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?

Getting fed up with all the stupid technology grind is not necessarily burnout though. One could call it wisdom or experience too.

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.

> 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

In my experience, the only way of getting some decision power is moving into management. Even team lead roles don't count and don't give you any ownership over the product direction.

In big tech engineers are generally trusted more, but still product ownership is dedicated to management.

the whole tech thing is changing fast, ageism is a true thing, in a scenario where most of the previous knowledge can be ignored, being a senior with 5 years of experience, 10 or 20 doesn't change much. Given that young people usually simp for the companies much more due to being naive, they have a huge preference in the hiring process.

Tech is removing the root of the knowledge, migrating from understanding the solution, to quick copy&paste from some places.

Half life of knowledge in our profession is more or less a year and a half.

This means 5 years of experience is the maximum you can accumulate.

Maybe years are not a good metric for experience.

There's a huge difference between understanding tools/libraries/frameworks/programming languages/APIs etc vs understanding how to build a system on top of any of these things that scales well, is maintainable, is easy to collaborate with others on, that can be extended quickly, that doesn't cost that much time/money to build in the first place, etc.

Yes the former changes every 1-5 years. Doing the latter well is much harder, no single tool can solve these problems, and I think years of experience really does help.

> Half life of knowledge in our profession is more or less a year and a half.

Only if you define your profession as knowing the latest front-end frameworks. In terms of concrete technical knowledge that half-life lengthens as you go down the stack. But beyond knowledge of existing tools and frameworks, there is also the understanding of systems and how they interact with the real world. This is what you need to understand to really give yourself a life-long career. It can still be hard tech (distributed systems, scalability, etc), or it can be a little softer (UX, maintainability, collaboration, etc), but these skills will give you the ability to dwarf the actual business impact of the 25 year-old who has maximized knowledge of the latest tools.

... and?

I agree that years aren't necessarily a good metric for experience, although I have decades in IT - started when I was 19 and retirement is a real thing I have to consider.

Years do give you some experience that isn't translatable to the resume: after a while, you've seen through most of the tricks that management likes to try but which the younger colleagues haven't learned. Having older folks around can spoil the surprise.

My personal theory of the roots of ageism has this as a pillar.

What kind of management tricks might someone be missing who hasn't been around too long?

They try to make you commit to additional unofficial work/projects for which you get no extra time or resources. If you fail and burn out, that's just you being a bit "overambitious", and if you succeed, they will just make if official. In that way, they can avoid owning up to any failures and only take responsibility for the successful ones. So you have to be a bit careful in casual conversations with the boss about ideas and possible improvements.

Do you mean as in you forget or that new ways to do stuff are reinvented?

The latter.

As an example I can think of:

- jQuery, Backbone/Knockout, React progression

- C++03, C++11

- Qt Widgets, Qt Quick

- SQL to NoSQL and back again

- Windows NT, 2000, Server

On the other hand, AWS Lambda seems like CGI/FastCGI all over again, but with proper automation, so I have at least one data point on 20 year cycles (to confirm we need someone who is in profession for at least 40 years).

Developer here who has been programming over 40 years (since I was a teenager in the late 1970s).

I know I am stretching things a bit here, but IBM mainframes, multi-user Forth systems, and distributed QNX systems ranging from the 1970s to the 1980s -- not to mention UNIX systems -- could all support remote procedure calls or interprocess/interapplication scripting across standard APIs to some extent (for a loose sense of process or application, especially with Forth). Even Smalltalk back then could do that to an extent but mostly from a single-user perspective in the sense that Smalltalk is mostly about message-passing objects. Essentially, you could have a system that could talk to itself or other similar systems in standard ways.

Yeah, there have been so many cycles of forgetting and reinventing with new generations of programmers. Although it is true some things improve even as sometimes other things decay for a constantly changing kaleidoscope of opportunities and risks (a bit like host/parasite arms races in evolutionary cycles).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_CP/CMS

https://www.forth.com/resources/forth-programming-language/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QNX https://www.qnx.com/developers/docs/qnx_4.25_docs/tcpip50/pr...

And also from the 1960s-1970s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO_%28computer_system%29 "Although PLATO was designed for computer-based education, perhaps its most enduring legacy is its place in the origins of online community. This was made possible by PLATO's groundbreaking communication and interface capabilities, features whose significance is only lately being recognized by computer historians. PLATO Notes, created by David R. Woolley in 1973, was among the world's first online message boards, and years later became the direct progenitor of Lotus Notes."

And from a different perspective, what is email but a standard way to do a remote procedure call to hopefully invoke some behavior -- even if a human may often be in the loop? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email

And from the 1930s an earlier Paul Otlet invented the idea of using a standard 3x5 index card to store and transmit information (mainly metadata): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otlet "Otlet was responsible for the development of an early information retrieval tool, the "Repertoire Bibliographique Universel" (RBU) which utilized 3x5 inch index cards, used commonly in library catalogs around the world (now largely displaced by the advent of the online public access catalog (OPAC)). Otlet wrote numerous essays on how to collect and organize the world's knowledge, culminating in two books, the Traité de Documentation (1934) and Monde: Essai d'universalisme (1935)."

For another example of cycles, my current favorite UI technology is Mithril+HyperScript+Tachyons for JavaScript (although Elm is great too conceptually, and likely inspired Mithril and React in part) which is so easy to use from a developer ergonomic point of view in part by (simplifying with a very broad brush) re-inventing the OpenGL video game paradigm of redrawing everything (with behind-the-scenes VDOM optimizations) from essentially a global state tree whenever the UI is considered "dirty" because someone touched it. Mithril is so much easier to use than UI systems that are all about creating dependencies (like most Smalltalk systems) or which require storing and updating state in carefully managed components (like React) or similar constrained models. But sadly React+JSX+SCSS has so far won the mindshare war despite overall worse developer ergonomics. I hope that cycle continues to turn someday and the Mithril approach will win out (if maybe in some other implementation by then). https://github.com/pdfernhout/choose-mithril

Frankly it has been frustrating over the decades to see great ideas lose out for a time to lesser ones with better marketing or other institutional advantages or other non-technical issues (Forth vs. DOS, CPM vs. DOS, Smalltalk vs. Java, Mithril vs. React) or which better fit with the familiarity of developers with earlier systems (HyperScript vs. JSX, Lisp vs. C++). Yet, I can also still be hopeful things may improve as social dynamics and technical dynamics change over time in various ways. Like was said about JavaScript which I mainly program in now: "It is better than we deserve..."

Ad multi-user Forth, I have a question, and you may know the answer. In the Forth history on forth.com, they write:

"By the late 1980s, polyFORTH users such as NCR were supporting as many as 150 users on a single 80386-based PC."

Do you have any idea how that was done? I do not know any hardware way from that era that was able to connect 150 terminals to a single PC.

For anyone interested, there is a nice book about Paul Otlet: "Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age."

