Idk what my most humbling moment would be, but there's been a few.
I've spent the majority of my career looking for wook rather than doing work, and have lost at least 7 jobs in the first 12 years for one reason or another. This is going on the 3rd time I've spent more than a year without working at all in any job. It never gets easier, and each time I get to spend a ton of time reflecting on how things went and what I'm actually good at. It's usually humbling, because so far the list of things I'm good at professionally has only dwindled. Another humbling aspect to this is realizing that most other people don't lose their jobs... like ever, unless it's seasonal or severe economic downturn.
During one of those periods I spent so long unemployed that I literally ran out of money and moved into a car from my relatively nice apartment, and then worked at Starbucks as a barista, which taught me that I can be good enough at speaking with customers, but what I thought were trivial tasks turned out to be almost laughably untenable, like remembering how much syrup goes in Karen's caramel macchiato, or just showing up on time.
I think you need to try working in tiny startups, if any of your skills would make that work. There, gaps in resumes and random ends to employment are expected. Nobody asks about mine, and I end up taking a full year off every 4-5 years whether I want to or not (but I usually do want to).
No, my normie friends don't get it at all, and everyone ALWAYS asks me "how the job search is going" even when I've told them every week for 6 months that I'm not trying to get a job, but trying to hold myself to their norms was a lost cause for me anyway.
Ya that would be my ideal next place, unfortunately it's also an economic downtown in Canada, so I'm sort of doing the latter part of your comment and throwing DMs and my resume out whenever something comes up. Honestly I'm thankful that I've had the time off, and because I expect any given job won't last long, I save my money quite aggressively.
Yeah, exactly. I was blessed with inexpensive tastes, so I find it easy to live well below my means.
Plus, one lucky break with some early equity goes a long way.
It's not the right game for everyone, but it's totally viable once you get the hang of its rules. And many of us find they're a better fit than the normal rules ever were.
I really wouldn't go so far as to say it's "viable" for me, as much as it's had it's benefits and sometimes severe drawbacks. For example, I will literally run out of money again if something doesn't come around soonish, and that's not a good place to be. I have no upward or horizontal mobility, no true dependents, no investments. I can however occasionally go on a trip if I'm not in such a risky position, say within a few months out of a job, and I've had more free time than most, but I really just have living expenses. It's good to take whatever positives there are though, because I absolutely do not think if I'd made other decisions things would be different, or that my personality would magically shift into being a perfect corporate drone, nor would I want that.
I usually don't comment on HN but needed to ask you: How did you recover?
It's been 8 years since I graduated. I started working at a Bank in a Management Rotational Program with great manager but dropped it within 4 months because young me dreaded being pigeon-holed at 9-5. I joined a promising startup but... the co-founder unexpectedly passed away.
Long story short, I have had 6 jobs (incl. internships) within last 8 years: I have lost jobs for one reason or the other (startup folded, directions changed etc).
In good times, I am able to appreciate diversity my experience but I feel undervalued; I am more of a "jack of all trades, master of none" and feel I've taken 2 steps forward, one step back in my career. This has also damaged my professional as well as personal interests.
Well, I've asked myself and HN similar questions, and don't really have an answer yet, so I'll offer a few disconnect thoughts that I hope provide something valuable, because this is a legitimately stressful and uncommon position to be in.
Preface: If you have considered counseling or asking your doctor about ADHD, then here's what you might expect. In my case, I eventually went down this path because I had returned to University Applied Computer Science because I was in this same low period and needed a change; I wanted to challenge my imposter syndrome and see if I could push myself through the curriculum.
After succeeding at nearly all of my data structures and algorithms assignments, persuasive essays, and anything remotely engaging, I suffered a few set backs, failing one of the 2 easiest courses I'd taken, bombing my DS+A exams, and basically getting nowhere. The Data Structures exam was all writing Java Abstract Data Types and LinkedLists etc.. by hand on paper over 3 hours, and I got bored of doing that halfway through, no increased blood pressure, no sweat, it just didn't provoke an urgency in me.
I'd also slept through the midterm, and failed one of the Geo labs that required me to draw many graphs each week by hand on paper. I failed in situations that other people would consider high-pressure (passing an exam) but nailed every practically interesting or applicable assignment, and this was in my late twenties. So I went to see the nurse practitioner, we talked, she gave me a series of family questionnaires regarding mental health to see what there was a history of, and offered a prescription for Concerta 27mg (extended release Ritalin). Since then, it's helped in a subtle way to reconnect me with a tenacity for getting things done that I think had been burnt out of me, but also helped me realize that I really did probably need this my whole life. It was scary, but the effect has been marginally helpful.
-- end preface --
I've been considering getting out of dev entirely, but I don't have a good feeling for which direction to go yet, if at all. Maybe a small investment in trade school, or maybe focusing on freelance, I have no idea whether I'd succeed at either and it's tough to in-debt myself more when money already isn't coming in. You mentioned getting out of the banking job early on, but that's something I've been considering as a boring and stable job for a while, even as a teller, that would allow me to pursue my hobbies more, but really I'm open to almost anything at this point. I'm still drawn to programming though, so I'm still focusing on that, and elaborate on below.
