit of Vue, it feels like you have a long way to go.
Secondly, you want to know things deeply, and so you question and analyze all the knowledge that is going into your brain. When starting out, you are happy to just repeat knowledge without understanding it deeply. An example I use is when I started at my current company, there was an intern that started at the same time. We both would be told, "here is a script to put things into the staging environment". She would take it and use it and move on with life. I would question what it exactly did, why it did it that way, what were the failure modes, and the history of how it go there rather than other options. She was much more productive to start, but fast forward 18 months, and I have a much deeper understanding about our technology and codebase and approaches, and am able to drive long term decisions and fix deeper issues.
Learning as a senior is exhausting :)
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
The worst part of software development for me is knowing that all of my work will eventually be thrown away or useless soon.
I stopped caring about my work completely. I force myself to continue because only because it pays well for the amount of time I spend on it. I make much less than SV types on here. But it's much more efficient than any alternatives I have identified so far, even though I accomplish nearly nothing essential. My current job only exists because a bureaucrat decided their government needs to invasively monitor my company's financial activity. How useful!
I only care about my family, especially my children, and the time I spend together with them chilling, cooking, playing, and learning.
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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It's funny to read all of this, because it always felt like this for me. I think I skipped the "this is fun and easy" part and went straight to the "what is all of this? Why are there so many frameworks? What are all those annotations? How are they all mixed together and somehow this works but only if written in arcane ways? Why is everything so overengineered and complicated?"
I also never thought the problems I'm solving are significant in any way. So doing it for the paycheck alone is my default mode of operation.
I never stopped feeling confused by the tech I'm using. There is just too much tech. Each new project another round of more tech to learn. As consequence, I now focus on understanding a base layer of project related tech in order to get things done. Most of it is going to be irrelevant with the next project anyway.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
Like, you've had it good in terms of career, from a simple percentiles-income standpoint. And most likely you have had a lot of moments of satisfying problem solving. But the learning of the job is basically done now, and it's just reframing of the same ideas as new technologies. It's like being told that the words in English are going to be renamed tomorrow so you had better get started on learning them.
For right now, punch the clock, and take up an immensely challenging and deep hobby like music or painting if you haven't done so already. If you find that the hobby pulls you forward where the job doesn't, then the path forks: "work to live"(keep punching the clock and moonlight a little) or "live to work"(either turn the hobby into the new career, or turn this into a reason to challenge yourself with tougher coding problems that go beyond learning another framework)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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)
Is there a solution? Maybe focusing on acquiring knowledge that has a more lasting value. There was a post recently about finding work as a more niche developer. Maybe a break to refocus which is what I am doing, and maybe starting something completely new.
Good luck.
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.
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.
I'm 41 and going through a divorce, so I have a distraction that carries over into everything else. But, I'm now also freed up to go do the things that I haven't been able to enjoy in years because of obligations or trying to make someone else happy. I've been able to go out on weekends exploring or camping, joining up with friends and reestablishing connections, and now have a puppy that is forcing a little more structure into areas of my life that I became overly relaxed in (plus his unconditional love is soothing).
Another thing to consider is just the amount of tangential stress in our lives from seemingly one bad thing to another: politics, the economy, foreign affairs, social media, etc.
Really, I don't think there's one single thing to point to but a conglomeration of many things. I try to focus on what can be controlled and let go of the things that I can't.
Things that have helped me in the past when I'm in a rut include: taking up a new hobby (I find woodworking enjoyable because it's more physical; cooking is another great choice too), learning a new programming language (I learn ideas that can be fun to experiment with or incorporate into my daily work), traveling nearby (get a Hipcamp glamping spot with a minimal of fuss; get away from things for a bit; clear the head, feel your body), explore a new book genre (I've been slowly getting into audio books), volunteer work (I joined my neighborhood HOA and try to bring my experience into solving little problems that others don't have the experience with; though there is the occasional neighbor drama, I'm on good terms with everyone and have regular and good conversations with neighbors while out walking or working in my yard).
Anyhow, this is all to say that I think that as we age and mature in our careers, these ruts we find ourselves in require a more "holistic" approach to finding a way out.
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.
I’ve spent a great deal of time analyzing this — and I still don’t have great answers — but here’s an internet-friendly numbered list of random strategies and perspectives I’ve had success with:
1/ be open with your boss. They may be able to offer strategies to help.
