I have worked in many different fields(web dev, analytics, product management) but can't seem to stick to one. Is it about the field or something about myself that I need to change? How do I go about solving this??
I'm not obsessed about "working for my passion" or anything like that. I have a good life outside of work, supported by my high paying programmer job.
I did a lot of job-hopping the past few years looking for the right place to work, and I finally found it. I look for companies that respect work-life balance, don't want me to work too hard, and have excellent engineering culture that values high quality work and has managed to retain their senior employees. I deliver great work, they make money off of the code I ship, everybody is happy. I can crunch every once in a while but we all understand that it sucks and isn't a long-term strategy.
My father was a funeral director & coroner. He would NEVER claim he "loves what he does", but he used his career to build a life for him and his family. I look at my career the same way.
What do I ACTUALLY want to do? Develop video games, make music, write fiction. But nobody is shelling out for that, and even if they are, I'm not good enough at it to compete. I know if I pursued any of my passions, I would have to work much harder for much less pay, and be treated much more poorly by my employer. I know my limits and I know that I cannot thrive in a situation like that, I've done it before, no thanks.
Part of growing older is mourning the person you could have been. If I had a time machine, I would have stayed in better shape, practiced guitar more, invested my time more wisely. But I can't, and honestly my life has turned out pretty great by trusting my instincts.
"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
Be careful with this one. If you could transport yourself back in time to each of the key decisions you made as a younger you, you would likely realize that in most cases, you made the best decision you could with the information and resources you had at the time.
Learn from it, and then apply what you can for the benefit of older you. Regret is pernicious.
"Live in the now and make the now the way you want it to be."
Sometimes (most of the times for the "normal" person), this is impossible, contradictory, conflicting...His approach to the subject is realistic, effective...Does it sound good? definitely no...That's life..
You can look at it in a positive way though...work with the resources you have to get the best from them...maybe not the life you want, but the best one you can get from your current reality.
I pursued video games as a professional programmer and all it did was kill my enjoyment of games in general. I couldn’t really get my creativity out either because you’re a cog in a 10-100+ person team and often you work on projects you probably wouldn’t play if you weren’t paid for it.
I still dream about FIRE and working as a 1-3 person studio working on silly creative little games for the joy of it.
On the flip side, I work at a 100+ person studio and have enjoyed great work life balance the entire 4 years I've been working there, including a major release. It hasn't killed my passion or made me like video games any less.
I also work on a game I like and have played it a fair bit without being paid to do so.
It is hard to break into games, and harder still to find work on game projects you want to work on, but it is possible. Lots of people do.
>If I had a time machine, I would have stayed in better shape, practiced guitar more, invested my time more wisely. But I can't
In another response you're saying you are 32. you are little more than one(!) decade into your adult and professional life. Christoph Waltz barely was making a living acting until he was 50 years old. With the exception of maybe being a soccer world class athlete you can pretty much still do anything you want.
An older guy I used to work with in China who was sent to some labor farm for half a decade and who only went on to study in his thirties told me when this discussion came up one time "don't worry, if you're younger than 45 you can just start over, everyone here has done it five times"
I'm happy to be where I am. I've had to go through everything that I did, to become the person that I am, now. That includes lots of mistakes and bad judgment, embarrassment, wasted money and time, etc.
I have said, that, if I could go back to being 20, I would want the body, but not the mind that went with it.
I've usually been forced to take the paths I've taken. Pretty much every big advance in my life has been heralded by fecal matter impacting an air circulation device. Being forced into early retirement, by SV’s notorious ageism, is an example. It really pissed me off, but now that I’ve been out of the rat race for a few years, I am kicking myself for not doing it sooner.
If my life would have gone the way I wanted, it would have sucked like a supermassive, galaxy-core, black hole.
