Ask HN: Going Through a Crisis/Burnout - Advice
Hi all.

I am going through quite a tough time of it lately, and would really appreciate some help + advice from hn, if that doesn't sound ridiculously vain and entitled. I am posting via a throw-away here, but am a moderate, if low-key, contributor to hn.

Some disclaimers: Forgive the life story aspect of this post. Just need to get it all out. Also apologies for the unrelenting sense of entitlement throughout. I am expressing how I feel, really feel, and that inevitably makes it sound as if I am not grateful for my first-world privilege. I am.

Background - feel free to skip...

Firstly, some background. I grew up in a family pretty much totally committed to a bordering-on-cult, but not really (a milder form - perhaps you could call it a sect?), whose tenets included the idea that we each have a 'natural talent' ordained by God and to go against it meant never really being able to find happiness/success.

'Thankfully' there is a person in this organisation whose 'responsibility' it is to (conveniently based on a letter you send them outlining interests/areas of academic success) dictate what your talent actually is. I was told to pursue a particular discipline in engineering, one in which I had no interest whatsoever. Thus began a very unhappy 5 years in which not only was I really unable to motivate myself to pursue the degree, but my family also fell apart due to my brother's repeated attempts to kill himself (thankfully all unsuccessful). I even failed exams one year, and suffered a lot of humiliation (professors telling me what a terrible student I was, etc.) and a complete undermining of confidence in my own intellect. I still managed to get a 2:1 from a good uni, but the experience has had a very serious effect on my ability to study anything, or even to hold my concentration long enough to get to any depth of understanding of a given subject.

So to programming - I have loved + programmed computers since I was 9 years old. I even contributed code to a relative's software firm when I was 15, though I did really little overall as a teen, certainly compared to many hn-ers. After uni, I decided I wanted to follow what I wanted to do, and worked an internal line-of-business job at one firm as a one-man team, then moved to another (my current job) where I've been for 4 years.

/Background

The situation now is that I feel quite desperate and despairing - I began feeling so passionate about programming but that has slowly been replaced with feeling utterly worn out + frankly terribly bored by it. I have had several overly-ambitious non-starter side-projects which I've screwed up, and busted so many interviews in such terribly crap ways that I've kind of lost count there too. I've spent 4 years at a place I am terribly unhappy at, and yet I can't pass a goddamn interview. I can't stand LoB/internal software anymore, and wonder whether it gets better anywhere else.

A large part of my anxiety at the moment is that I feel as if software engineering is all so much cargo cult bullshit. After reading articles on readability and quality of empirical evidence for readability tips, and certainly after reading a number of people's perhaps more cynical views in the community I have come to feel as if I simply cannot judge what is good or bad code, or at least that what I feel is good/bad is just bias. It's freezing me up and I find it utterly impossible to deal with the uncertainty of it all, something which attracted me to programming in the first place.

Another issue is feeling that the work can only be boring - it is impossible to motivate to work hard in spare time when you feel like you can't be passionate about something, and the idea that the 'reality' is that the thing is definitely boring, no matter where you work, is a horrific thought.

Another concern is that it's 'too late', 'too much competition', etc. and goddamn that grates at age 30. I am even considering a career change.

I suffer from depression, clinically diagnosed, so it's hard to know where that ends and 'real' concerns begin, but all-in-all I feel really down at the moment, and would appreciate people's help and advice.