2/ set short-term goals and force accountability. For me, that was making promises to my manager and asking them to hold me accountable at regular intervals (micro-management as a service).
3/ if it works, it’s fine. I had a lot of my self worth bound up in my ability to deliver clever hacks. I’ve come to the realization that most of my useful output has been simple, obvious, and quite ugly.
4/ the only people who care about your code are you and the peers who have to engage with it. I want to write clever code, but (at work) I want to read really, really dumb code.
5/ I’ve moved from caring about tech to caring about business impact to caring about what that impact has on humans. This helps make decisions about code easy, since in my work humans never care about the framework or elegant code unless that framework or code causes them to have a bad time.
- burnout
- world stress
- aging (you getting dumber)
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.
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.
I think it was actually the newness of the things that made me interested and kept me focussed on them enough to break through and make changes.
The JS world has left me feeling similarly fatigued when every couple of years there is a new variation on what seems to be the same old concepts, with very little conceptually different enough to make it feel like I'm learning something of value.
Maybe deep inside your brain it knows this latest thing you're going to learn is likely to be quickly deprecated, and it just can't bring the dopamine levels in your brain up high enough to keep you focussed and interested.
Definitely it can be burnout, but I wonder also if it could be ADHD linked? Inability to focus on something you have to focus on for your livelihood will absolutely lead to anxiety and depression.
Switching to a different field (Cybersecurity) and writing EBPF tracing stuff really helped restore my confidence that I really enjoy writing software.
A change of scenery can really help, and there are so many interesting new things to choose from out there.
First, what you describe sounds like burnout. Do some research about it for yourself, both what it's like and how to fix it. You're not lazy and you're not dumb. You have more capability and potential today due to your experience than you ever did any time in your past. But you do need to take care of yourself, and as you research burnout you will get ideas of how.
Second, when learning new things, you must give yourself the space to learn. For example, when I went to go learn Angular 2, I was already expert in older ways of doing web development and other technologies such as games and mobile, so I figured I'd give myself a week to learn angular, and in the final days of that week also begin the prototype of the project I was getting into Angular for in the first place. Also, I'd go ahead and start using the basic ideas of Redux. While learning, I was stressing out the entire time about how these trivial examples I was working on were probably not going to add up to the project prototype I needed to create by next week. The stress of the time crunch, combined with the fact that I was punishing myself for being too dumb to learn this in a few days inhibited my ability to learn. When you're learning something new, give yourself the space and time you need to learn it, and do not pressure yourself by trying to conflate project deadlines into the learning. The learning is the project for now; the business project must become a secondary concern to be worried about later, until you have the skills and experience with the technology you need to complete the project.
Also it's probably best to try to learn only one new technology at a time; don't switch to a new database and a new visual framework and a new web framework and also start using Typescript for the first time, all on the same project. Not unless you've got a year or something just to learn and nothing is going to be due on a specific date.
Be kind to yourself. When you're talking to yourself, talk to yourself about this the way you would with someone that you love.
p.s. Feeling like you're inadequate is a common side effect of learning. I've come to recognize it as a sign that I've got this. It's darkest before the dawn. 'Learning is not child's play; we cannot learn without pain.' - Aristotle
It's not that you can't learn anymore. You don't want to learn right now (specifically you don't want to learn what you're trying to learn). You're not enjoying what you're doing and your tired brain is starting to protest.
Here's what your brain (you) is saying: I don't want to do this. With logical results (I don't want to do this, so I'm not doing this).
Some people in this thread have pointed to age as a major factor. It's a minor factor in your 30s as it pertains to learning and it's very unlikely to be significant to what you're describing (Vue and React are not that difficult to learn). Age becomes a major factor for burnout in your 30s though; you've done it for quite a while, so it starts to feel very repetitive, drone-like factory work, and the work hours wear on you differently for all those reasons combined with naturally having a bit less energy at eg 37 vs 22 years of age.
What are those things?
I maybe have a similar experience. I question every little detail that may add unnecessary complexity and I see those things as potentially limiting to overall outcome. Controversially those can be things like overuse of React's hooks leading to unwanted patterns, or Vue's special string syntax or Redux's issue with thunks, or MobX's OOP god like objects. I work on a large TS codebase. I have a strong opinion about how the code should look like, but it's discouraging to see how others don't pay enough attention to understand the long term effects of some unwanted patterns that lead to technical debt. Sometimes I think that my colleagues confuse simple vs easy.
