I know I posted before...but I feel like my situation is the same or worse. I'm trying, I really am.
I keep trying and failing. I am sincerely worried that my career as a software engineer is over, if it even began. This is the end. All I wanted to do is get really good at this and build things but no one wants to hire me. I try to get good on my own but I know that I don't know what I don't know. I keep trying to do stuff on my own but all I do is fail. If I never quit and never win, what do I do?
I don't know what I'm doing wrong. How do 'normal' people do this? They graduate school, get a job doing this, and then get better after years of practice? Did I take the wrong jobs? What did I do to so colossally fuck things up so no one wants me?
I'm terrible. I'm shit. I'm in the wrong field. I feel like eating a bullet would make the world a better place. I'll never understand. I give up.
Thoughts like this are always a significant cause for concern. If you found a mole that was raised and had changed shape you would see a doctor. If you found a lump on a testicle you would see a doctor. This is similar.
Your treatment options should be a broad package:
1) change the situation
2) give you the tools and skills needed to change the situation
3) support you while you're getting those skils and making those changes
(2) here is not just about your software skills, or your interview skills. It should include some stuff about how to recieve criticism (take what's useful; ignore the rest).
I often push Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. That might be a good idea, but you have some complex interdependant stuff going on and CBT is more effective if you just concentrate on one thing.
There are other therapies that may help, but they're harder to find. DBT is well known and might be useful.
You make several reference to your perception of your programming skill. You describe bug hunting as low skill. Try to frame that as specialist skill, that helps you avoid mistakes in your own code. Do you program in your own time?
I've been there, I really have, I know it feels hopeless right now, but I promise it's not. If you're anything like me you might feel that getting anti-depressants is somehow wrong or cheating, or that you're admitting defeat , but you know what? They are just another tool that you can use to improve your life. Think if it like toilet paper, sure people lived for years without it, but we live in a modern world why not use the modern conveniences?
> all I do is fail.
That is called learning. Maybe you are trying to take on too big of a project or maybe you're just not giving yourself enough credit for what you are able to accomplish, it's hard to say without knowing you. Just don't compare your self to what you see on the internet. I know this is kind of a cliché at this point, but when you do that you're comparing someone else's highlight reel to your everyday, and it's just never going to compare.
I get the tripe of what you mean, but perhaps I fail at failing, then. I don't really learn anything. Everything I do is wrong, I'm told.
I wish antidepressents would work. If I could cut out parts of my brain and be better, I would.
I just don't get it. Everyone else has done something right or at least better. People say things and everyone else gets it. I've been working for seven years, unemployed for one year. I had a job for a month and they fired me because I didn't have the skills they needed (not sucking, being experienced, nothing tech specific).
I just don't get it.
So you have held onto a job for 7 years. You can do that again! Being unemployed sucks, but it has happened to most people at some time in their life. Getting fired is not fun, but that too has happened to lots of people. You're not alone.
Why do you think that? What is the evidence for it?
I think measures like that should be only considers IF you can't figure out WHY you are depressed. If you know why you are depressed, taking anti-depressants will only cure/suppress the symptoms, and without coming to terms with the actual fact that is making you depressed, you will be dependent on drugs for a long time.
OP, if you do not already take it start a course of vitamin D, you will be surprised at how fast it clears your head and gives you motivation to move ahead again. Personally I believe you need to seek help, if you have tried SSRI's and they have not worked (I personally think they are ineffective and cause more harm than good) you may want to see if your doctor will try a course of Gabapentin it has had very good results in stemming both situational and long term depression. If you do go on meds look at as being akin to antibiotics a medicine to get you thru a sickness develop a plan with you doctor to phase out of medicine but use it to break the cycle once depression has a hold on you as you know it can be very hard to break. Getting momentum is the most crucial part and medicine can help you gain that momentum.
My contact info is in my profile if you want to talk one on one. I have been where you are, it has been a long time ago but I still know how it felt. You are not alone and there are people that will help.
Please do me a favor tomorrow first thing in the morning please go and get a bottle of vitamin D at least 2000 IU preferably 4000 and take it in the morning. Do not take it at night because it can interfere with melatonin production. Give it about 3 days and see if you start to feel better.
I don't think I am particularly talented, but I spent so much effort on this (learning how to write software) that I can say today that I am a mediocre software engineer. Again, just think about it. I spent 10 years on this. In the meantime I did everything that I could, being Linux admin, systems engineer, data engineer, just to keep myself running. Almost forgot, I never received any formal education in computer science.
My co-workers run circles around me when it comes to programming, yet my persistence helps me to outperform them.
I guess what I am trying to say is: - don't give up - expect success over time (1-2 years as a bare minimum) - try to start with a simple thing, as simple as it gets (QA, DevOps, anything where you don't need to flip binary trees on a whiteboard :) )
This was my story, I hope it helps.
