I mean they are all plot and action. Pretty good if you can drink enough to ignore the shitty parts. Even sober I'll throw on a lifetime movie once in a while because its at least as good as a lot of things on netflix.
Agreed. This is aligned with what I was throwing on another thread. Your behaviors were not aligned with your identity so one of them had to go. Sounds like you picked the one you really cared about. Kudos
I beg to disagree. Self-hatred is always negative and certainly does not correlate with any particular behavior. Does being hooked on doughnuts and ice-cream go hand-in-hand with self-hatred? What is so special about alcohol versus porn or sugar or Pokemon or Amazon Prime or Netflix?
I applaud your self-awareness and realization that you personally cannot drink moderately but must reject the assertion that there are such things as "regular life" and "alcoholism". Define these states of being...
There is this lesson that keeps coming up in my life again and again that I believe is true, applies effortlessly to matters of substance consumption, and generalizes out to life in general: think in reverse.
What you want to do is have a clear vision of what the life you want looks like and then work backward to where you are right now, then walk that path.
When you think forward incrementally with thoughts like "I should drink less" or "Do not drink beer" you are prescribing a behavior that is detached from an identity. Who is the person you will be that behaves this way because these behaviors are aligned with who you are?
Consider the difference between eating less meat versus becoming a vegan. One is a forward looking behavior, the other is a backward looking identity. If you are a vegan, you cannot consume animal products because that is who you are and to be a vegan means that you cannot consume animal products. The behaviors and identity are intertwined in a self-reinforcing system. This is strategy versus tactics.
Veganism and other extremely well defined identities are useful for making my point but it need not be so extreme. You can create a custom identity built around a set of ideals, policies, and rules that you define. I am: "a vegan" is equally valid to "a guy who has 3 beers on Wednesday nights watching the game with his boys". Define your values, describe who you want to be, then figure out the delta from where you are at right now to where you want to be. Then do it or admit that it's not what you really want and who you intend to become.
Setbacks and fuck-ups are inherent to the human condition. They do not matter. If we are still on the path we can take two steps forward, one step back and still finish the race. Black and white thinking leads to shame and guilt, which undermines and destroys everything. Life is messy and happens in the grey. Yesterday might have gotten fucked up, tomorrow might be dope, more than likely it will be aight.
I hate to tell you this but you can swear off booze or smokes or bread or sugar or bowties or whatever now and forever but it is gonna come up again. You might get involved. That is not failure. That is life. Hating yourself is counter-productive. Notice when you get yourself off the path and course correct, keep rolling.
You cannot and should not ever expect that you can execute flawlessly and white knuckle your way through this mess we call life. Do not give up your power and agency by believing that some bullshit molecule has hegemony over you.
Be who you are. Do as you wish. Become what you want. Live the dream.
Your problem is very simple: you are working on bullshit.
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.
> Creating stuff that people want to use is all that matters.
Don't forget that you are one of those people.
When it's something you want, it's somehow easy to find yourself at 3am banging out x86 asm for fun. Doing the exact same work in a corporate day job that you hate makes you want to stab your eyes out.
That's great and all, probably true for a ton of developers. Certainly is and has been for me. Now show us how that's actually useful, the majority of jobs aren't building useful important things. It's building some dumbass startup idea that is very likely to fail or writing insurance backend code or some generic web form that NO ONE gives two shits about. I'm not angry at you, don't want this to come off that way. This industry is fantastic in many ways, great salary, skill based, no hard labor, etc..... But just like most jobs it's a very lucky few that get to work on something they think is important.
Maybe 20+ years have beaten me down but it's so rare that a job that matters is out there and available. It's so depressing how many web apps for really bad ideas are considered "engineering" careers. Maybe that's what I should build a way to find engineering jobs for causes/things that matter to people. I know I'd love to have a job board/DB to search for Climate Change based positions.
It doesn't necessarily have to be world-changing. Just something that you value and causes a glimpse in customers' eyes because now they have the tools they didn't have before can be enough.
This is me in a nutshell. I am fried from building things that make no difference. If these things were never built the world wouldn't notice. A life of purpose is the cure for burn out. I have not found it yet but let me know if you do.
I can recommend building something for fun, just for yourself without anything of the business-y metrics.
When I had a demotivated phase I started to build my website for fun, and didn't give a damn about anything people would say of it. [1]
That ignited the motivation to build my own tools again and led to the motivation of finding something other people might need, too.
A lot of "older" people in the industry that I know also take part in game jams like ludum dare and come together on the weekends to build something fun that they like. Game jams are all about having fun with zero expectations, so you can basically build whatever you want that comes to mind on a specific topic.
I have always been motivated mostly by the stack I use and especially the complexity of the thing I build. I don't really care if anyone wants it. My most exciting job was a failed startup but to this day I can brag about the kind of system we built. It's probably easier for frontend developers to care about actual users.
Ok, what if instead of yet another one "UberEats for dog treats" I want to build a novel rejuvenation therapy. Or a platform for building such therapies.
If you want work alongside people experimenting with rejuvenation therapy, Calico labs works on that. They hire in-house software people and also of course use software provided by external companies.
I haven't worked for them or with them directly, so I don't know anything else about it, but it might be one place to look. I'm sure there are others; they must have competition.