Also, I wouldn't rush to diagnose burnout or anything like that. It might be as simple as accumulation of experience leading to higher expectations. Nothing wrong about that.
That being said, the reason why it wasn't an absolute nightmare for me is because I have good foundational skills and I genuinely enjoy software development. These two things have made it very easy for me to onboard. I also strive to understand how the internals works, and that speeds me up tremendously.
I'd encourage you to understand how the internals of Vue work. That way when you're working, you don't have to think about Vue itself, and just about what you're working on. If you really do feel like you're getting "dumber", start writing stuff down! The only way to truly never forget something is to understand it deeply, as if you can explain it to a 5 year old.
Anyways, this is my advice. I'd be happy to chat offline if you want some more advice (in my early 30s).
https://www.amazon.com/Laws-Brainjo-Science-Molding-Musical-...
It’s ostensibly about learning a musical instrument but it’s really about how to learn anything.
That's why. Motivation comes from a sense of purpose.
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.
They're not smart enough to understand and therefore affect their circumstance. Their greatest accomplishment is that they still have a job, lol.
You are the Peter principle. You are fatigued from being asked to use a brain that isn't capable of solving corporate web dev and relaxing. It is instead tired of trying to solve what it considers 'complex stuff'.
If something is still complex about placing buttons and text on a screen after 15 years - you're not smart enough to do it!
Try switching into management, testing, anything else where brain use is severely limited and largely not needed. You'll feel a great sense of relief.
1. I have no time. I am completely capped out with meetings, certification expectations, etc. 2. I am expected to perform at a high level immediately, which takes away from the ability to learn. 3. I take on stories the rest of the team doesn't want. Like right now I am digging through Auth0's library code because they don't support a feature we need.
All in all, I think the solution is to back off and start with easier task. Oh, and sleep enough and make sure your diet is fine.
Few things that helped me:
1: Don’t try to cope with this by telling yourself that you’re “successful” in the eyes of the world and you should suck it up and keep going.
2: Keep figuring out what you enjoy and try to align work with it. Ofc it depends and there are trade offs.
That being said, in your case can you ask your boss if you can try the other project to see if you like it?
Some resources: youtube: healthygamergg “you are burned out and don’t even know it”
When I get up and don’t feel like working I just start working until I’m having fun and the hours start flying by.
I hate what I’m doing most days, but, it has to be done. Just last month I had to, finally, really learn regular expressions, read the Scrapy docs start to finish, figure out how to scrape/merge a 1M+ document site where none the metadata for the docs live in the docs themselves, learn to use Falcon to fix a project only to find out that Falcon has some issues that make fix the project impossible, requiring me to figure out how to make a raw ASGI app.
That was just April. On top of my other work!
Over the past two years I’ve learned, in depth, Bash, Make, Helm, Kustomize, CSS, Sass, HTML, JaveScript/TypeScript, Angular, RxJS, half a dozen testing platforms, Kafka, Cassandra, color theory, Style Dictionary (design systems), and a few dozen other little things. I’ve read tens of thousands of pages of books and documentation, taken extensive notes, and written demo code as I’ve worked my way through them.
It’s been like this since 2002 and I think it’s going to continue until 2042. There’s no reward, it’s what’s expected.
It doesn’t matter how senior I am, how many people I manage, or what my title is. I’m 38 and I feel like a junior dev with 22 years of experience. I don’t know if this level of flexibility is required to be a good developer, but, I’ve never worked on a successful project where it wasn’t.
At night I watch videos on CSS to keep up, read books about tech we may need to adopt in the future, read about changes to Kubernetes/TypeScript/Angular/Django, do UX+product design for the next version for our app, and read resumes.
For me learning new things is something that I have to do to move forward and get paid. It’s an investment that has a huge opportunity cost associated with it.
You’re getting paid multiple six-figures to learn new stuff? Sounds great. If you don’t like what you’re doing, why not quit and take a few weeks or months off to figure out what you want.
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.