I think it's great that you didn't have any formal education, and you have gone farther than me, someone with formal education and 'seven years' of experience.
> guess what I am trying to say is: - dont give up - expect success over time (1-2 years as a bare minimum) -
I've been unemployed for a year. I think my career is over. Other, better people can do more.
This is a sign of depression. Talk to a doctor. It's possible that clinical depression is holding you back. It destroys your motivation and makes it hard to find joy in anything. And it's hard to get better in something that you don't enjoy and aren't really interested in.
> I've been unemployed for a year. I think my career is over. Other, better people can do more.
That sounds like the depression talking. Don't listen to it. Fix the depression (easier said than done, but it can be done), and the rest will get a lot easier.
I've been unemployed for over a year once, and completely wasted that year (I should have done private programming projects, but instead I wasted it gaming and sleeping late), but now my career is doing great.
A close friend had dropped out of programming completely due to RSI, and after many years of not touching a computer, tried to start his own company (selling computer generated puzzles), which failed, but it did get him enough hands on experience to get a regular programming job. His career has lost some time, but is otherwise doing fine.
Another friend went suffered from depression and addiction, went through years of therapy, got his life back on track, and now has an excellent job in programming.
It is possible to get back in the saddle. It's not always easy, and it can mean you have to take care of other problems first, but it can be done. Take hope in that. Get help, get to the root of the problem, fix that, and your career will get easier in time.
The interviewers just pick someone. They then post-rationalise and say things like "cultural fit". And then, when any other candidate asks the interviewers will post rationalise a reason those candidates didn't get the job. You get conflicting answers because they're all just making it up.
You frame not being sucessful as failure. Sure, it is. It might be useful to reframe things. Getting a job is an iterative process. You apply for jobs. If you don't get replies you tweak your resumé and cover letter until you get responses and requests to interview. You're getting interviews so that already some sucess! Now you just need to tweak your interview technique to get a job.
There are people who can help. There are probably recruiters that can help - although finding a non-scumbag recruiter may be difficult. Perhaps there is someone on HN who can help?
It is hard to give advice on the OP's professional situation (do you underestimate your ability? do you need a better way to learn? should you be looking at different talents and try a different career? no idea), but the way OP responds to his situation is very concerning.
If you do suffer from depression or some other psychological condition, it's entirely possible that that's the very thing that's holding you back. Talk to some experts, and deal with that. It might solve a lot of your problems.
Seconded about seeing a doctor- seeing a therapist as needed is one of the best things I've done.
b) Maybe the platforms/technology/projects you've chosen aren't clicking with what you want really to do, just because its popular doesn’t mean it works for everyone.
c) Sounds like you might trying too hard, relax your self standards a little and concentrate of getting something running to your satisfaction, don’t worry about tight/pretty code. Once you like how it works, go back and re-factor if you feel the need.
c-2)Take one of your earlier projects and revisit them, might have some new insights on how to prop up some earlier work. Sometimes looking over my old code is a mixture, of "I can do that so much better now" and "wow, I wrote that?!"
d) you might be REALLY good at debugging from what you say.
e) you know, you can build stuff on your own. Reinventing the wheel is also something to do, maybe you can make a spiffier one.
f) maybe the jobs you are applying for are too high for starting out. Or maybe you should take a non-developer position and work your way up through the company (this is how a lot of folk do it, including me).
g) network, it's not always what you do but also who you know, even in non-teach, someone might know somebody...
Did you see these suggested learning projects on Hacker News?
The road to being a successful software engineer is paved with failure. I failed to get accepted to an Ivy League (or equivalent) for undergrad. I had a failed relationship affect my graduate studies and partly ended up dropping out of a prestigious PhD program in math as a result. It took me 2.5 years to find a first full time job afterwards. And yet, I became a senior frontend engineer in under 2 years despite my failures - the important part is that I maximized the lessons learned from all of my failures.
Failure is natural - what you do when faced with failure is what defines us.
bug fixing. that's all i've ever done. anytime i try to move into a dev role they shut me out. Writing new code was not an option; tinkering with new code was not really allowed. I thought about what I could do to make things better but they're already fairly optimzed. doesn't matter, I'd just make it worse.
You'd think they'd hire for c/c++ but not me.
For example, I know that I am only an average programmer when it comes to detailed systems level work. I would fail at a Google style interview because I do not know the Big O values for common algorithms. I cannot tell you how a Red-Black tree works without having to look it up. But I discovered that I was very fast at writing software of average difficulty that has few bugs. So I work at a small company and crank out lots of software that saves the company money by automating manual processes. By aligning my best skills with a company that needs them it becomes a win/win.