Bullshit is much easier to learn and do when you are young. I am not sure why this is, but a shift does seem to be common once you start to hit your 30's.
This is why it is much easier to recruit people in their 20's to work super hard on problems that don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. Once people get older, they don't really want to spend all week optimizing a tiny button on an Android app that no one will ever see or use, no matter how much you get paid...
When I was young I didn't realize what I'm working is bullshit. I thought it's the coolest shit in the world. I used to be excited about new technologies. Now when I hear about "new technology" I just roll my eyes, because in %99.99 of the cases, this "new technology" is anything but. It's just a permutation of an existing tech with trivial differences that I'm interested in learning.
Maybe when you're starting out, this kind of work doesn't feel as much like bullshit because you don't have enough experience to differentiate. It feels like you're on your path to becoming a better engineer and the struggles ultimately seem worth it. But I bet once you hit a certain point, having to wrangle with the same flavor of bullshit you did 3, 5, 10+ years ago feels a lot more soul sucking. It doesn't feel like becoming a better engineer like it once did because, in OPs case, learning the syntax/structure of a new JS framework doesn't feel like the sort of vertical learning it once did. You probably want to learn new, more advanced concepts, not "I know how to do this in React - how do I do this in <new JS lib>?"
Similar to JimtheCoder, I think it is experience. As a fresh faced college grad, I got hired at a bank. They have good recruitment, and a decade ago, the entire company was almost cult-ish (in the least bad way possible). The mission was constantly talked about, our members are the most important, we are helping members - our neighbors and public servants - with their problems, and every employee works toward that mission.
It felt really important. And to some extent you can still feel that in some places, even that bank.
However, as you get more experience, and you see the same political mid-management games play out, and you realize a lot of the cynical realities of things, you can lose energy. Or, perhaps you watch people not doing the right thing, but having no power to convince them to do otherwise.
Like an old man telling a child that digging a hole with a shovel is better than digging it with a rock and watching them continue to use the rock: you just get worn out.
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I agree with the main reply, that burnout is a thing, but that yes, it does help to be working on something you care about if you're going to put the level of mental effort required in software/IT. Sometimes I dream about being a bartender. You do your job, deal with the shit, and go home.
There is no intrinsic value to being in a management, leadership, or even a founder role. It's really a shame that we have embraced this nonsense of uplifting and celebrating roles and titles over contributions and outcomes.
Nobody gives a shit if you are a director of engineering but they may well care very much if you solve their problem.
It's all vanity and ego run wild. The reality of business is that the only two things that actually matter are building shit and selling shit. This is how to easily differentiate between cost and profit centers and who is essential vs expendable in an organization.
You should only be driven to be a manager or director if your fundamental skillset is dealing with bullshit to enable other people to do value creating work by getting it out of their face.
If you think you are moving a bunch of JIRA tickets around you should take a hard look at what a legit engineering manager deals with. And then add in trying to resolve bullshit conflicts between grown ass men acting like children, talking people into getting involved with your high risk/low reward squad, forcing people to make a decision and start moving instead of arguing endlessly, having really uncomfortable conversations on the regular, firing people who have a mortgage and kids but have undeniably become a risk to the business even if you like hanging out with them, identifying, defining, and enforcing the processes and changes to keep everything from falling apart...
Your 25 years of experience don't necessarily have any impact on dealing with all that bullshit. You have to be fundamentally organized and passionate about driving others to succeed and absorbing damage so they don't have to in order to be a really legit manager. Unfortunately titles and position in the hierarchy has become irrationally coveted and rewarded in many organizations and people who are "senior" slide into these roles and fundamentally suck at it and create misery for their direct reports and commit unforced errors that put the entire business at risk because they don't know or really care what they are doing.
Do not envy and covet joining that squad.
The only thing that really matters is creating dope shit that people want to use and making money while you are doing it. What role you are playing in the organization isn't meaningful compared to whether or not it is winning or losing.
There are plenty of lone-wolf IC's out there pulling down ungodly amounts of money because they are just destroying it and the best way for them to create value is for everybody just to get the fuck out of the way.
Only become a manager if you can be an excellent one and crush it and don't think for a second that just because your former colleague slid into a lane when you didn't that he is succeeding and you are failing. He has a whole new problem now to make a bunch of other people successful and absord all their bullshit for himself to be successful. That's the job. You can only admire and envy him if and when he has crushed it and you are certain that you could have crushed it even harder and should have taken that shot.
And if that is where you are at start interviewing for management roles, grab one, and put the ball through the basket to prove it.
You haven't made a career mistake you are just ruminating on an insecure head trip. And fuck that, you don't need, want, or deserve to live that way.
What you need my friend is a strategy. Are there features that if delivered create outsized economic returns?
You need to invert your thinking. Nobody gives a shit about you, your product, your company, your mission, open source. Money is directly derived by delivering value to another party in a way that they could not or would not be able to create themselves.
Open Source software utilizes a confluence of patent law and hippy bullshit to create a safe space for collaboration and advancement and yada yada yada.
I didn’t invent fire, but I can start a hell of a bbq.
Do shit that matters and everything will be fine.
The best thing that you can ever do is make a ton of money, hire a ton of people, pay your taxes, and be there when your are called upon.