Worked at a startup with the most complicated possible software architecture just for an extremely simple product. There's a lot of mentality of just because it's possible we should plan for it. I want to work for a place where simple and less cheeseburger is preferred over an everything burger.
The fact that one has to learn mind numbing levels of abstractions, contortions, domain specific knowledge, virtual DOM's and all this with the hindsight that this could soon be out the door just like any number of mootools, extJS's before it. All this effort to get a SPA or a smoother UX interaction doesn't seem to be as appealing.
Given that the basic UX functionality can be achieved with plain html and js in a fraction of the time and effort (minus the smoothness) since the ~2010's.
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.
That's what saved me in my then mid 30s in a comparable circumstances.
I’m 60, and still learning new stuff, every day; but I’m highly motivated.
Anywho, I've solved this by having fewer opinions about technology and generally giving fewer shits. Doomed project? Yeah, they almost all are, so, fine. Bad tech? Most of it's terrible, that's normal. Some moron having way too big a say in the project and making it worse while creating unnecessary work? Yeah, that's normal.
We must imagine Sisyphus happy. I suppose.
I've kinda thought about starting an agency or trying to launch a product, but between not being able to stand looking at a computer screen after my day job, and my guess that that'd end up sucking just as much, but in different ways, I've not done it yet. Honestly, probably never will. Coming to terms with what I, realistically, won't ever do has helped some, too. Kill any dreams you don't care enough about to work toward today. Just let 'em go.
- get pleny of sleep.
- exercise.
- eath healthy and have a healthy bodyweight.
- have social, in-person interactions with friends. Have a laugh, etc.
You need to spend a few months playing beach volleyball, barely touching any technology.
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
(I'm thinking of getting tee's printed with that slogan).
Or switch into completely another job/geo/culture/.. for a while.. or find a hobby that can use your thinking skills, but in another way..
But yeah,.. change. While still in control.
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.
Slept like crazy for 2-3 months. 12-14hrs daily. Much better now.
What percentage of your salary are you saving?
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.
So my first major period of work-malaise was ended by switching jobs. I decided if I didn't find my job fulfilling and interesting enough to work on, I would go out and find a job that I could be excited about.
It helped; everything felt new, and if I wasn't super productive right off the jump, well, I was learning a lot of new things and no one expected me to be productive.
The next time I got into a work-funk, where it felt like I wasn't getting anything done and I had trouble being excited about the work, I thought about changing jobs again. But my job was objectively good, I liked my coworkers, there were plenty of opportunities for exciting work, and there was nothing about it I particularly disliked. I just felt like I wasn't particularly happy, like I was spinning my wheels and not really getting anywhere in life.
So I left work well enough alone, and took a step back to look at my life and think about my identity and figure out what made me happy.
I decided I needed three things: home, community, and quests.
I am, deep down, a nester, a home-body. I need a space I feel like I belong in, that's mine and no one else's. Archimedes' "a place to stand". So I bought a home, committed to it, and started changing it to suit me better. Set up a private home office, a workshop, started reshaping the yard and planting an orchard. I hope to be there the rest of my life. The very idea of a place to be, forever, gives me a sort of stable comfort and happiness.
But while a part of me would love to be a hermit, I do want a sense of community, like I am connected to the people around me. So in addition to starting a family, I also do what I can to get involved. I started volunteering at a local food pantry and with the town's Rec board to put on local events; I ran for local office once. Even if I like to spend a lot of time by myself doing my own thing, it's nice to meet people, to feel like I know the people around me and they know me, at least a little.
Deep down, though, I do want a quest. I want to work on something meaningful. Something that it's worth working towards even if I never achieve it. Something that, if I gasped out "finish my work" on my deathbed, someone else would reasonably consider devoting their own life to the project as well. I haven't figured out that last part yet. Maybe it will end up being something I quit my job to do, either a job itself or a pursuit in retirement.
But in the meanwhile, formalizing my life in this way helps me take the pressure off at work. I enjoy my job, I think it's useful, and I take pride in my work from time to time, but it's ultimately just a job.
I still fall into a work-funk from time to time -- these last two years especially -- but when it happens it is no longer the existential crisis it was the first couple of times. I have other parts of my life I can work on and take pride in instead, it's not me failing at my one big thing. It makes it easier to just focus on making a little bit of incremental progress on my job every day until the malaise passes and work become fun again.
