How do you fix the “no longer feel” anything in tech?

Imagine liking woodworking... would you still love it as much after 10 years of doing it 8h/day, 5 days a week?

Then imagine opening a woodworking magazine, and every page is a new ad-hidden-as-a-newsstory, showing some new magical tool that will do all the magical stuff you hate doing... trying to sad this complex shape? With our tool it takes just 5 seconds... then you get that tool, and it works only on small square shapes and 5 seconds is 'per side'. Another day, another magical tool, another disappoint. You'd slowly stop buying the bullshit and used the few tools you know work and try new ones only after they get an established presence in woodworking.

Then look at the customer... every customer has "special needs", but in the end, all you're making is a bunch of silimar wooden stools.

It's not something you have to get depressed about or even really care about... it's a job, you rise over the overinflated hype, you do your 8 hours, get paid, and then you can do other stuff that makes you excited... mostly because that stuff is not your 8h/day job. I mean... imagine having sex for 8h/day every workday... how long until even sex loses all the excitement? I'm guessing not very long.

Two solutions:

1. Build something you really care about. Something that solves an actual issue that you have.

2. Learn a better programming language. This might sound strange, but I found that work gets super boring and repetitive quickly if the language can't keep up with my thoughts. Some languages do better than others here. Forget Python, JavaScript/Typescript, Java, C#, C++, Golang, Rust (even though Rust is cool). Do Clojure (or other Lisp), Haskell, Scala, Racket, F#, Prolog, Idris, Purescript. It makes a huge difference.

A job is a job. If you have to set an alarm to wake up Monday morning, eventually it is going to grate on you regardless. I am sure there are some people who love it, but I suspect this is more likely akin to the social media effect (where you only see people sharing pictures of their amazing holiday/car/friends, and never the shit parts of their life, so that amplifies this feeling of "everyone's life is great but mine seems crap" because you only see/hear the edited best bits)

I personally find that "coding for fun" at home is the best solution to not caring about work. You don't need to code for any purpose apart from the sheer joy of it - don't worry about open sourcing or a business model or a side business or even if anyone in the world will ever even see the code. Just code for fun even if that particular idea only lasts a Sunday afternoon (I have loads of projects that I worked on for perhaps total of like less than 10 or even 5 hours before getting bored and moving on, but it was fun for those 5-10 hours - that is fine, I occasionally pick things back up, but often not).

You also don't need to care about every new tech that comes along.

Good luck.

I think your experience matches what 99.999% of engineers feel. Very, very few people get to ride a cool tech wave. John Carmack got to make a living making Doom and Quake. Good for him. For every John Carmack, there were tens of thousands who tried and failed at game dev, and ultimately went back to their day job making accounting software.

Because, as you say, most of the time business and marketing make things successful, not the actual tech. Only rarely does a hard-working programmer make something at the right moment that catapults them to success.

But that said, I don't think that fulfillment in tech is all or nothing. If you work very hard on a side project, you may be able to capture a tiny amount of success. Maybe your side project can generate enough money to pay for coffee every month? That would still feel pretty nice.

What worked for me, found a place that needs tech but isn’t a tech company. So it’s just make cool stuff to make the business more nimble, smooth. The application of tech as a business tool, it’s kept my interest for the past few years.

Some of it reduces required human resource, like I took a logistics department head count from 10 to 4 with scanning to automate record keeping and increase accuracy. So that kinda sucks deleting jobs, but from the perspective of building/scaling a business, it’s awesome.

Geo political events. Overall downturn in Tech and layoffs. Higher possibility that AI will invade lower end programmers job.

We are standing at the edge of some uncharted territory. No one is sure whether the future of software development as a profession will be better or worse than the past.

It's ok to feel numb standing here.

Take a wider outlook on life.

You’ve been in this environment for 10 years, it is only healthy to be where you’re at right now in your mind.

With a high probability you enjoyed tech and valued your career highly and was rightfully proud of it.

To be happy with life in the next decades the key is probably not tech, or what does your heart and stomach tell you?

Are there goals that your inner you tells you to strive for?

Dare to look beyond tech and work. Travel, love, companionship, philosophy, listen to your 80-year old neighbor etc!

Whatever direction you choose it must be your active choice to give meaning.

In the past what has helped me is exploring the 'techy' area of something I see all the time but never stopped to consider how it works under the hood. A great example is music and music software. If you begin exploring sound, synthesis, filters, etc. there is a huge world just waiting to be discovered. Hours and hours of fun - very easy to find that "where did the last 3 hours just go?" feeling.

You could also look outside the tech industry and go into something else you care about as the person who is an exception for being technical. If you have 10 years experience you can do a lot of good and help many people for whom computers are still scary and mysterious black boxes (remember, this is the overwhelming majority of humans currently alive on Planet Earth).