That's a great question. I don't know the exact answer, but as one possibility here is a PCI (I know, probably not right bus) PC card that supports 16 serial ports: https://www.startech.com/en-us/cards-adapters/pex16s550lp

So if you had 6 of those, you could support 96 users. You could get expansion units too for the main bus: https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/dpt47y... "It takes up one ISA slot in the main PC, and then hauls the signal to the external box, where you can plug in up to 7 more cards, plus some RAM"

Which mentions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_XT#Expan...

So, using 6 slots in the first box, and 6 slots in the next, and 16 port serial cards, that's in theory 192 users on RS-232 lines. Anyway, this is just a guess. I vaguely remember hearing of some actual (lesser) systems with lots of RS-232 ports, but don't recall exactly how they worked.

One thing about Forth is that it could cooperatively multitask essentially (almost) by just switching a dictionary pointer to one for each current user (along with a small terminal buffer of say 80 characters). https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.forth/c/Rh3stETjMls https://forth-standard.org/proposals/multi-tasking-proposal

So, that's 12K to support 150 input buffers, plus probably at least 1K for each user dictionary on top of the shared dictionary (12K + 150K = 172K total). That is probably low -- if users might want 4K each that's 600K. Throw in 28K for an extensive base system to round things off and that is 640K for a great low-latency system supporting 150 users all simultaneously having a command line, assembler, compiler, linker, and editor. And I'd guess probably a database too on a shared 10MB hard disk. And it might even feel more responsive than many modern single-user systems (granted, expectations were lower back then for what you could actually do with a computer). So, yes, "640K of memory should be enough for 150 anyones." :-)

Related: "Why Modern Computers Struggle to Match the Input Latency of an Apple IIe" https://www.extremetech.com/computing/261148-modern-computer... "Comparing the input latency of a modern PC with a system that’s 30-40 years old seems ridiculous on the face of it. Even if the computer on your desk or lap isn’t particularly new or very fast, it’s still clocked a thousand or more times faster than the cutting-edge technology of the 1980s, with multiple CPU cores, specialized decoder blocks, and support for video resolutions and detail levels on par with what science fiction of the era had dreamed up. In short, you’d think the comparison would be a one-sided blowout. In many cases, it is, but not with the winners you’d expect. ... The system with the lowest input latency — the amount of time between when you hit a key and that keystroke appears on the computer — is the Apple IIe, at 30ms ... This boils down to a single word: Complexity. For the purposes of this comparison, it doesn’t matter if you use macOS, Linux, or Windows. ..."

Thanks for the Otlet book reference! Got a copy just now: https://www.amazon.com/Cataloging-World-Otlet-Birth-Informat...

> 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.

Uhh... who are these junior people who don't like having a boss? I read the first part of this sentence and wondered why wouldn't a lower level colleague not want a senior helping them avoid potholes in the road...

> why wouldn't a lower level colleague not want a senior helping them avoid potholes in the road

Because they become much more influential in a shorter time, if they make a coup d'Etat by paving a completely new road, now they are the new road master. The old potholes are gone so they don't have to worry about those, and the new potholes are still unknown and yet to be discovered.

Is that not what architects do? Seniors with decision making authority?

Notice the fast decline in the last 20 years? Even active X was less crappy than the most well-polished actual react project, and active X was crap. Even java applets did more and in an easier way than modern frameworks and JS shit.

One simple page, with login, logout, some search, and navigation nowadays require a few plugins, router, state management, lib for requests, lib to handle cookies, lib for JWT, etc...

Rails does 95% of this out of the box. Companies need to understand how much their poor technology decisions cost them...

It's the developers not companies that make this decision. Out of boredom or trying to get promotion. I'm just so tired of seeing something that could have been one static html page but was built with NextJS+lambdas+terraform and a hundred more buzzwords.

Seeing the same trend in web/ecommerce development. The brand needs a simple site with a little bit of dynamic sprinkled through it. The agency chooses to build a full SPA with all the bells and whistles. In doing so they neglect/break basically everything else - SEO, connected martech, analytics, etc etc. Sure, some bits are a little 'faster', but then there's all sort of UX issues with parts that update too slowly and goodness knows what else. And all at a cost dramatically greater than necessary.

I'm sure some agencies do a fantastic job (those that think about the bigger 'more than just dev' picture). But on 95% of the sites I'm seeing right now the downsides far outweigh the benefits and it feels like dev for the sake of dev.

> In doing so they neglect/break basically everything else - SEO, connected martech, analytics, etc etc.

This is exactly how it looked like when Flash was a popular choice for making web interfaces. We've fought a long, hard battle to finally get back to indexable, interoperable, standards-based HTML, CSS, and JS. It was fine for a while, then Angular happened. Fast-forward a decade and we're right back when we started. Amazing.

> It's the developers not companies that make this decision.

I don't see developers making these decisions anymore, not in large web-based tech companies.

My experience has been that management controls a lot of these decisions and/or steers them in the direction that they want them to go. And the more power a manager holds over a team or department, the more influence they can exert to get their way.

As an example, I'm hearing from a colleague in another department that they're being told by an engineering SVP that all new backend services are to be written in NodeJS. These are .NET developers. How does this guy who is 3 layers above these engineers intend to enforce this "rule?" The implication is you can do this or get fired, I guess, so it's happening regardless of how stupid it is. This was all explained to me when I noticed that I had gotten 3 "so long and thanks for all the fish" emails from long-timers in that department.

As someone who recently returned to Rails after 7 years of searching for a better option, I totally agree. For the types of problems I solve (not FAANG problems), Rails is the by far the most productive option. Not perfect, mind you, but better than anything else I've run across.

Or Django. Or Laravel.

> Rails does 95% of this out of the box

This is always my thoughts when I start a project with something else .

I feel like I am one of the few that switched from angular to react in 2014 and while enjoying how "simple" it was started noticing how much people liked building complexity in it.

Now I have used react at a few different sized companies, taught it to some students and completely stopped using it for personal projects. It just seems like too much added complexity for almost every situation and people just see everything as a SPA now.

I'm a full stack engineer that does lots of react in my day job. I now use jquery in all my side projects because I want to get them done instead of spending lots of time getting the project setup.

Nothing beats adding a script tag in the footer and being done with project setup.

That's why I like Vue. It's mix of the two with a synchronized ecosystem for the core libs and a simple API.

Vue 3 kinda tanked all that though.

Can you describe the vue 3 part more? As an outsider it just looks for me they just added another api with a different style, so people can choose what they like.

The official router and store were not ready when they released Vue 3, even kind of still not, and the store is moving to a new lib.

Also there's now two competing APIs. The new one that they want you to use, and the old one that people like better.

Also a lot of time your objects are actually proxies, which I'm sure there's good reason for but that's kind of annoying (personal opinion).

I dislike dealing with proxy objects because you have to serialize and unserialize to turn it into what it always was.

What do you think of Svelte? I haven’t used Vue since I discovered Svelte but I’m always curious about peoples perspectives and try to keep my finger on the pulse. The new Nuxt looks pretty awesome! Love the api design. I’m hoping Sveltekit steals a few ideas from it before 1.0.

