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
I am in a mildly similar situation and I don't have much to add to the other much-better replies but I just wanted to say I empathize
I am a basically completely self-taught computer-toucher which is seemingly (idk actually, I've never actually applied anywhere for computer stuff tbh) not very conducive to actually getting a job in the """"industry"""". I just work retail on and off which is killing me but I feel kinda trapped, every time I go look on the job websites it just makes me rly sad cuz I don't even meet the minimum requirements then I just leave and have to lay down for a while and doom
One of my great friends, who is also on this site btw lol, is kinda stuck in one of these awful corpo software developer office jobs. They tell me the most wild stories about all the shit they have to do and their techbro-brained coworkers. I'm sure it's made worse seeming to me by the fact that corpo software stuff is completely alien to me but it sounds truly soul-sucking tbh
My dream is to somehow get into a hacker collective (those don't really exist anymore, do they, or did they ever even exist?
) or somehow get paid to work on something I like and that actually matters like the Linux kernel or OpenBSD or some operating system or something (I've loved operating systems my whole life lol) instead of some corpo software product sludge. Sometimes I think I wanna do research or something like in academia but idk what that actually entails and I probably have no way to get into that anyway
Would also suggest finding "your things", maybe like you said one of your things could be AI and you just need to find a way to exercise your thing-doing abilities. I have a few things: I am also a Plan 9 nerd like @zongor@hexbear.net, to the point of it being basically a special interest lol, I rec highly, it is like an alternate world operating system where Unix was allowed to pass away and only the best parts of Unix were carried over and improved upon :3, I have a few essays throughout my post history about why Plan 9 = communism (kinda) lol. I may be something like a dumb retail wage slave failure with no money but is stuff like Plan 9 and my projects that makes me continue living even in absence of most other usual reasons (my life is kinda shit rn tbh)
Also for last few years on and off I've been working on something on and off that is basically an AI project. I rly like Prolog and logic based programming, knowledge bases and stuff, but their practical uses are minimal sadly outside of the field of like.... computer-based theorem proving. Have been trying to develop a programming language that isn't practically useless for tasks you would normally use an imperative programming language like C for, something that is capable of describing change and interactions between parts of systems just as well or better but that isn't so error-prone and manual. I'm still trying to figure it out, I've thrown away all my like 5 half-attempts so far but I guess I've still learned a lot. Lately have been reading about/playing with math (if you wanna get into abstract math but don't know where to start I highly rec the Metamath system) and formal systems lately, especially formal systems of paraconsistent logic which has been helping me figure out what my system would even look like (I'm dialectics-pilled, even if no one has managed to figure out what a formalized ""dialectical"" logical system would look like rly). I'm totally an outsider to AI research ofc, but the vibe I get is after the early successes and then progress-stalled-status of similar but classical first-order-logic-based systems in the 60s/70s most everyone moved on from this kind of computer reasoning system and now neural networks are ascendant ofc, idk I like this stuff but it might just be primitive to you lol. I'm also lacking in computing power and money for cloud shit but you don't need a ton of computing power for this kind of thing unlike massive statistical AI models, with Prolog you only need enough computing power to do logical unification over Horn clauses which is a tiny amount these days :3 (at least if you aren't doing anything toooo intensive). I still know almost nothing ofc but I'm trying
, is at least slightly easier now since I got ADHD medicated
The vibe I get and like you said is that you do actually care and are passionate about this stuff and wanna get better at it but the doing-some-pointless-and-stressful-version-of-it-to-make-money-for-some-capitalist way of doing it is getting to you :( which I relate to a lot. Idk, is like a continuous crisis for me I can't rly resolve, whle it's also just a creative outlet for me, I wanna maybe help bring about a better world by working with computers (like the "economic calculation problem" is, theoretically, solved but no one has actually built that system yet but it is a necessary part of modern socialism imo, not that I'm even close to doing that ofc lol)...... idk
I also have huge impostor syndrome but also like... I'm not even pretending to be anything, I'm nothing lol. Doing projects (small ones even) or open-source stuff, or even just interacting with interesting systems has helped me feel a bit less fake though. Also hearing stories from my friend of their corpo software job and how much everyone is faking it lol
Sameee a lot of the time tbh. I rarely finish projects either. I feel like it's so much harder outside of a community of people hacking on stuff together. I've never been in one but still lol. Sometimes it seems like I'm in a struggle with myself to push myself harder and idk why, it's probably not even healthy, I just feel so alone tbh ;w; I'm also unemployed rn but I have to go back into the retail grind soon probably, only reason I'm not homeless after I lost my apartment and job recently is family :( Am so sorry you lost yours, it's horrible and scary
I don't know how to escape this horrible meaningless cycle
and ofc I don't, that's the point I guess
Sry, this maybe kinda became about me :(, considered deleting but idk
Prolog is so hardcore
lol. I took a class on where we had to make a concurrent messaging queue in Prolog and it was the hardest thing I ever had to do for a class. Mine barely worked and it was because I found a bunch of shortcuts to hack something together. Idk if you have worked with Lisp at all but there is an interesting phenomenon where a lot of Lisp people bake prolog into it for some reason. Like PicoLisp has Pilog and Scheme 9 from Empty Space has their tiny prolog implementation.
Omg MANY such cases lol, besides the huge mindset change Prolog can just be quite miserable to use sadly
Besides even just "cuts" like every relevant implementation has some imperative language, among other things, hacked into it which sucks cuz it undermines the whole point of using Prolog :/ which is probably why few care about Prolog anymore lol. The formal systems nerds don't like cuz you can't formalize that and the programmers who just want to program
don't like it cuz they usually just think in terms of instructions (which is fair lol, difficult and verbose to express many, many things, even practically impossible sometimes, in purely logic) that manipulate a global state or at best in functions lol and the AI people moved on long ago
I never got into Lisp as of yet tbh, but big respect. I've never heard of this Prolog inside Lisp phenomena before, this is cool lol
Omg, this is adorable hehehe, I love it lol
I may have to try Lisp out, see why people like it so much
Maybe Lisp + Prolog just works rly well hehe
Ty for sharing
You should def try lisp! Its fun. I on the other hand want to get into prolog, it seems very interesting but i dont totally comprehend how you can make programs with it haha
Thank you so much for sharing! I wish the best for both of us in our journeys. I actually always have liked "classical AI", although more production systems and planning
Yeah classical AI is dope, feels more "real" to me than giant collections of (as far I know)impossible-to-formalize floating point numbers that are (people argue about this I think) just rly good at pretending to do reasoning lol
I actually never heard of production systems, these look really interesting actually, I thought you meant like a generative grammar or something at first lol
I'm doing cheap-ass classes, one of the few real great profs we had said this to me: "if you see job requirements divide them by 3 at the very least. People at hiring positions are insane and don't know what they're looking for". That quote by him was very endearing to me personally.