Maybe in your case you are very detailed orientated and so software testing would be a good fit. Maybe you are great at translating users needs into requirements and so should be a business analyst. Maybe you have a wide range of skills but lack depth in one area, so work as a jack-of-all trades in a small company. Stop thinking only about your ability to write some code and look at the wider context and where you best fit in.
Are you getting feedback from the job interviews that you can share here, so we can give more targeted advice?
> I'm in the wrong field
Are you sure yet? Do you enjoy programming and tinkering with computers in general? If so it probably is not completely the wrong field. Although the roles you are applying for may be wrong for you.
http://www.appacademy.io/#p-home
JavaScript/Ruby are very employable skills and there's no shortage of places that need them. If you have the time, I'd give it a try since there's nothing to lose (you don't pay them if you don't get a job).
I invite you to step out of yourself for just a moment. Position your perspective within someone else of your choosing; a co-worker, a manager, an interviewer. Read both the post from today and the one from several months back. Ignore the particular details of the narrative itself. Instead, see what you can pick up on, sense, about the _author_ of the narrative. Then, observe how, what you sensed about the author, makes you, the observer, feel.
Go ahead. I'll wait.
As the observer, did you pick up on desperation, despair, defeatism, confusion, and anguish?
How well do you think you'd be able to hide those mental states in person or even just on the phone?
I think we already know the answer to that question.
Being around a person that's experiencing acute non-positive states induces acute non-positive states in others. Considering that most people spend the vast majority of their time preoccupied with both moving towards feeling good and moving away from feeling bad, they would do everything in their power to avoid being around such a person.
It's not even about the words that would be coming out of your mouth. It's easily detectable before so much as a single word is uttered. Your posture, facial expressions, respiratory rate, inflection, intonation, etc., will tell anyone, everything, in an instant.
This is why the places that you have interviewed with have not hired you. It has nothing at all to do with your technical competencies, because your technical competencies were not, in fact, evaluated. They shut down, disqualified you virtually immediately based solely on "lack of cultural fit", went through the motions, and then fed you a generic line.
When people spoke about the "experience they want," I don't think you quite understood the subtlety. They were not referring to your technical background. They were speaking to what they wanted in terms of the experience of having a new hire at the office: a positive, uplifting, energizing experience.
As an aside:
* Trying and failing is good, not bad. Why? Because you're learning. Not trying at all is bad.
* No-one wanting to hire you doesn't mean what you think it means. No-one wanted to hire Steve Jobs.
* Similarly, just because the few companies that you've interviewed with didn't extend an after does not mean that you colossally effed anything up.
* You can't say that "no-one" wants to hire you. You've interviewed at only a tiniest fraction of potential employers.
You may or may not feel better knowing that the roadblock is your disposition, as opposed to your technical competencies, but at least you now know the truth.
The question is _why_ is this your disposition? The answer is quite obvious.
In your short post from today alone, I have counted a staggering thirty two occurrences of first-person pronouns. Here's what your post looks like with all of the other words removed:
I...I...I...my...I'm...I...
I...I...my...I...me...I...
my...I...I...I...I...my...
I...I...I...I...I'm...I...
I...me...I'm...I'm...I'm...
I...I'll...I.
It's no wonder at all that you are the way you currently are; you are stuck -- trapped -- instead your own head. Replaying and re-analyzing the past, over and over, worrying about and agonizing over the future, over and over. When other people are speaking to you, you're not really listening -- they don't have your full undivided attention -- you're off in your head doing something else. When you're eating, you're not tasting your food, you're too distracted talking to yourself. You are perpetually lost in thought. This is why you're struggling with trying to get good on your own and struggling with trying to do stuff on your own.
Your self-identity is far too strongly, unnaturally, and unhealthily, intertwined with things that it should not at all be intertwined with. You are not your career; You are not your skill at programming. Your value as a person is not measured by your career progression; your value as a person is not measured by your programming skill.
This is the point where you have a decision to make.
You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and the bullet that you spoke of may very well, at some point, find you. Considering that you've already made suicidal statements, it may be sooner than later. Let's hope that you don't take the blue pill.
You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and you show yourself just how deep the rabbit hole goes. You enroll in an MBSR course in your area, or find a Mindfulness retreat, or listen to headspace.com, or find a good Mindfuless book. Mindfuless will allow you to dissolve those negative emotions, gain insight, not be stuck in your own head all of the time, attain full control of your internal state, and so much more.
Only then; and not before; will you have transformed your disposition such that you'll easily find a job that will progress your career, have successes doing your own stuff, and be able to do the best work of your life. None of these things will ever be possible if you're constantly experiencing negative emotions which are inducing pain, and distracted by negative thoughts that are constantly stealing your attention, as this will only serve to cause others to feel uncomfortable, unsafe, and/or ill at ease around you.