Wish you good luck!

The idea that a person should be thrilled about their job is a rather luxurious position in the first place. Do you have a hobby? If not, find one.

If you don't hate your job, consider yourself very very lucky.

Fwiw, i think chatgpt is kind of boring too.

That said there is a difference between not feeling excited about latest fad and not feeling excited about anything.

My general advice would be to take a break. Quit for a month or two. Learn to paint, hike, whatever. Maybe the excitement comes back after a while, if not maybe you found something different to be excited about. Either way its a win.

> No, I don't think I'm depressed. I eat healthy food, exercise and see mountain and river every morning. My mom loves me.

What's your basis for thinking you are not depressed? Because depressed people can still eat good food, exercise, see nature, and have people who love them.

Which to be clear, i am not saying you are depressed, but if you are basing you thinking you are not depressed solely on that, maybe you should dig a little deeper, as you can be all of those things and still be depressed. Or maybe just suffering burn out.

In any case, consider talking it over with a therapist. If you are depressed they can get you help. If you are not depressed, they can help you figure out what actually is wrong and what your options are. Alternatively, if all you need is to change up your life a bit, they can help guide you through figuring out for yourself what parts to change. There really is no downside to talking to a mental health professional. They can help with things with depression, but they can also help with life just feeling boring.

I have felt exactly like that! I was a consultant for 12 years doing ecommerce. The last year was me trying to do things right but always got hammered with the "customers needs this so just do the easiest thing right get there". I hated it. I discovered that it has always been like this in that company so i decided to go look for something new: an internal IT department for a company that actually cared about its own products. My plan was simple: say yes to all offers i got through eg LinkedIn and see where it brought me. Most important thing: i minimized my efforts at my current job. I said to my self it was okay, because noe i wanted to that job that brought back: pride for doing software, had a real goal for doing quality, test and maintance and lets the devs redo parts of the system when we thought it needed it.

After one year i did find my current job. It came out of nowhere and because i just said yes to everything. Actually when i said yes to go for an interview for this company i work at now, i thought "this isn't going nowhere because this is an old company with legacy code and nothing new, but i have promised to say yes"

I landed the best job in the world. And i actually found out that the new teams they hired wasn't legacy teams but doing .NET core, k8s, docker, dapper etc. I can even install Linux on my laptop if i want to.

I've been in the software industry 40 years and have felt this way from time to time. Some of the suggested ideas have worked at different times, e.g. when I was doing not-so-interesting contract work, extracurriculars make a big difference. Other times, picking up other programming styles, frameworks, etc have reignited interest followed by disappointment from not being able to use it at my day job, but ultimately changing the way I think and work with mainstream languages. Management track definitely didn't work for me.

One thing I've always tried is to align the companies I work for with my values over pay raises (except for a contracting stint experiment). I don't know how much that matters but I've rarely had trouble getting up and doing a day's work.

I'm now at a large company continuing on an IC track. It's a bit tricky 'managing-up' etc, but I am finding a way to be effective by trying to get myself on projects I find interesting or challenging, as well as better ways to scale myself via writing high-level documentation, giving talks/demos, or lots of pair-programming to get aligned on tech culture. This probably only works because I don't think too much about how this or that is so ineffective/inefficient etc but rather frame it as a puzzle or technical problem to be solved within the arbitrary constraints of the organization. I don't do well with office politics which sometimes blow up in my face, but usually able to continue with the technical aspects of getting things done. Caring about and for your teammates and other people you work with (especially the non-technical ones) makes a big difference in how smoothly things go, or important things seem.

I don't follow ML/crypto/etc other than on HN with a sense of 'we can do that now!?" and smh wait and see attitudes, without thinking that these should have any impact on my work anytime soon. I wonder how much this kind of problem is more/less prevalent depending on whether you value internal or external validation?

All this is to say that this could be a long and recurring problem and you can look deep and wide to find different things that make it less important in your life or find a way of making it interesting again. One thing that's self-defeating is applying current apathy level to dismissing potential perks. Good luck!

> I no longer feel exciting for anything including the latest ChatGPT

If it helps, I'm don't share the hype for ChatGPT either...

> I'm figuring out what's the best mental model to survive (or feel) anything in tech.

I've personally been the most fulfilled, when I'm part of a team of people who listen, and are not afraid to share ideas and build things that solve problems. Connect with the people you're working with and I think you'll feel much more satisfied at work.

Are you sure this needs to be fixed? Of course this is Hacker News, so our bias will be towards finding a way to stay in software (I hate calling it tech when it’s a small subset of technologies that exist) and be happy. But really, do you need to do that? This is just one profession of many (and this one is far from immune from automation, contrary to popular belief!). If this isn’t what you feel passionate about, cool. Start thinking about everything else that exists. Software isn’t the holy grail.

