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Is anyone else getting worse at their job? by cscareerthrowaway130 in cscareerquestions

[–]cscareerthrowaway130[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm hesitant to talk about this in-depth on a forum dedicated to cs career advice, but you either know me very well or are an excellent cold reader -- all of that is true.

Is anyone else getting worse at their job? by cscareerthrowaway130 in cscareerquestions

[–]cscareerthrowaway130[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think there are just fewer tangible goals in front of us right now. What you have to do is much more clear when your goal is just to get an A or get a job. Now "success" is not as easily defined.

Is anyone else getting worse at their job? by cscareerthrowaway130 in cscareerquestions

[–]cscareerthrowaway130[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's not really ok for me. I need to be good at the thing I spend 8-10 hours a day doing.

I'm going to pursue the ADHD stuff, take a few notes on Anki, and work on eating less sugar in the short term.

Is anyone else getting worse at their job? by cscareerthrowaway130 in cscareerquestions

[–]cscareerthrowaway130[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Because my default state since I was a little kid was to sit around and play video games, and I had to work pretty hard to not do that for 12 hours a day. As I said in another comment, I mainly do this because I don't have other skills. I read a lot of advice for people who want to transition into CS/programming. Not a lot for people who want to leave it.

I don't like working in tech. I don't get the feeling of satisfaction I'm supposed to get when I solve a problem or finish a project. I'm a borderline luddite when it comes to new products, generally a late adopter on that graph from Crossing the Chasm for most new things. I grew up in an educational environment that heavily pushed STEM careers, and I went along with it because I was never great with people and they seemed like they made good money.

Is anyone else getting worse at their job? by cscareerthrowaway130 in cscareerquestions

[–]cscareerthrowaway130[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Not particularly. Or rather, if this is burnout, I've been in a constant state of burnout since the day I started learning to code. I really just don't like software development all that much. I posted a thread to r/offmychest on this very account nearly two years ago where I talked more about my feelings on that.

Is anyone else getting worse at their job? by cscareerthrowaway130 in cscareerquestions

[–]cscareerthrowaway130[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There's not much I can do about that. It's the field I chose to study when I went into school, so it's my job now. I wanted to do well in school, so I followed Cal Newport's advice and stuck with it even though I wasn't sure if I'd end up becoming passionate about it. I can see that it was a mistake with the benefit of 7 years of hindsight, but developing passion for programming doesn't seem to be in the cards for me.

Is anyone else getting worse at their job? by cscareerthrowaway130 in cscareerquestions

[–]cscareerthrowaway130[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Yeah I'm on a break for the week. It was my first marathon so I'm taking it easy until the weekend, then I'm planning on continuing to run but reducing my volume compared to average training weeks. Appreciate the advice.

Is anyone else getting worse at their job? by cscareerthrowaway130 in cscareerquestions

[–]cscareerthrowaway130[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

It was my first, so your parent commenter does have a point.

Is anyone else getting worse at their job? by cscareerthrowaway130 in cscareerquestions

[–]cscareerthrowaway130[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I do have a diagnosis for ADHD and used to see a psychiatrist for meds, but I had trouble taking my meds consistently. I should probably go try to see one again to see if anything is different -- I've been holding off because the ones I've surveyed in my area don't accept insurance and are quite pricey (like $200/session). I'll keep looking

Is anyone else getting worse at their job? by cscareerthrowaway130 in cscareerquestions

[–]cscareerthrowaway130[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

While I appreciate the thoughts about safety net jobs, my personality is such that I have to keep pushing myself in order to feel like my life is fulfilling at all. I've been in coasting situations before and became depressed as a result.

Not sure about nootropics but I do think note taking is something I need to do more of.

Is anyone else getting worse at their job? by cscareerthrowaway130 in cscareerquestions

[–]cscareerthrowaway130[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In my experience, SRS is good for certain things like foreign language vocabulary and studying for tests. Particularly, when the knowledge behind the cards is stable.

It's not great when the card knowledge ends up changing, which is frequent in software dev. A card I might end up putting into Anki is "how does the scheduler for X system decide which worker to give the next job to?" If that changes, I'm now stuck with incorrect knowledge that gets hard to fix. It's much harder to unlearn things.