As someone a little older, what is interesting is that it comes back around again. By which I mean, at first you start out desiring this joy you don't know how to access, and then later you feel mournful about what could have been... but honestly for me I found a third phase later, of realizing those abilities/passions/joys were always with me all along anyway. In school I was torn between music and creative writing - I chose to major in music. I've always been good at logic, though. I started out completely certain I'd only go into programming long enough to get out of college debt, and then quit and commit to music. I was distraught for a while, unable to come with a plan to support myself with music, so I never stopped programming. Over time (a long time), I put together my first cd, a seven-song EP of jazz/pop piano/singing that I am still very proud of, and I think it is really good representation of the best I could do at that time. But I was still attached to my younger ideas of success, so when it received pretty much zero sales beyond family and friends, that really upset me for a while, and I got discouraged abut music. Kept programming; this is when I was freelancing. Years pass, slowly started getting back into music, improving at jazz, having music friends over at the living room and medium size grand piano my career paid for. That's fun. Found some time during COVID to restart the creative writing website I had first started twenty-five years ago. It still works, and I enjoy upgrading it to modern tech, and through the site have started writing more with friends. And then I wrote a novel in November, figured out how to typeset it and ordered myself a 6x9 trade paperback of it for Christmas. I'm proud of it. Don't even care to try publishing it. Still programming. I guess over the years, I've just realized that I freaking love programming. Breaking things down, turning complicated problems into simple solutions. And not am I only able to continue doing that, and get paid, but I still know how to play piano, can still sing, and this year discovered I can even write a novel. It's all... just pretty damn cool over all, and many of my earlier regrets and "what could've beens" have just mostly fallen away. I guess it just took thirty years or so to figure out how to get out of my own damn way.
(For OP, you can still go do 20 pushups, learn a simple guitar song to the point of self-enjoyment, write a small video game that makes you and your family laugh.)
Thanks for this excellent comment. It reminds me of a letter I wrote my dad last year for his birthday. It was called: "The summit isn't necessary", where I thanked him for his words on enjoying life for yourself by simply enjoying it and not comparing to others or overreaching to _win_.
Thanks for writing this. I’ve been feeling mournful about “giving up” and returning to a “normal” software engineering job, but the things in quotes here are a matter of perspective. Ain’t nothing wrong with doing good work and using the fruits of it to enjoy your life. Thanks for sharing your perspective.
Out of curiosity, how old are you if I may ask? I just entered 30, but I do share some of my regrets and life perspectives from this post. Thanks for sharing your perspective!
I’m really early thirties and it resonates with me. I’ve been successful, but it’s hard not to look at any of the other paths I could have taken and wonder “what if.” Or, more precisely: what now?
After 15 years as a freelance developer I’ve started a rural wireless ISP. It hasn’t entirely displaced my freelance work, but allows me to help people in a way that being a developer didn’t (tangibly, at least).
Now I install internet access for people, on infrastructure I have built, and I see how happy they are when they go from 2 to 100mbps (this is often in a field in the middle of nowhere). This means they can talk to their families, actually do the work that pays their bills, and just generally entertain themselves.
It is very rewarding. And I know all these people as they are essentially my neighbours.
What an awesome and fascinating thing you're doing! Could you possibly explain at a high level what you had to do to start the ISP and make it accessible in these areas?
Congrats, if you don’t mind me asking where do you get the capital to do something like this? Other than “wage slave for a decade and live like a student”.
I know some people who made millions working the Universal Service Fee system, getting paid gobs of subsidies to provide DSL / wifi to hillbillies in West Virginia. It's like digital gold if you know how to really work the system.
I've thought of doing something like this in southern Utah ... but we've got 1 gig fiber even in some smaller communities... but there probably are certain places that don't have good coverage..
I love to write code, I love to ship products and I love to build businesses.
But what I really love, what drives me, is solving interesting problems. That's my entire career. Solve interesting problems.
"We're building a web2.0 exercise tracking..." No!
"We're putting health records on the block..." Nein!
"We're improving how people buy insuran..." Non!
"We're creating a mobile app to submit expens..." Nee!
"We're building a SaaS to improve cable modem analy..." Nie!
"We're using computer vision to identify fossilized cat shit." Oh hell yes!
I've built websites and CRUD apps and mobile apps, out of necessity, but they are universally boring endeavours with little to give them any merit beyond a tiny sliver of an interesting problem. Most of the work that is out there is just grunt work that should be farmed out and then extensively code reviewed.
At meetups people ask me, "what do you do?"
And I respond, "Whatever the !@#$ I want to, it makes money, and everyone goes home happy."