I looked at it the other day after the discussion thread about JS frameworks, but bounced when I saw ".svelte" files.

I accept (demand, really) TypeScript but I've become allergic to any attempt to add much more on top of JS than that. I can just see the next poor bastard coming along in a short year or two and going "oh god, WTF is a '.svelte' file? What did my piece of shit predecessor fall for?"

I'm looking into Vue today. Possibly I'll settle on something even simpler.

React's certainly out, and thank god the mood is finally shifting enough that I can abandon it without harming my career (much). Slow, janky, and god they've made some weird choices with it in the last few years. It was always a bit heavy, but it felt like it had some degree of elegance to it before that—if only in parts of the API itself, not the implementation.

[EDIT] Oh good lord, '.vue'. Don't any of these just use normal-ass code? Sigh.

Things like .vue and .svelte are really more like hints to your Editor for which linter to use, which code highlighting etc. Also your build chain I guess.

I'll admit it's annoying but it's still just "normal-ass code". Vue, for instance, is just html, JavaScript and css. A .vue file is just all three in one file with special syntax to indicate each section.

At least, last I looked at vue it was.

That's true of Vue. Svelte has a compiler which changes and augments your code with additional code for it's state management system. So it's definitely not normal code.

I generally agree with your don't "add much more on top of JS" sentiment, but I like .vue files. It's "just" HTML, CSS, and JS in one file, which I find convenient for components. But it's optional--you're free to use three separate files.

Seems interesting but quite young. When I looked it up it there was discussion about Sapper vs Sveltekit etc and quite frankly I can't stand that kind of thing anymore, it just leads to confusion, a lot of Googling and SO, partial or wrong docs etc and in the end a LOT of lost time and energy.

And I say that as someone who is currently refactoring a Vue 3 app from JS/VueX to TypeScript/Pinia ... oh the irony.

that's why i started using Svelte[1] on my personal projects... simplicity ( and the godsend cross-compatibility between browsers/desktop/mobile )

[1] https://svelte.dev/

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.

Another level of wisdom is to realize this is a form of job security. Put in the 8 hours, whatever the grind.

If that's good enough for you. Else there seems to be suggestions in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31285969 lol

We switched to using Elm for our front end. One of the complaints about Elm is doesn't get upgrades very often (like years in between).

This has been a feature for us – we don't need to be upgrading or fixing for upgrades or learning new "things". We focus on building with what we have and know and it works.

The things I was doing in my 20s made me feel as though I was changing the world, and I had an impressive project list.

In my 40s, I can hardly stand certain aspects of the tech space... and keeping motivation is all about things I can make, but not make for others.

Find something that sparks your imagination. Skill atrophy is my main thing. Mitigating skill atrophy on legacy skillsets, sub-sets of skills you have used for 20 years, but have no passion for any longer is tough as HELL -- and it makes me feel I can't learn... but the fact is I fail to learn anything I dont have a spark of passion about.

And I am not talking that romantic passion that some billionaire founder is taking about -- I am talking about *enough* passion that your ADHD can be quelled, and that small distractional things dont have undue heavy draw against your attention (passion)

I do think this is true - if you don't see the advantages of learning a new tool then you won't feel motivation or energy to do so - but I can also understand that it has to be done because of career reasons.

I mean if you were all in on e.g. Backbone.js or Dojo ten+ years ago, you're kinda running behind now and it'll get harder and harder to find a gratifying job.

I can see it happening for Vue vs React as well.

> 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

This might sound tangential, but I am at this exact stage in my life. I am in my early 30s and have signed up for the executive MBA program. I will be looking to start my term in Sept. Any tips/suggestions/warnings that you can share?

Not OP, but in my early thirties finishing an MBA now.

Here's how I sum it up. Pure CS is about determining what's theoretically possible, then software engineering is "applied CS", about taking what's theoretically possible and making it in the real world, which includes a mature understanding of costs (both upfront to build v1 and long-term maintenance). Thus an MBA is "applied software engineering." It's not sufficient to understand the costs of the engineering we build, because it doesn't matter if it costs $2,000 or $2,000,000 if we don't have the money for it. We also need to understand how to make it actually self-sufficient, by ensuring that it brings in enough revenue to cover the costs. $2,000,000 in costs, let alone $2,000 in costs, may be too much for a college student to afford out of pocket, but if you can show that you can earn it back and more, then you will find investors - be they angel or VC investors for a new venture, or your company's Finance division for a new project in a Fortune 500 company.

Ultimately the skills you get are about convincing people to fund what you want to build, for different definitions of "fund", whether it's literally cash, or persuading people to invest blood-sweat-tears equity by joining you, or just getting work to allow you to put time into it. Instead of working on what others want you to work on, you will learn to persuade The Powers That Be that your work should be funded. The main caveat: working on the MBA may change your mind about what's worth working on.

Tips, suggestions, warnings - very subjectively and at random...

- The "hard" stuff (with numbers in it...) didn't really grab me at all, I originally studied math and was somewhat disappointed in much of that part of this kind of MBA program, my hunch is that a regular full-time MBA would have been better for this, more immersion, this was all a little in the one, out the other for me because there wasn't much time to practice.

- But, the "soft" stuff on the other hand, was a goldmine, all the personal development, organizational psychology, negotiations, etc. This alone was worth the tuition.

- The best part was gaining a far better understanding and tolerance of why and how pretty much everything we work with in software is more or less "broken", it's actually not broken, it's as good as allowed by budget and organizational circumstance, and if something is to be improved, well, then that background has to allow for that improvement or else the improvement is just a pipe dream.

And you meet interesting people who will do interesting things in the community where you live, assuming you stay put, which I didn't, so I can't say much about that.

What do you want to do after your MBA?

That's why I decided against the MBA. I was in this stage of life in my early-mid 30s, and asked for some advice from other engineer-with-MBAs. All of the ones who had done things of value with their MBA were no longer engineers.

What's your endgame?

Do you want to be a CEO some day? A product manager? Business development? Work in something other than software? An MBA will teach you useful things and help you get your foot in the door.

Do you want to be a CTO? Do you see yourself creating software down the road? None of the MBA things explicitly help you, and executive MBAs are very expensive to do "just for fun". If you want to go back to school, go get a masters in CS if you don't have one yet.

>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.

I wonder if the VW ID Buzz California Camper van will be great for this. Take it for a drive to wherever. Go fishing, whatever. No need to rent a hotel or anything like that. Just hit the road and enjoy.

I'm doing these mini vacations so often now that they feel routine.

What's next? :P

Buy an old house and start renovating?

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?

Measuring for the sake of measuring isn't useful. Burnout may have become a catch-all term but it isn't meaningless, it means that the person is currently fatigued and action is required. It matters that the root cause is identified, it could be a health issue, an environmental issue or more probably a combination of factors. The KPIs you set as I see are arbitrarily chosen, not sure what you are measuring or why and can't even say that the goals are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-sensitive).