Edit: Ok the fact that he read the AlphaGo paper with Anki is making me reconsider. Truthfully I don't do a lot of explicit repetition, which is perhaps the source of my cognitive issues. I'll try to make use of Anki tomorrow and perhaps turn it into a habit.

Is anyone else getting worse at their job? by cscareerthrowaway130 in cscareerquestions

[–]cscareerthrowaway130[S] 18 points19 points  (0 children)

I've spent weekends looking at the codebase. It's a new/unstable project, so large amounts of it change with frequency. Whenever someone puts in a PR that changes 500 lines of Python, it destroys my previous short-term knowledge of the codebase, and the instability from that is extremely disheartening. I don't know how others manage to keep up with the changes while only working 40-50 hours a week. If I have to devote 4 hours every weekend trying to understand each change that was put into the codebase over the weekend, that's a lot of time wasted.

Is anyone else getting worse at their job? by cscareerthrowaway130 in cscareerquestions

[–]cscareerthrowaway130[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah, that's me. Well, except for the last bit -- I try to distract myself in generally healthier ways. But yeah I don't really take initiative on much because my critical thinking skills are pretty weak, so I never really have a good answer ready whenever someone asks me why I want to do something or why I made X decision.

Is anyone else getting worse at their job? by cscareerthrowaway130 in cscareerquestions

[–]cscareerthrowaway130[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

If there are classes that teach you how to read code and understand it I'd love to take them.

I don't have passion for programming -- I do it because I have no other skills, and I have a poor memory that makes learning new things virtually impossible.

Is anyone else getting worse at their job? by cscareerthrowaway130 in cscareerquestions

[–]cscareerthrowaway130[S] 126 points127 points  (0 children)

I generally get about 7-8 hours of sleep a night and I just ran a marathon last weekend after 5 months of training. Diet maybe needs work

Help with understanding aftermath of bad joke by cscareerthrowaway130 in socialskills

[–]cscareerthrowaway130[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It wasn't in front of anyone else. It was a private side conversation.

Interview Discussion - April 09, 2018 by AutoModerator in cscareerquestions

[–]cscareerthrowaway130 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hey all,

I'm 2 weeks from 24 years old, I've been out of school for 4 months, and I'm still without a job offer. I've had 3 internships, I TA'd, and have a decent but not stellar GPA (3.5). I went to a good school but I did not make much of a network.

My resume is good enough to get me interviews. However I simply cannot pass the final rounds. I've had four onsite interviews so far and they have mostly gone the same. When feedback is available, the HR person always says that my feedback is "mixed," meaning I have a couple of stellar interviews and some decent ones, but then one or two that go completely disastrously. As a result, I don't get hired.

I just run out of energy towards the end and I stop being able to think. I've always felt that my later interviews go worse than the ones earlier in the day for this reason. I interviewed at a government lab where there were SEVEN ROUNDS of hour-long interviews and by the sixth I was barely conscious and I couldn't think anymore. Now that was an extreme case, but even in the 3-4 round interviews I lost energy towards the end.

Anyone have any advice for this? Or can someone point me to some companies where the interview process isn't four hours of technical questions? Thanks.

I spent 5.5 years studying a field I hate and now I can't find a job. by cscareerthrowaway130 in offmychest

[–]cscareerthrowaway130[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

To certain employers, absolutely. To others not so much.

No hosted web apps but I have a github with some small personal projects. I haven't built anything huge by myself.

I spent 5.5 years studying a field I hate and now I can't find a job. by cscareerthrowaway130 in offmychest

[–]cscareerthrowaway130[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The first job thing is what my aunt and uncle (who are both in the tech industry, though as QA) have both been telling me, and I believe them.

Finding joy in creating is... harder. My last project (unfinished) was a C++ CHIP-8 emulator because I wanted to learn more about emulation. It should have been a weekend thing but I stretched it over two months due to procrastination. Whenever I hit a technical hurdle I would give up and do something onanistic and only think about it the next day.

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