I think that's pretty normal. Doing anything for a decade when all you can see is more of the same for the next decade can be dispiriting. It becomes just a way to earn money.

For me when I got sick of software development I moved to information security and cryptography. I now love writing software again, because I do it all on my own terms and I have fresh challenges at work.

Might not be the answer for you, but maybe do a masters degree or consider a change of career to something adjacent to software.

I'd start with asking yourself what does feel right and going from there.

Or you can just view it as a job. No one wakes up wanting to flip burgers all day, it's just a means to an end. Find something else in your life that makes you feel other than work.

If that doesn't sit right, maybe consider working with non-profits and charities. They will have their problems, but at least you're working towards something meaningful and bigger than yourself.

Useful? I think you should stop trying to derive meaning for yourself out of a job and not be bothered by the hype-train.

Be into stuff you enjoy only for the sake of enjoyment.

I’m in the same boat. A suggestion would be try to switch up the markets you’re involved in. I used to be based in SF Bay Area but moving to the MENA region has renewed my love for tech by giving me a chance to be somewhere that’s relatively early in its industry cycle and finding different business cases than what you’re taught in MBA classes.

There's a lot of negative things that could be said about the "tech" industry right now, but let's not dwell on that.

Find more things you do care about in life/world, and then maybe see how tech can intersect with any of those in a good way? Or does it even have to.

Also, you didn't mention raising a family. Maybe try hanging out with a nice 5yo, and teaching them something, and see whether parenting instinct you didn't know you have suddenly activates. That might change how you look at other things, whether it's making a family and providing for them (perhaps with a tech job), or suddenly on a mission to make the future better for kids like that (perhaps with tech).

Try to build something that makes the world a better place. This is extremely difficult, so joining others with the same aim can work better. At that point tech is no longer an aim in itself but just a means to accomplish something important. And the it becomes interesting, because you no longer focus on just the tech aspect but how it can be useful to your projects and hence other people, and it becomes doubly interesting (if it's actually useful - many modern trends are just distractions). It really works and I'm happy I took this path.

"No, I don't think I'm depressed. I eat healthy food, exercise and see mountain and river every morning. My mom loves me."

My question would still be, do you "feel" anything about other things? The way you describe it, does not really sound exited. More like, yeah mountains, healthy food, exercise, same shit every day.

In other words, you do sound disillusioned, to the point of burned out/depressed.

"But this profession just doesn't feel (or feel at all) right."

So what profession would feel right to you?

I don't think you can "fix" feeling right about anything.

It's time to stop working in tech for tech's sake and actually solve problems in other domains using computers as a tool-for-thought not as a business process support system.

There are all kinds of different jobs in tech, all kinds of technologies you could be working on, and all kinds of companies you could be working at. There are lots of companies that do really important work, and not just shoveling bullshit around.

It seems as if your current job isn't working for you. If I was you, I'd think about what does excite me and then see if I could pursue it. Find a new job, change careers. Obviously not gonna happen in an instance.

Not relevant but thanks for the line

"No, I don't think I'm depressed. I eat healthy food, exercise and see mountain and river every morning. My mom loves me."

made my day

Stay for the joy of the craft, not the excitement. Excitement is temporary and it is lost when the thing that's exciting goes away or is replaced.

Development has become less of an artform and more a slog to see how fast you can Google solutions or find whatever library of the week to use.

I feel the same and I only have a few years. It’s just a job. Nothing more, nothing less.

I find having a non tech hobby really helps me come to terms with this.

It comes in any profession. Switch to soemjting that you would like doing, pretty much.

And I don't mean another language. You may need something completely different. Metalworking, chemistry, robotics, whatever you can find that you would like to do and learn.

Oh but that's super hard and income will drop? Do it on the side or keep your current job.

Work on something challenging. Imagine how the future could be made better through technology and help make it so.

Maybe you'd like to work on free software projects. Those that try to tackle real problems, dedicated to offering real solutions, have positive social impact. And think about how to be involved with this in a way that is sustainable (the hard part of working in FOSS).

You might see if my story about quitting tech to become a therapist resonates at all: http://glench.com/WhyIQuitTechAndBecameATherapist/

If you want to feel, pursue art, not soulless tech.

Wait, tech has got that covered too...

At least we can still ride our bikes.

I code mostly because I enjoy it. The fact that it's useful to someone is just a nice extra which means I can easily make a living out of it.

I'm not sure who said "code is just a tool" but it's a depressing way to see things.

"It is just a job."

Forget about feeling it, it pays the rent and allows you to of what you love / like. This is actually the way 80% of the employees make it through the day.

Maybe it’s not for you.

Try a new career, you may be happier.

>No, I don't think I'm depressed. I eat healthy food, exercise and see mountain and river every morning. My mom loves me.

Those things are not evidence that you aren't depressed.