>In our professional lives, we are used to set quantified KPIs in a SMART way

In your opinion do you think that's been working well for the industry?

I don't find KPIs terribly useful in the software development at the level of an IC (which is btw my own level), unless we talk about performance & latency of large services where it is very useful and helps save millions. Software IC is special because motivation-wise it is almost self-sustaining, which is evident from massive open-source participation and pet projects.

On the contrary, at larger scale (starting from middle management and all the way to the top), I have an educated opinion that structured measurement of KPIs and clearly defined goals is what differentiates "tech" companies from all the rest - which is to say, tech-companies are known for their powerful growth.

It's really obvious in the hindsight: managers are usually pretty disillusioned types and will avoid doing hard work unless properly incentivized, thus fine-grained unforgeable growth-adjacent KPIs are really at the heart of the tech-company's success. Overall corporation's fast growth is a direct consequence of the synergy of KPI growth across the org-chart.

I like to define burnout as expending effort without makng perceived progress.

If you can phrase explain your problem in those turns there is a good chance it is burnout.

If not, it might be depression or something else.

In answer to your question though, speak for yourself. My personal goals are far more ambitious than my work ones.

Any example of a smart KPI ?

Some examples of directly measurable KPIs:

1. Mood diary

2. Time spent on social media, negative

3. Hours of sleep

4. Steps walked, number of repetitions in exercise, calories burnt

5. Psychometric tests (help measure mental clarity) https://openpsychometrics.org/

6. N-back: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0220...

7. Active vocabulary test to measure available crystallized intelligence

8. Biomarkers, for example the simple Levine PhenoAge clock: https://michaellustgarten.com/2019/09/09/quantifying-biologi...

You don't gave to measure every one of these, of course. In my experience they are more or less correlated: good lifestyle interventions improve many measures at once.

SMART goals regarding these KPIs are pretty obvious.

I have a strong dislike of the modern focus on personal measurement and metrics. It implies a sort of mechanistic existence. It’s also often connected to a focus on productivity optimization, which given that the OP may be suffering from burnout, seems like it might be the wrong direction.

My advice to OP: whether it’s burnout or not (and it does sound like it), you aren’t liking what you’re doing right now, so if you can, stop doing it for a while. Summer is coming. Can you take a sabbatical? If not, can you quit? If you are able to regain your energy and enthusiasm you will surely be extremely employable, so your overall risk seems low.

Use the time to nourish your body and your spirit. Get off the internet and into the outdoors. Don’t measure your steps or your sleep duration, instead, reflect on how you feel. Lay back in the grass and watch the stars and ponder your place in this vast universe.

I wish you good luck and if you are able to start this journey, I’m excited for you.

If I could upvote your comment twice, I would. Measurement has become the be all and end all, and it's useful of course. But it's easy to make the mistake that you've captured the whole of something on your graph, or spreadsheet, and usually that is far from the case. The spirit of a thing is not easily captured.

I'll give him one on your behalf.

> I have a strong dislike of the modern focus on personal measurement and metrics. It implies a sort of mechanistic existence. It’s also often connected to a focus on productivity optimization, which given that the OP may be suffering from burnout, seems like it might be the wrong direction.

Those things actually help reduce burnout, in my experience. An hour of sleep can make a big difference.

These can also be SMART KPIs.

Compare "take at least two weeks of vacation, where vacation is defined as not checking any email or voicemail and engaging in purely arbitrary activities not directed by an external authority, within the next six months" to "you need a sabbatical."

Heck, even your own wording is already edging toward SMART. Staying off the Internet and not measuring steps or sleep duration are quantifiable goals. Binary, but still quantifiable.

I too would like if my life were nice by default, but it is not. When faced with a hard problem we have to resort to hard measurements of progress, because otherwise we tend to go in circles in high-dimensional parameter space.

Otherwise taking a sabbatical is a nice decent feel-good advice.

> If you are able to regain your energy and enthusiasm you will surely be extremely employable, so your overall risk seems low.

And that's a big if.

I'd upvote this multiple times if it were possible.

So what are your goals?

1 - Wake up happy each day?

2 - Do not use social media?

3 - Sleep 8 hours per day?

4 - Walk 3000 steps per day?

5 - I fail to see how a personality test can measure mental clarity? Even if they aren't useless constructs. Thought "core self-evalutions" if taken regularly can be a good indicator of issue.

6 - Not sure what are you measuring. Work memory?

7 - "Available crystallized intelligence". Isn't this an oxymoron?

8 - Only if our bodies didn't show signs of aging.

My goals, as I have already said, are pretty obvious: find a good set of lifestyle changes (including exercise types and patterns, diet, sleep conditions, outdoor activities, supplements and drugs, but also including choice of country & city to live in), so these metrics are optimized in good direction, and I feel better. I tried less systemic approach and it didn't work for me. In my impression our genetic makeup tends to make us choose a complementary sort of environment, so it all (behavior, health, mood) comes to equilibrium and balances out - it's really hard to make consistent progress when you are inside such perverse equilibrium. Thus the need for heavy-handed hard measurement approach.

1. Mood diaries are more about trends and avoiding depressive episodes, it's better to rate your mood in the evening so your professional life is included in the rating. For example if your manager stresses you out on your job, you may not think about it in the moment, but it may show on your mood diary as a week-scale trend.

2. Completely avoiding social media is an unattainable goal, thus usage should be limited to 0.5-1.0 hr.

3. Yes, and sleep well, which is quite hard.

4. 3000 is too little, I'd aim to 5000-10000.

5. There are various tests, I'm specifically interested in IQ-test https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/FSIQ/ but it's more or less interchangeable with N-back. IQ is a scary number, but it's a good barometer for how good you really feel. A difference between "a good day" and a "bad day" is clearly seen on such test.

6. Working memory and attention, yes. These are degraded by lack of sleep & stress & aging.

7. Again, lack of sleep & stress & aging tends to degrade active vocabulary, in my case.

8. Of course we age, but this aging process is malleable: some interventions are shown to decrease (!) the value of various aging clocks. Yes, the aging clocks themselves are imperfect, but this decrease is often correlated with subjective & objective improvements on other axes.

If you accept fundamentally mechanistic view of nature, biology and ourselves, you might as well position yourself to reap the benefits.

> If you accept fundamentally mechanistic view of nature, biology and ourselves, you might as well position yourself to reap the benefits.

You're missing my point. What I deny is the usefulness of presented frameworks and tools. But it's fine if it's working for you and can work for others.

I envy your energy to even spend time tracking all those things. Just reading and imagining keeping them as a routine sounds exhausting.

You can track only the most important ones. Biological age isn't something you need to track every day - more like every month, or every week if you are rich. Step-tracking & sleep tracking are given for free.

To be honest I don't have much energy either, unless I take stimulants. Which I don't do often due to reasons.

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...

"Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely"

Basically just one of those meaningless buzz words that gets thrown around.

https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/ot...

It sure sounds smart, just isn't. Another example of a mechanistic approach in a field were humans are the major factor. Goals at best are arbitrary targets reached via consensus.

In my honest opinion one of the largest meta-problems ever amounts to decent mechanistic routes of helping each other being not taken in favor of more feel-good decent sounding verbal coping.

Virtue signaling should be banned.

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

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.

That is what this game is all about.

> 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.

Seems like projection, and everyone upvoting this is sharing in it because it's the case for the vast majority of us.

Sure, but does that make it necessarily false?

These kinds of threads are a dart board for everyone to throw out their fresh takes, and the OP to pick and choose from the advice as it applies.

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.

>That is what this game is all about.

It may to you, but for lots of people it's just another job and that is also valid and sometimes healthy too.

True, but if it were just another job to him, he wouldnt be posting...

> Build something people want

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.

[1] https://cookie.engineer

This is something that I wondered too.

Are you excited about the problem that your software and company are focused on improving?

Do you connect with the users whose lives are going to improve when they use your solutions?

Are you empowered to talk to your users and figure out how to solve their problems?

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.

Who cares what you build for someone else. Playing with frameworks and salary bumps can be fun.

You know what's not fun? Meetings.. caring about what you build will get you into many meetings.

Or, a variation, instead of building something someone wants, build something you think is valuable and excites you.

Working for 15 years, you know how much time off he has taken?

The content of the post clearly indicates complete apathy and lack of interest. Something that happens when you work on bullshit for years.

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.

Something that doesn't exist? You build it.

Something that you know of you check similiar companies.

If you are just browsing for ideas visit angelist.

If you want a great job you have to search. If you don't want to search you'll apply to places you know like big tech.

Another piece of advice is to get involved outside of work and you will be first to hear about the interesting positions.

That doesn't explain why OP was able to learn and do bullshit before.

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. ---

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.

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.

Thanks for sharing. I've been in the "wane" stage recently and your story gave me some things to consider.

Just remember the golden rule about advice (this advice included) is that it's all relative to one's own personal circumstance. What may work for me may not for you and that doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong or there's anything wrong with you or your approach.

If we could solve problems like motivation, drive, and perspective with a wiki or a readme.md file, we'd all have it bookmarked. Life's a learning experience, and unfortunately we all need different curriculum.

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.

Those are good observations. I'm going to apply these in my work. I like the above/below concept a lot.

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

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!

This might not be relevant to you, but a lot of runners/cyclists exercise at 'tempo' - an intensity higher than necessary which mostly generates more fatigue without much benefit.

So, if you need to drop the pace/intensity of your running to recover better, it's probably still worthwhile. More info here: https://www.trainingpeaks.com/blog/zone-2-training-for-endur...

Thanks for the input, intersting article! This might actually be a worthwhile first step in recovery as i run at quite a fast pace naturally and after covid i often hit a hr of 180bpm as a 30 something year old - maybe i should only walk jog for now.

As far as I am aware, the only way you can exercise with several issues (CFS, POTS) is to exercise at a level below what triggers relapses, and to very gradually increase the amount one does over a period of years.

Isolation can also cause some of these symptoms.

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 !

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!

I don't remember forgetting things as soon as I learned them, when I was a kid. I grew knowledge quite rapidly. Now I can re read the same thing every week and re "learn" it.

Make sure you're getting enough sleep, and carving out enough focus time. What I've realized is that while my current situation on either of those is not much different than when I was younger, my ability to learn and get by with minimal sleep and amidst distraction has gotten worse.

I can imagine several hypotheses to answer that:

- at school, it's the job of the teacher to force us to repeat until we've learned something. See Anki and other SRS systems.

- as a kid you don't read to learn, you read because it's fun or because you want to try something. See what another commenter said, you learn by practicing, not by reading alone.

- you forget all that you've forget as a child :)

Also, kids like to imagine stories. In the literature about learning, one method used to improve the retention is too create vivid images about what you want to learn, in other words, imagine stories to memorize. Relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/208/

Kids also rehearse stuff a _lot_ => Anki/SRS

Having said that, I like to learn about learning but I don't consider myself a particularly good learner :)

> 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!

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 !

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.

I think neuroplasticity is bullshit and is a convenient scapegoat for a shared experience many people have.

No different than phrenology explanations for differences in cognitive behaviors, an explanation that is now deprecated.

The most clear example is the incentives. Change the incentives and people learn quickly. Find anybody that rationalizes their technophobia with their age, and look at the difference between them and someone of the same age that had no problem adjusting to new technology or that specific technology.

70 year olds texting or using smartphones? I know many people that used to make excuses about not being able to do that. As soon as their friends started communicating that way they figured it out. The same incentive children have and do.

> Change the incentives and people learn quickly.

Not necessarily, I definitely got slower at learning new stuff at 40+ than when I was younger. My memory just doesn't work as good as it used to, and I also have less of "mental energy" to get into the zone and stay there digging until I figure things out. I don't know is it my age, or life style, or health and genetics, or just having a lot more other things going on now than before (wife, kids, running business, etc.). However I'm positive it's not a technophobia, first because I love tech and learning new stuff just as much as I used to, and also because I see this in other, non-technical, areas like with learning a foreign language. And if it's (a lack of) incentives then again it's an external limitation of my capacities to motivate myself which I can't solve and I feel it has to do with the age too.

> Instead of striving to find real ways to help our seniors avoid a tragic fate of illness and decay, you whip up several white lies. All the more tragic, given your apparent intelligence.

am I supposed to be defensive here, seems too easy when I really have no idea what you're talking about. You think I made white lies, ok. what I detailed is a valid experience that co-exists with other forms of physical decay.

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/

That looks suspect. n=23

2 groups of 12. (one person's data was lost).

No baseline pre-treatment data.

Each group did two trials: VPA then placebo, or vice versa. The VPA-first group did well on VPA, but the VPA-second group did not. Improvement was suggestive but slight.

>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 ?

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.

Not my experience at all (50+). Having 25+ years of experience in many different technology stacks makes it easy to cut through the BS and understand the core of what a new technology/stack/framework/library is. When you do that you realise that most “new” stuff is old stuff with a new lick of paint and excited evangelists promoting it.

> 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.

I agree with you--let me throw in my experience. In my first dev job, I was 26 (not super young, but also not old). We used Clojure, but I had only programmed C, Python, and Matlab up to that point. It took me a month or two to really grok it, mostly just learning ~40 hours/week.

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

I have come to realize this is why I love Go. Lots of the big libraries over complicate things at times but for my own simple toys I love writing down my types and planning my data containers and then just writing small functions to interact with them.

I have started writing (type annotated) python this way and it has made it a joy to work with again. I watch coworkers add so much state and complexity turning every small problem in to a bigger problem with object oriented patterns.