I haven't worked a day in my life. I play, every day. And any time I've come close to discovering "it's just another job" I go and find something else to do.
My response on LinkedIn or AngelList when approached by business people and recruiters with their dreadful job opening is usually along the lines of "Thanks for making me aware of this opportunity. Sounds boring. Good luck in your continuing candidate search."
>My response on LinkedIn or AngelList when approached by business people and recruiters with their dreadful job opening is usually along the lines of "Thanks for making me aware of this opportunity. Sounds boring. Good luck in your continuing candidate search."
Thank you, this is what I always think with these job adverts. It's almost impossible to think about anything less appealing than a list of technologies they require without any motivation why.
The worst is when the company brags about their funding as if it makes any difference to me. If anything, it makes their shitty offer look even more shitty. If you're gonna brag about millions, you better offer me a decent cut.
"This exciting start-up just raised two hundred million dollars. Are you interested in taking a 70% paycut to work for someone who would step over your corpse if they saw you drop a nickle?"
I never respond to those emails, but after reading your comment I'm thinking maybe I should reply with, "what % of those X millions is being offered for this role?"
Recruiter: "We're doing <solved problem> to <extract money> from people by implementing <unnecessary subscription service> that attaches <internet stuff> to <something that doesn't need it>. Also, we'll have <creepy video technology> installed in people's homes for <nothing bad ever happened doing that>helping them live healthier, happier lives whilst partially clothed</nothing bad ever happened doing that>. We've raised <large amount of VC measured in hundreds of millions> that guarantees <anybody with equity is so diluted they'll never see a payout>, with that <equity on a stick dangled out in front, we think we can convince you to take a lower salary>."
This is a great post but allow me to be a little pedantic.
Your example of an interesting problem sounds more to me like an interesting solution. It's the computer vision that's fun, right? Or is it the cat shit?
Interesting problems have interesting solutions. In my mind, it's rare that an interesting problem would have a run-of-the-mill solution, because if it did, you could hire a freelancer off Craigslist for $30 an hour. Interesting problems are rarely ones that can be solved with a Wordpress install, a few plugins, and a downloaded theme derived from Bootstrap.
Boring problems don't usually have interesting solutions. I mean, you could make the solution interesting, you could over-engineer it, or choose to solve it in a novel and unique way, but it is not often that you'll be given that opportunity. Un-interesting problems with un-interesting solutions usually get given to the lowest bidder.
I built a cat toy, it's a 42" LCD screen with a touch interface overlaid on top, and then wrote a "bot" that exhibits prey response and can be "caught" by the cat. Fun project, had to figure out how to do multiple toe bean rejection. And a whole bunch of other tech too.
Built a cat toy, it's a home built 3D printed robot arm, that has a plastic rod as the end effector, with a feather on it, that is radio controlled, and can be controlled via a 3D application running in a web browser.
I built a semi-autonomous, self-driving radio control car that can race a human controlled radio control car, and can also give the human operator a first person view, like a racing drone. It used various solutions from computer vision, low-latency video streaming, low-latency, long-range WiFi, and so forth.
I built a human controlled robot to clean the litter box, which then farms out the job to people on Mechanical Turk.
I built an app that helps you find the jigsaw puzzle piece you want when solving a jigsaw.
I built an app that can scan your Scrabble tiles and the Scrabble board, and tell you which word to play for the most value.
I built a number of bots and assist bots that play a popular MMORPG.
I built a dashboard for my home that tells me what the weather is like, where my cats are, where the family wallets are located, where I left my phone.
I built a resume website with a space invaders game embedded in it.
Plus there are hundreds of other projects. Each one interesting in their own way. But what I studiously do is avoid the CRUD apps that are solved problems.
Currently I am tinkering with a Star Trek Picard-like, flight deck transparent "holographic", curved display with head/eye tracking and touch interface. I am also building, as my day job, a computer vision solution that will do full body and face tracking for a new VR HMD.
Web developer for many years. Lost interest in CRUD apps because they’re mostly the same architecture with different content.