I'm trying to be critical of what I'm good at and what I'm not good at, and I feel like I lack efficiency and depth in the few areas that are hiring, and so I'm trying to work my way back up or rebuild my proficiency from first principles.
For example, I consider myself a frontend developer, but my last few roles have all been jumping into an existing complex projects and making incremental improvement or refactors, with no significant responsibility. Among some weak points are my knowledge of low-level software engineering, building SaaS products from scratch and scaling them, using AWS or Azure, and I've let my backend experience stagnate. To address these, I've been working through Nand2Tetris (highly recommended), and building up some basic projects from scratch using Django, Nuxt.js, Next.js, Postgres, and Tailwind, so I can at least speak more confidently about them and expand my job search for when the tides turn.
It's important to cultivate a good sense of self during these periods. If you can, get out into the mountains, or into nature, alone, and spend some time thinking on it. Independent from that, if you're not in good physical shape, just start showing up to the gym 3 times a week for about an hour each time. These are some of the non-tech ways I stay mentally engaged and are all things people find easiest to make excuses about when they're working that 9-5, because they just don't have the time. Well... you and I have the time, so we should use it, and once you get going, it creates a positive feedback cycle that's hard to break when you do land something. Socialize, spend direct 1-on-1 time with people and build trust.
Untreated ADHD can make this really really really hard. And the worst part is: nobody will understand because it is not hard for most people, so everyone assumes that being late is a character issue.
To understand how hard it is, imagine that you have periodic blackouts during which you completely forget not only that you need to be on time for work, but that work is a thing that exists in this universe. You cannot control when one of these blackouts will hit, you just get to deal with the fallout.
We should make it a social expectation that you can show up any time ±1 hour from the official start time of your office job. That way, "I'm ready half an hour early: I could catch the earlier train" becomes an actual thing, and you don't have to kill time for half an hour and risk missing two trains in a row.
Yup. And no matter how many techniques, coping mechanisms, organizational systems, medications and meditations there are - there will still be something that will slip through the cracks, that something will be important, and will make people scratch their heads and wonder how it was possible to drop the ball in such a spectacular fashion.
Luckily, the long list of coping mechanisms significantly reduces the incidence of these catastrophes. But "when will my brain malfunction again" is a constant source of anxiety.
> there will still be something that will slip through the cracks, that something will be important, and will make people scratch their heads and wonder how it was possible to drop the ball in such a spectacular fashion.
What doesn't help is how many leaks there are in the systems we operate in, that are just overlooked because we've either accepted them as fundamentally important, or because most other people will manage to pull it off despite the systems' inadequacy.
For example, feedback loops and focus time. Companies will design their workspace to be as distracting and dehumanizing as possible, where someone can roll up a chair at any random moment and start asking questions, meetings are scheduled sporadically throughout a day or week and don't have any positive value contribution. We'll use 3 different asynchronous communication systems that everyone needs to attend to all the time, but no integrated notification system between them; I'll miss that Jira comment because I forgot to check Jira, and then that someone responded to my code review because I'm not checking GitHub every 20 mins, and yet I can't focus on my code for longer than an hour because my boss asked me "How's it going" on Slack.
I don't know, this line of thinking seems similar to "I am a midget - but look, I never have a problem with legroom on airplanes!" The tiny upside is simply incommesurate with the massive downsides.
Looks like riehwvfbk (below) hit the nail on the head. I don't know that I can add anything to their explanation, except that the blackouts are an analogy for what is basically object/obligation permanence issues.
For example, I might get in the shower with enough time to make it to my zoom call or an actual in-person job, and then start thinking about something or realize the hair has grown in on my shoulder, and literally forget that I had somewhere to be, or wildly misjudge how long I've been in there, and it can kick off a series of additional delays, like I might then miss the bus.
In one-off or irregular situations, this rarely happens, but given enough time, I'm bound to do something like this that doesn't fit into what my manager considers suitable conduct, and once they get this in their head, it's tough to recover from.
If it's not hard, why can't everyone seem to do it?
I have a friend who's a defense lawyer. He tells me that prison must be the happiest place on earth, given the lengths that people go to just to get a chance of getting in. It's funny and illustrative, just like the Woody Allen quote about showing up.
While I agree with that version of the phrase, and have applied it in other areas, I meant literally showing up at a specific time, consistently over a long period. Applying the Woody Allen quote though, I absolutely believe this is why I'm in good shape and have a decent real in-person social network.
I've spent the majority of my career looking for wook rather than doing work, and have lost at least 7 jobs in the first 12 years for one reason or another. This is going on the 3rd time I've spent more than a year without working at all in any job. It never gets easier, and each time I get to spend a ton of time reflecting on how things went and what I'm actually good at. It's usually humbling, because so far the list of things I'm good at professionally has only dwindled. Another humbling aspect to this is realizing that most other people don't lose their jobs... like ever, unless it's seasonal or severe economic downturn.
During one of those periods I spent so long unemployed that I literally ran out of money and moved into a car from my relatively nice apartment, and then worked at Starbucks as a barista, which taught me that I can be good enough at speaking with customers, but what I thought were trivial tasks turned out to be almost laughably untenable, like remembering how much syrup goes in Karen's caramel macchiato, or just showing up on time.