Setting aside why I disagree with this superiority claim, since this is posted under a "Clojure" comment, I just wanted to point out that Clojure is not a pure functional language and you can still use imperative programming. In fact, most Clojure programs are a mix of imperative and functional constructs.

There are two times I noticed I wasn't as good as before mentally. One when I was 17, I noticed that unlike when I was 12 I no longer could memeroize entire books. Which back then I could, I had memorized 12x20 Questions and their answers back to back. But now in HS I felt I'd forget 90% of what I read yesterday. Now to learn I had to write the thing down and act of writing helped me remember things. Second time I noticed is when I was 24 and still in college and when to study in a group. After 10 or so minutes, I had hit my limit with info from one page and just started to skim, but other students who were like 19, kept on writing things down in paper and weren't getting exhausted. I noticed lack of stamina... Now it takes me 3 months to read one book that I'm very interested in. Back then I'd finish a book in 3 days and write 8 page essay on it. So yea things change.

I am almost 30 and attempting to learn Clojure was to me like swimming through mud. It is definitely not just you.

I think this could be particularly difficult for people (just guessing here) who haven't used a functional approach in the past. The shift from procedural imperative thinking to functional thinking is not obvious, and Clojure strongly pushes you to use immutability right away, too. That can be a steep learning curve.

I can tell you that the payoff at the end is huge, though :-)

As a side note, I'd highly suggest that everyone reads "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks" (https://pragprog.com/titles/btlang/seven-languages-in-seven-...). There are many programming paradigms and opening your mind to them is a great investment in the future.

I feel like the longer you've been steeped in OOP the harder it is to get over the hump.

Clojure also has a lot of bells and whistles that aren't really FP but add to what you have to learn.

For anyone wanting to learn FP, I'd recommend trying a more pure FP language like Scheme first.

The problem is not Clojure (or Haskell or …) The problem is having to unlearn OO thinking and understanding a very different way to view the world. But that is a good thing! If you are not struggling learning then you are not really learning anything new. Just a different flavour of what you already know (another OO language with a slightly different syntax and slightly different API).

>swimming through mud

You describe it perfectly !

Thanks!

That being said, I just played around with it for a few days. Some people praise it, after having gone through a few years on and off:

> I wasn’t convinced right away. It took a few years. But after the usual stumbling around and frustration, I began to realize that this language was the easiest, most elegant, least imposing language I had ever used – and not by a small margin.

https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2019/08/22/WhyClojure....

I also explored the language landscape, and Clojure projects on GitHub seem to have a low density of commits matching "fix OR fixed OR bugfix":

https://danuker.go.ro/frequency-of-bugfix-commits.html

It's also on the brevity-popularity Pareto front of my bug-ridden analysis:

https://danuker.go.ro/programming-languages.html

So I plan to look at it some more.

Took this journey myself 8ish years ago to learn Clojure. I think by default most experienced devs in other languages will find it frustrating.

It seems to be a language where it is frustrating up to a certain point and then once you cross over that line, somehow it just all makes sense and seems so elegant you almost can't go back to other languages. So just know that if you keep going you will be in for more frustration, but the tip of the peak will be there eventually and then it all falls into place.

Yea that is what im focussing on "just keep going" no matter the struggle or the ugliness im currently producing :)

I'm in my early 30s, been coding since I was 16. I've worked in half a dozen languages and learned about a dozen "just for fun"...and damn, Clojure is hard.

It took me 3 very solid attempts over effectively three years for it to really click. It's honestly why I'll probably never bring it to work unless I absolutely need the thread-safety for something massive and complex that only experts will work on.

It's just not approachable.

But all that said, when it did click, it was worth it. Knowing that I have this powerful (almost magical and forbidden) knowledge is worth having really struggled with it.

In other words, I've been there. It's very tough. Stick with it (if you want) and I wish you the best.

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.

Playing with a new language is much less work/burnout than the BS we get paid to do

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".

> 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.

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.

>seeing how crap so many people in the world have it while I sit here and earn good money

Whenever I start to feel bad I kinda fantasize about going back to an 'easy' job. One where I was just working physically instead of mentally. Just clock in, work out, clock out, and go relax, my mind fresh to learn new things and do hobbies unrelated to work.

But then I look at the pay rates of those jobs compared to the current cost of bills and my family, and I remember the paycheck-to-paycheck struggles. When we were juggling which utility to pay each month, desperately trying to find a burner car because the last one had broken down, etc.

Work is hard sometimes, but life with an 'easy' job was hard too.

Maybe what happened is that once you become good at being a developer, you derived satisfaction from that even if you were working for someone else, or maybe you thought your "passion" was elsewhere.

This is the thesis of Cal Newport's book "So Good They Can’t Ignore You", summary here:

https://fourminutebooks.com/so-good-they-cant-ignore-you-sum...

I think you have a point here, summary book marked thanks for this.

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.

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.

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.

You're saying what I'm writing about is an example of a "cope"? I get if you feel that way but that's not how it is. It's just normal, like resilience.

It's funny, because what it seems like you're saying, where you'd rather medicate your thoughts and feelings than experience them, that's the only cope.

And I think that dynamic, where people want that cope that you say you desire, is intimately connected with the pathologization of everything.

What you said is interesting. And I haven't thought that much about your comment or the topics it raises in general up to this time, but here's my current take: Do you feel you're "coping" when you have normal life experiences of ups and downs and feel those feelings and thoughts and face them and process them? Do you experience people talking about normal life and feelings with ups and downs as "coping"? You see feeling intense feelings and thoughts as "coping"?

Hm, I wouldn't really use that word, because it has negative connotations that don't apply to my situation or approach.

I believe the best approach is to feel and process your intense thoughts and feelings. That's what I do.

Coping is more like not feeling them, and eating, drinking, or medicating those feelings, or taking them out on others. Coping suggests being overwhelmed, unable to deal with, and adopting external or orthogonal or ulterior methods to handle the stress at hand rather than confronting the stress directly. That doesn't apply to me.

It suggests doing something that I don't believe in at all which is tolerating undesirable situations rather than trying to create improvements that change them.

So your coping word doesn't apply to me... but I'm interested that for you, you feel this normal emotional Arc and normal life experience (and I think valuable experience to go through so you can learn how to handle your own thoughts and feelings yourself, and know yourself more), is "coping".

Also, you are misrepresenting or misunderstanding my views. I get if you could feel triggered by it, and then project your trigger into it and thereby misrepresent it, and therefore take it that way but what I'm saying is very simple: the labels are being overused. You don't have to deny the reality of a label to say that it's overused, of course.

So what I'm clearly saying is not every emotional experience or life experience is a pathology. Going through trauma or grief or sadness and feeling sad and feeling those emotions and thoughts is not depression. It's just a normal Arc.

In fact it seems like it's very clearly not depression because depression by definition (heh :) I may have an incorrect definition here) is where you experience intense and negative thoughts and emotions but they are divorced from any particular life experience that might give rise to them. So depression is where your life is reasonably okay but you feel not good anyway. Yeah, I might have made up that definition but in any case it's very clear what I'm saying is that not every emotional Arc is depression, and in fact most emotional and life experience arcs are not depression and not mental illness in any form. They're not pathologies, they're completely normal emotional and life experiences for people.