I’ve been learning WebGL and using math more than I have since college. It’s very rewarding and what I feel my Computer Science degree prepared me for. I spend a lot of time outdoors and my project is a map simulation of terrain shadows. Every time I’m outdoors and my model lines up with physical reality, I have an almost spiritual moment of feeling like I can comprehend the universe. :)
>"Thanks for making me aware of this opportunity. Sounds boring. Good luck in your continuing candidate search."
Well this made my day. I usually ignore recruiters since everytime i tried telling them that i'm looking for something else, they either keep insisting to have a call or they forget about me for a few days and then start sending the same things.
I think this will be my new response for recruiters :)
The best way to get recruiters to stop responding is:
Thank you for making me aware of this opportunity. Before I waste your time, I have a few quick questions that I'd like answered:
Is this fully remote? Or on-site?
And most importantly, what is the compensation range for this position?
Pretty much shuts down the conversation completely. Ghosting. So much ghosting. I'd say an awful lot of recruiters will view you as a "difficult candidate" or "too much work" the moment you start asking about compensation.
I've found that just telling them, up front, that I'm over 40, terminates the relationship almost immediately. They can't hang up, fast enough, and I never hear from them again.
This is hilarious and depressing at the same time since, having turned 40 recently, I still hope to start a first career in software development in the near future.
IMHO, there won't be a shortage of computer programmers for the next 20 years. I'm over 40 too and never experienced any issue with my grand old age. Since you seem interested by software development, I'll tell you the ultimate secret to working with computers: tutorials. That's it, there is no need to be a grand master at one specific piece of technology if you struggle with a simple script on an OS you have never worked with.
My secret is to learn and know "enough" about every OS, every language, every framework out there. Of course you're starting and you don't have either the time or experience to do everything, but do it anyway, slowly, one task at a time. Compare, study a bit, read, and have fun. Also, don't be scared, no one knows everything, you just need to know enough to be able to help (and learn at the same time).
I demanded a minimum compensation amount to a recruiter once at a FAANG company, something really outrageous even for FAANG. They ended up giving me non-answers saying that I still needed to interview and determine what my SWE level was going to be before they talk about compensation.
I stopped the conversation right there. That was a massive waste of time.
We need to talk money going in, or someone is wasting my time.
"Don't be showing up on the Ferrari dealership forecourt with a Honda budget in your pocket."
I don't generally deal with recruiters anymore. Haven't had a job through a recruiter in a long time. My last round of looking for a job (5+ months ago) I had an interview where I confirmed that the compensation would be satisfactory.
Did the interview, got an offer, and that offer was 70% less than what I was currently making. Turned the offer down.
When asked "why?" I responded "because you lied to me about the compensation. I have no interest in working for anyone that would immediately lie to me."
I will not talk to any company, and haven't for the past 15+ years, that cannot give me a very firm number in the first ten minutes. And I shut down the conversation immediately if they won't.
I think up until recently I had a different mentality than what you're describing, where pay was second, but the type of work was more important. I always assumed that so long as I was satisfied with the projects, coworkers, and company/organization was something I could stand behind, pay and compensation would follow.
As I got older and more "adult" responsibilities started coming (mortgage, family planning), economic security became much more of a priority. More conventional things I learned about employee retention and organizational behavior started to make more sense where pay and time off were huge motivational factors. It's okay to be motivated by money.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I have worked on interesting things with entrepreneurs, without pay, for months at a time. Or even asked for a certain amount, and then never took any money. And I have also worked on interesting problems for far less than what even a mid-level engineer could earn at a decent company.
It isn't always about the pay, but it is often about weeding out the people who would take advantage. There is cheap, and there is poor, and for some parts of my career I have confused the two.
Much like I won't pay for something just because it is expensive, but I will often pay for the more expensive option rather than the cheaper one. Expensive doesn't always mean good, but it is a differentiator and a signalling mechanism.
I use compensation as a litmus test to determine if someone is trying to take advantage of me. If the company is trying to low-ball me, that means to me, not that they are financially cheap (though some are, and you can smell them from as far away as the dog's dinner from two nights ago), but that they believe me to be naive and exploitable. I might be an immigrant, but it doesn't mean that I stepped off the boat yesterday.
