I am a programmer by trade but i feel so lost at this point. I lve been in the industry for like 4 years and i feel like i barely know anything. In some respects i feel like my skills have actually regressed since college. I have cool project ideas but i never see them to fruition. Tried for years to make a game on my own but barely got anywhere with it owing a lot to my lack of art skills and inconsistency in actually working on it. Made a robot and got about 5 lines into leg IK and just... gave up. I was into AI for most of college and took tons of classes on it at the expense of a well rounded foundation in a diverse set of topics but i have significant barriers to getting a masters anytime soon and so no chance of getting an AI job. I dont think ive done a single interesting project w.r.t. modern AI despite wanting to, plus its hard to do computationally heavy things on a busted ass decade old laptop. Was in game dev professionally and while i was shielded from things like crunch it was deeply unsatisfying and i would spend a lot of time on my phone/slacking off. I only worked with clients twice - one went ok but the work sucked, the second time they put me on a contract by myself and i melted down, failed to deliver anything and pissed off the client. So they just kept me on internal stuff that will never see the light of day for the rest of the time i worked there. New hires would immediately get more responsibility than i ever had because they were just straight up more competent, talented employees and i suffered a great deal of imposter syndrome as a result despite trying to improve myself. Even with adderrall i just failed to get anything useful done or motivate myself except at the very very end when i did make a pretty neat feature that i was happy with even if it wasnt perfect.
Then I lost my job and for a while i really did try to like, do neetcode, refresh my dsa knowledge and such, work on projects. But 2 months passed and i received nothing but silence or the rare rejection on all of my job applications, nor have any of my former coworkers. More and more devs get laid off every week. I havent touched an IDE in over a month. I dont know what to do with myself really. Working in general just sucks for me (which is really privileged for me to say because ive barely worked hard a day in my life and have had everything handed to me) and its not what i like about coding. I hate agile, never have anything to say in code reviews, and feel no satisfaction from my work.
What do I do? I want to become something more than what i am, learn new things, learn how to hack stuff together and make cool gadgets and programs, hone my skills to the limits of what i can do. Become one with the net and the machine. But not for capitalism, not for money, not to work a dull corpo job until my brain rots and my soul withers and i get replaced by an intern with an AI. But when i try its like my brain is in a fog and my motivation dwindles and i abandon everything to go back to cheap stimulation.
Where does the newborn go from here? The net is vast and infinite
It's pretty late, so I'm going to write this steam-of-conscious without too much editing.
Right now is very shit for developers. Ride it out until they start asking wHeRe DiD aLl tHe pRoGrAmMeRs gO?!?! again. This is my third rodeo, and older devs would probably make fun of me for being a mere baby. Our entire accursed industry shits the bed once a decade or so.
We all do too. Phone it in enough to not get fired explicitly.
LGTM 👍
If there aren't any bugs or there isn't an obvious problem then rubber stamp it.
However, reading code and understanding how it works, especially if it comes from a more senior developer, is a chance to learn why they might have made some decisions. A career in programming is mostly reading, might as well get good at it.
Even if you never get caught, you feel guilty about it later. It's a very common ADHD habit/pattern, and is probably a source of many of your other anxieties. Instead re-frame your actual work as earning slack time. This is the essence of the Pomodoro Technique, and it helps with ADHD time management.
What I would try, going with my suggestion above, is get more active in reviews from senior members to learn why they made the decisions they did. Frame it as wanting to get better at understanding the system architecture and making more informed programming decisions. At home among your hobbies, give yourself permission to work towards some side project and "reward" yourself with slacking off. It inverts the guilt spiral because you feel like you "earned" the slack time.
You want to know my secret? I don't feel satisfaction from work either. That's not the place to get it. The Games Industry is famously abusive to staff on par with Silicon Valley. ea_spouse was 20 years ago and nothing has significantly changed since. My advice? Be far more mercenary regarding companies. Dollars to donuts you will make more money in Silicon Valley than in game development. Or you could move to a boring company (think Office Space) and let them pay for your Masters. Keep a very popular language that pays well (like Java, Go, etc) where you can take contract work or full time boring work between better jobs. Your job is transactional. Get paid and clock out. Save your passions for your side projects or hobbies.
Oh there's lots of places where they want to deploy but can't because of that very problem you are describing. Think IoT devices, sensors, phones, and anybody who wants to have a sensible power bill and/or battery life. Yes AI can do cool things if you give it a billion-dollar supercomputer and time-travelling levels of electricity, but that's very difficult to scale and deploy. You already have experience with AI from college, so you can bring a unique perspective for developing and deploying on low powered hardware. Perhaps this is an open research topic, perhaps for a masters degree...
My final thoughts are to get chummy with your coworkers. They are your network and can help bridge between jobs. They are also in the shit with you and can relate to many of these problems too.
Lots of great advice in here. I haven't tried the pomodoro technique in a long time, definitely need to use that again. Never had the habit stick.
One thing I struggled with for a long while is corporate career progression culture. At my last job I was strung along for a few years, then my manager was surprised I wasn't "engaged" with the work. It really felt like if you weren't moving up then you were going to get pushed out the door or left behind. Otoh I think the only reason I'd want a promotion to a senior position is to do "what you're supposed to do", vs just clocking in and out which is what I'd much rather do.
Definitely agree about getting chummy with coworkers. Colleagues on other teams are also great people to socialize with if able, and can often share helpful perspectives a direct teammate might avoid sharing.
I guess part of the problem is that i have so much anger and I just dont want to participate at all at this point, i dont want to sell my soul to corpo fucks, i dont want to deal with dull office drudgery, i dont want anymore 8am standups, i dont want to live my life knowing that everything i do is just to meaninglessly grease the wheels of a faceless inhuman system and enrich a group of people who are growing increasingly more deranged and plunging the world into tech dystopia. I hate it i hate it hate it. But what can I do? Maybe if i had the skills i could do something about it, but I dont so I cant. I feel pretty childish sometimes when i think about it haha. In the end I'll probably just have to fall in line take out all my chrome and consign myself to this life just to live in relative material comfort and safety