But you misrepresent me in that I'm not saying that depression or mental illness doesn't exist. Of course it does, plenty of it around that you can see. What I'm saying is, it's like everything is being pathologized and many things are labeled as pathologies when they're not. It's simple. You don't have to deny the reality of some label to say that that label is being too liberally and incorrectly applied.

If you care about mental illness, which you seem to, that should concern you because the general application of these kind of labels would seem to dilute the real meaning and also divert resources and sympathy from people who actually suffer from those things.

Maybe you suffer from depression or not I don't know. I'm not a psychologist and I'm not interested in labeling you here with some pathology. That would be Internet Psychiatric Diagnosis, anyway: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I get that you must feel frustrated if you have depression and if you have yet to find adequate treatments, but you believe they exist. Maybe what you're saying here is a way you're expressing that.

But if you think that someone displaying emotional processing strategies, resilience and facing their thoughts and emotions, if you think that's a negative thing, then I think that is part of the sort of sickness in society that I'm talking about. Because if everything's being pathologized and all the pathologies are being medicated then we don't want people to take any personal responsibility to learn any skills or strategies to manage their own emotions at all we want them to be completely chemically dependent. But I see that as an awful violation of individual autonomy and psychic freedom, and freedom of experience.

At the same time I think plenty more mood enhancing molecules should be available: like all the chemicals that are explored in tihkal and pihkal there's got to be so many good possibilities to come out of that. and instead of simply medicating illness I believe that as a society we should provide people with psychoactive drugs that enhance mood, enhance abilities (they should be tested and safe for example) but they shouldn't be scheduled. these kind of performance enhancing, spiritual enhancing hallucinogens or an entheogens, or empathogens. I firmly believe that the prohibition of these substances is holding Society back and it's a, you know, it's a sad and unnecessary form of draconian barbarism to withhold from the general public such things like that.

But I also see that as a separate issue to the mislabeling of normal emotional arcs and over pathologization of regular experience.

There is an intersection I guess where they come together which is more effective treatments for mental illness and certainly I think that's an active area of research that could have many improvements...not that I'm an expert.

In short I think chemicals should be used as treatments for sick people, enhancements for healthy people, but they should not be used as crutches or fake substitutes for people learning emotional processing skills and resilience themselves.

I think this is extra important, because mental illness does not always just arise out of chemical imbalances or other random changes, it can come about because people do not have the skills to handle their own thoughts and emotions and life experience.

So stunting people's growth by preventing them from doing the inner work to learn their own emotional processing and psychological processing skills and resilience is actually going to lead to more mental illness I think.

And you can kind of get this sense of a vicious, corporate greed fueled conspiratorial cycle: of a medicated Society, without any skills to develop their own internal psychological resilience, constantly being pathologized by an industry that's in bed with a pharma companies so that those pharma companies can sell the medications (or rather sell their governments medications with subsidies). I'm not saying that's the case but I definitely think it's a completely plausible dynamic that could exist to some extent and you know I think it's a real danger that it could be taken to a dystopian extreme and I see worrying signs of that with his crazy over pathologization of everything.

Coming back to what you said and how you misinterpreted or misrepresented what I said I just want to reassure you that none of this means that mood enhancing chemicals have no place. They do and I think they have a very clear place as treatments for sick people who don't have the resources to handle it without chemical intervention.

But the best chemical factory in the universe is your own body. So through meditation and exercise and yoga and all kinds of other things you can change your in chemistry. The emotions and thoughts create and how you process them also changes that chemistry. What I'm saying is you have a lot more power then you may realize to alter you experience. If you've tried something and it didn't work you probably feel that's not the case. But I'm to tell you, you haven't tried everything. But even so I think people should have freedom to ingest whatever legal and enhancing chemicals they want.

But I think if there's a chance that you personally are facing regular life experiences and emotional arcs then, rather than seeking chemical means to deal with that (which you probably call "copes") which will only invite dependence and erode your resilience, I think you should try or you can to develop those skills and I personally find that facing emotions, trying to process them, and taking like an "outside" perspective to look at situations and emotions and thoughts of yourself and other people involved is incredibly valuable and transformative.

I hope you get to where you're headed.

To the people who responded to what I wrote, thanks. I think both views are right in a way. I don't even think that the disagreement here is a real disagreement it's just different ways at looking at things. There's truth in both. Well there is to me because seeing what was written after I posted was actually helpfully. There's things I've haven't considered before in those responses.

Just another note, someone else I know lost parent long before I did, they said "yeah sorry it took about ten years before I was ok with it" I didn't believe him at the time. He was right!

Good that you came through it!

> You had a depressive episode, and you recovered.

You’re quick in jumping to conclusions.

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.

Have you considered living frugally and investing most of your income into stock index & crypto to become financially independent?

Just one thing, I became really interested in this too. It made me very unhappy that I didn't have it it. Sort of jealous of everyone who does have it. I see a contradiction now in what I wanted: living frugally to be free of pointless desires but in the end craving that so badly it was ruining my best years.

(Ps I still throw as much as I can afford in a pension because I'm terrified of being poor with no ability to earn when I'm older)

Anyway just my take, I'd still love to be financially free but I've accepted I won't be.

I-bonds are looking like a good option for the next year or so.

That would be nice. I have a family to support and make under $100k. Financial independence is decades away at best.

> You had a depressive episode

Armchair diagnoses of mental health problems is very very bad - perhaps you should see a psychologist yourself because you are most likely damaging others?

Even worse, you are ignoring the fact that we can all be situationally “depressed”.

You know, when your job feels like shit, and you can’t enjoy your family or friends or anything? But you change your work situation, and the very next day you are invigorated and energetic and you enjoy work again, and you enjoy your family and friends; and the change is lasting?

Or when your job feels like shit, but you have a wonderful time in the evenings or on the weekend.

You are unlikely to get either of the above if you are clinically depressed (although bipolar may be an exception to that).

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.

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!

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.

The others are focusing on some things that it could be including demotivation, burnout, disinterest in learning something that is just a different version of what you already know, etc. Those are all definite possibilities.

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 :)

I can echo this, and am of a similar age as the OP. Even things I feel excited about learning are chores now, simply because my expectations are grok it quickly and be productive. The act of being bad at it, not understanding something, having to look things up, not having the full shape of everything in my head and so sometimes having to cargo cult it until some later date when it'll make sense, etc, are alien and exhausting now. It's hard to pour myself into something I'm "bad" at, when there are other things I know I'm "good" at.

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!

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.

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?

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.

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.

I’ve had useful conversations with my doctor about similar topics. I’ve been perhaps lucky to have exceptional care, but in my case my doctor was able to identify (and help treat) clinical depression.

Misery may be common, but seeking help shouldn’t be discouraged.