Out of all the benefits and bonuses and culture that a company has, all of which can be taken away or changed in an eye blink (Activision's purchase of Blizzard for instance) for a variety of reasons, base compensation is exceptionally hard to hand wave away. Companies that don't pay well usually have crap culture, lousy benefits and work-life balance that truly sucks. Again, for me, compensation is a signalling mechanism.
Did they confirm the offer _during_ your interview?
If yes, then it was a dick move and you definitely dodged a bullet.
I'm asking because I know of some cases where the salary range was listed in the job posting, but after talking to the candidate, the company decided to offer them a number that was below the lower bound, saying that the level of the candidate not enough compared to what they had in mind when they were posting the job.
I confirmed the compensation range via email directly with the hiring manager at the company and again with HR during the initial pitch screening call. "That won't be a problem." was the response. I don't work with 3rd-party or external recruiters so it most definitely wasn't any confusion there.
Now, they might have thought "this guy isn't worth $X, let's offer him $Y" instead, but offering an exceptionally senior candidate $100K is one hell of a "we don't think you're worth it" snub. It's insulting.
Would you agree that the path should be a SaaS that keeps you in a position to keep a flow of new and intriguing work/individuals in tech in your vicinity?
For me, it was producing a scifi/mental-health podcast which blended my three great passions of music, programming, and love of my own voice^H^H^H writing fiction.
The experience has been life changing!
More people should try podcasts: They’re almost as simple as a blog to produce, but allow you to present your story or information in a much more evocative and personal medium: Voice, sound, and music. Additionally, and unlike something like Youtube or Spotify, you retain total control. All you need, essentially, is a website to host MP3s, and an XML file that tells people where those MP3s are. There are plenty of services that will do this for you for a few dollars a month (I use Spreaker), but that’s what it boils down to: No gatekeepers, no monopolies, no algorithms.
It’s very hard to answer for you because it’s likely about personal growth and realisation more than anything else. But I can tell you what I did, or rather what happened to me.
I started as a developer, because I was good, I gradually became the lead enterprise architect (I’ve never hated anything more than TOGAF by the way), and eventually “fell” into management. While doing this I rode locally fame ladder in Danish public sector digitalisation which means I’ve had a massive impact on our overall national strategy for IT architecture but like 5 people know who I am. I’m not sure I ever actually liked that work, but it was thrilling to be part of something “important”, so I felt like I liked it. Eventually I had my first child, and 9 months later I had a depression caused by stress so severe I spent a night in a psychward. Long story short I was diagnosed with ADHD at almost 40, and told that I needed to figure out how I wanted to live my life.
Turns out I like problem solving and that I hate project management. So I quit the public sector and found a job in a company where I could be a programmer again, I made sure to find a company where I wouldn’t have to deal with a whole lot of the Atlassian sort bureaucracies surrounding programming and it’s frankly been a bliss.
I’ve gone from not thinking I could ever work more than 30 hours a week until my children left our house to back to full time.
So chances are you probably already know what kind of work you like, but it’s just really hard to figure it out. One thing that I thought I would miss was feeling “important” but the truth is that I was never actually “important”. If it hadn’t been me someone else would’ve done it.
(For reference I’m Danish, having a break down here gets you 6 months sick leave with pay and costs you basically nothing out of your own pocket. This made things easier to say the least.)
The problem, as far as I can make it, is that the thing(s) you love will probably not look like a corporate job.
It's my strong feeling that people don't actually love jobs, they love kinds of work, but only as long as they have agency. Once the work becomes a job it tends to get subordinated to profit motives, instead of your own creative drives.
My best bet is that if you want to do something you love you have to somehow end up working for yourself.
Working with others is definitely important for motivation and for technical progress.
> I’ve tried teaming up with people on projects but it seems like if it’s not tied to a paycheck they flake out pretty quickly.
Maybe something like contributing to an existing open source project or doing some small projects of your own (e.g. writing a blog about smth that your really like, without aiming to monetize it) could help.
The best case scenario would be to start a self-supporting company or something of that sort.
In this regard, you might want to read "So Good They Can't Ignore You" by Cal Newport.
I know. The title is cheesy and melodramatic. But this book was really helpful in shaping some of my worldview.
This book goes vehemently against the "discovery" of "passion", and instead provides some practical insights on how to do work that you will love. Or how to reach there.
No. One important aspect of the book that doesn't appear in the title is: People who get really good at something useful, also enjoy their work a lot more. The public view is often that passion leads to success. But the book argues that in many cases it is actually the other way around.
As a generalist, you can become an expert in one thing after another as you apply your generic expertise and ability to learn to a broad range of areas and problems over time.
I fell in love with developing measurement equipment. It started in grad school, realizing that I really wasn't cut out for a basic research career (in a massively overcrowded academic job market), but that I got a lot of satisfaction from being able to solve hard technical problems.
Today, measurement systems combine many of my hobbies, including electronics and programming. I would get bored with becoming a specialist in a narrow tech field. This is also an area where I feel that I can genuinely help people, not just with immediate business problems, but also where I can credibly justify a socially redeeming purpose.
I like the fact that the ultimate judge of my success is mother nature, who doesn't tolerate bullshit.
Advice: Can you work on something that you actually believe in? I read a lot of comments (HN and elsewhere) from people for whom "work" is just an empty cash transaction, and who respect no distinction between good and bad work. (For instance threads on doing little or no actual work without getting caught).
Or, can you completely detach yourself from your day job, satisfy yourself with the empty cash transaction, and get your personal satisfaction in some other way?
Hey, are you interested in climate change at all? Would you be interested in developing new measuring equipment for methane emissions in rice paddies? This is a completely white space. https://www.ricemethane.org/ Let me know, thanks!
"Advice: Can you work on something that you actually believe in?"
You absolutely can. I fell into a great gig by accident. But it's a bad idea to put all your eggs in one basket. Companies get bought, cultures change, priorities shift and if you can't detach yourself from work or find another outlet you'll be frustrated. Balance is key and I'd say a fulfilling personal life is healthier thing to aspire towards.
Those last two paragraphs feel like the trick to me. Either work on something you're invested in, and if you can't, pick something outside of work.
I personally like D&D. Spending time with good friends wroting stories together is one of my favorite ways to spend time, and the excitement for it has gotten me through more than one hard week.
> For instance threads on doing little or no actual work without getting caught
I imagine there are exceptions, but I think a lot of this is people doing jobs that are fundamentally pointless to begin with. When what you're doing is of no practical value to anyone, it's difficult to remain motivated.
I think for me it was kinda letting go of what job title or self-imposed "career objective" I had set myself and just focusing on trying to identify the things I found the most satisfying. Or at the very least what I disliked the most.
I stopped trying to weasel my way to the "right" job/role to get one step closer to my "career goal" or had the right job title, and focused on some self reflection about what I get the biggest kick out of. If you had a good day at the office today, actively try to identify what it was specifically that made your day good (was it a day of code? Bug fixing? Debugging? Meetings? Design work? Etc)
Sounds obvious and simple but I think it took me a decade or so to realise this. Perhaps I could only really come to this conclusion once I had already "proven" myself career-wise and was making enough money to come to the realisation that I could stop trying to climb the career ladder and focus a bit more on what I get a kick out of, and not if the next role was a steppingstone to something else.
For me, what helped was paying attention to what I liked about my work and leaning in a direction that emphasized those kinds of tasks - though it was kind of just luck that I found a job that let me do that.
I got my start in web development because I had picked it up as a hobby and (at least at the time) it was a good way to get reasonable money without a degree. But my favorite parts were learning new techniques/technologies (I started out without a team to steer me toward best practices so I did a lot of experimentation, self-teaching, and reinventing the wheel - probably made my projects take longer but meant I learned a lot more) and then using that expertise to help my colleagues (once I did have a team, my deeper understanding meant that I was the one to go to when something didn't work right in IE6 or something).
At one point, I was having dinner with a friend at his startup and happened to meet one of their product support engineers. She explained that the role involved becoming an expert in their highly-technical, fast-growing product and then using that expertise to help customers (internal and external ones). I realized that was an entire job made of my favorite parts of my previous job. I applied to join her team and I've happily worked in product support for tech startups ever since. Before this point I never would have considered product support, because I just had a stereotypical vision of it as sitting in a phone center reading from a script. The ideal field for you might be out there without you realizing it exists.