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.

"Ecosystem-fatigue"

Nice. I'm going use this in my next 1-on-1.

It's likely burnout. I have experienced this for a solid year now. Just sit at my desk for 8 hours a day unable to get any real work done. Have probably 30 minutes of real productivity a day. Started after working insane hours for months and months on end. I refuse to work more than 40 now. Funny thing is I get great reviews because I just decided to hijack a team lead role that was missing and just run the team. No one knows how absolutely fried I am. My opinion is that humans are not meant to just sit in front of a desk producing useless widgets that do no real societal good besides making money for our employers. We have no sense of purpose. We just make dumb shiny things. I am still struggling with it. Starting a new job soon in an official management position, optimally I am happier there.

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.

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.

Thank you. Your comment (among many here) is incredibly kind and I will take it to heart.

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.

Thanks for posting this question. I've been through that sort of thing a few times myself over the past 40+ years of programming in a variety of social contexts. There's a lot of good advice here on a personal level both on dealing with burnout and on learning's stuff. If you want to step back and look at the bigger picture (the forest that the trees may hide), here is a reading list I put together which includes books on the bigger picture: https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-Organizations... "Most of these books, web pages, and videos are about how to design better organizations. Some are about how to be a more effective individual within the organizations we currently have. The items are divided into three broad categories -- Organization and Motivation, Health and Wellness, and Software Development Specific."

I hate engaging in surrogate activities which are only abstractly related to the things I need to survive. Even though I understand it's necessary due to the sophistication of manufacturing and the economies of scale of it all, it's mentally destructive.

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.

I agree about stop caring about my current work. I'm in my 50's and I was working for 30 years as CIO and programming in MUMPS, taking care about systems and networking.

Now, my employers put me in SAP support without any formation.

So hard and bored. I feel so difficult to learn this ..when in the past learning new things was easy for me if they were interesting.

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.

This is also something many forget. Learning takes time. I learn one simple concept in a day or so. A framework? That is going to take a couple of weeks at a minimum. Staying motivated during that time can be difficult if you have nothing to directly apply what you just learned on. The old 'teacher when will I ever use this' question. For many if it is not right away it feels silly to do it.

Disclaimer: This isn't going to help you, just a self-meta comment about most of the other comments here. I'm wondering if someone else feels like this.

---

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.

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.

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.

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.

>> 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.

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.

Interesting, how long have you been using Vue3? I'm only 3 weeks in and still waiting for that video or diagram or tutorial that really inform me on why all of this extreme overhead is needed to perform simple tasks.

Does anyone have any good resources that made them enjoy the Composition api, Pinia etc?

Maybe 3 months - the first two months I learned Vue 2 and then we were asked to do everything in Vue 3. I don’t mind the composition API but overall the framework feels over complicated at best, and goes out of its way to show you how much it’s not like another framework while using similar concepts. The result is that I now have to learn the same thing but with magic words. That could be the frustration talking though.

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

Easier said than done. The waiting list for therapy here in Hamburg is more than a year

It's almost certainly not because you're actually getting dumber...and it could be burnout...but, what you are probably facing is probably something more on the axis of philosophical-existential questioning, which tends to rear its head periodically with age. A line of work can be logically good to pursue but eventually your body and emotions will fight you on it if they aren't feeling nourished.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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?

> 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.

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)

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.

I have the same problem and my take on the learning problem is: caring about something is an important part of learning. I remember also that I had a lot if patience for things years ago, but somehow I don't really have that any more. Partly because I think / feel some things are more complicated than they should be. I don't care about all the tiny caveats anymore. But also because of what I think is the burnout part, which is the feeling that it's never going to stop, there will always be something else to start over from scratch.

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.

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.

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.

Don't forget that hormones change starting mid-30s. Fatigue and energy levels can be affected due to lower testosterone, or from just years of sitting in chairs. Also, don't forget we're coming out a pandemic that really put us into isolation... maybe not as noticeable for those of us that tend to work in isolation anyhow, but it can have an unrealized toll.

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.

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.

Same here, I have no advice, I am stuck.

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.

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.).

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.

The MBA route not a fad language in itself?

Maybe. With programming though, the amount of actually new stuff I woukd learn with a new language is relatively small. With an MBA at least I'm learning every day because I'm newer to the topics.

I find if my work doesnt fascinate me, it becomes hard to be good at it.

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.

I still ‘suffer’ from similar mid-career burnout that culminated 10 years ago. I’ve been successful since, but to I’ve had to move to roles where my work product was much more transactional, visible, and delivered in smaller chunks in order to remain productive.

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.

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.

> aging (you getting dumber)

The guy is in his mid-30s, ffs. He isn't even at the peak of his career - he has a lot more smartness to get.

I didn't become a really good programmer until my late 40s when I ran out of things to prove and decided to focus on simplicity and high polish while keeping rapid development.

> 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.

Is aging really a problem? On the individual level it is but as a whole the world population has exploded in the past century. Would we have enough resources for everybody if the life expectancy will increase to say 100 years?

One look at the population pyramids of the developed world [1] is enough to conclude that a systemic shift is underway, and the old social order, at least in its current form, is doomed to be upended.

The logic of dependency ratio is hard, you can't circumvent it unless you really do deliver widespread automation of labor, including social service labor. And even then you have obvious concerns of EROEI and "Labor Returned On Labor Invested" - your society-scale park of machinery will require substantial infrastructure and qualified staff just to run it. It's 2022 and despite many attempts, widespread social robotics still hasn't appeared, and robotics startups of our recent history died all the same.

> Would we have enough resources for everybody if the life expectancy will increase to say 100 years?

I think yes, given falling birthrates, continuing emphasis on sustainability and doing more with less. Consider also how much resources are spent on re-educating every new individual, and how much of an economic win is extending the active professional life of an average individual, given it amounts to mere 2-3 decades as of now.

I'd say on the contrary, for our societies to avoid collapse we need to either up or fertility rates, or extend the active part of our lifespan.

1. https://www.populationpyramid.net/western-europe/2019/

Western Europe population is only 2.5% of the total world population

Inverted population pyramids are forming almost everywhere, excluding Africa for now. If you read this 18 year old book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon%27s_New_Map you will see that it wasn't an unexpected development for the policymakers.

Everyone could live _modestly_, like middle class Cambodians but with better healthcare, yes.

The issue is a tiny number of wildly consumptive rich people.

Whilst it's easy, simple and populist to blame a tiny [x] group of people for all that is wrong with society, it does not have a good historical precedence: try asking any Germans you know!

More difficult is to acknowledge the huge middle-class that has been created as a result of globalisation over the last decades.

blaming rich people for the problems they create makes one a nazi. got it.

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".

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.

I'm similar in that I've jumped between embedded, web dev, etc etc.. through my career, and it was always easy to learn new things.

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.

You can still learn. I've experienced what you describe many times. Two suggestions for you.

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

As others have mentioned, it's some variation of burnout most likely.

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.