I still try to identify the things I like doing and spend more time doing those things. Sometimes that means spending time working with folks on other teams - not all companies are flexible enough to allow this, but I think healthy ones will because the added perspective usually will make you more valuable to the company as well. Making sure to have these varied experiences and keep learning new things has been a great way to keep up my engagement over time.
I have talked to lots of people who were trying to find their passion and had limited themselves to looking in an area where they felt they could be "well paid." This isn't too surprising because surviving is first, passion is second.
However, what they often don't consider is that compensation is just a part of the picture. If you're making $X and living in New York City you might only be able to rent a room, but making $X in a small town in Minnesota and you can buy the best house in town. Not that I'm advocating you move to Minnesota, rather that one's "Quality of Life" is the complete circle of income/cost of living/friends/opportunities.
Now I have no idea what you're looking at so this might be completely useless but oddly enough, reading people's biographies can give you insights into other choices made and their impact and effect. If you can imagine yourself in those other choices, you can sometimes discover something you would like to try before you've "wasted time" trying something you didn't like. Reading non-fiction for exposure to other life experiences can be helpful in other ways as well, it can help you understand others from a perspective that isn't your own lived experience.
After some burnout after building a tech company, I saved up money and left my job, and decided to take 2 years just doing whatever I feel like doing each day, until I find something I really, truly love, that I can build a new career from. I tried some different things, and in the end I found my new calling. I think the key is to free up time so you can experiment with different things with no pressure to make money immediately. In this video my whole story https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfHvh87gm7M
I love talking, so started my own podcast in my native language (Telugu). Always wanted to talk on stage or do stream on YouTube but never was confident but with podcast I can speak anything I want and don’t worry about anyone judging me.
Even though I don’t have very large number of subscribers but I am satisfied with the few people who listen and like . I don’t do any post processing, just raw recording.
Be honest with yourself. What do you really want? For me it was to be in control when I wanted to and let someone else drive the ship when I did not want to.
Essentially I wanted to pick my battles.
I started my own company. It was a shorter path than climbing the corporate ladder.
How do you know when you found it? In my case it was my wife saying you haven’t complained about work in a while. You must have found your stride.
Love to do? No. But I’ve found some things I’m good at that are useful and I don’t seem to get sick of, and after that what seems to matter more is the people you work with.
Ultimately even if you like a job it’s still a job, and the widely promoted notion of passion rarely holds up.
It’ll suck up much less if you know your real passion is outside of work. Instead of stressing about getting a staff engineering title, I enjoy senior and make some money to simply support that passion :)
I enjoy working on and solving technical problems, but the “core” thing that I’ve found I really love is working with other people to figure things out together (even though I’m fairly introverted). Once I realized that it shaped my perspective on a lot of work tasks and hobbies.
For example - a good friend and I regularly play battle royale and co-op games together after work in the evenings. The joy of those games, for me, is that we are communicating and working together to achieve something or win. I don’t get the same kind of enjoyment from single player games or games where I’m just grinding alone.
I think looking at “core values” and trying to extrapolate from there might be a good approach (or at least it has been for me). If you don’t have a sense of what those are, maybe take some time to reflect and see if you can find or create them.
This is exactly me. I get super bor d of playing single player games and I don't even play multiplayer games alone. I always need to play with a friend over discord. It's my way of socializing and getting that feeling of playing a team sport. Overwatch has been really fun over the years.
I did, when I was younger. It was from the environment (lived in Anchorage, lots of bush planes, got into model airplanes). I spent about 8+ years doing it... in 2008 or so would get lost in it. At that time I was in high school, didn't have much money but I built all my planes from scratch with foam. Those were times I felt truly happy/in the moment just being in the sun alone flying. I can do it now sure, have money now but I lost it that drive/happiness to do it. Finding real passion can be hard vs. external factors eg. money. It's like you could say you want to figure out GAI but if you're doing it for money/fame vs. truly pursing it out of personal passion, I don't know if it'll happen (aside from being hard).
I like writing code now, it's like a tool, can build things in that space. Don't think it's a passion though. I didn't come from it, I barely used a computer when I was younger. I say I want to pursue robotics but I'm not pouring myself into it either. Been spending a lot of time consuming as someone else mentioned (tv/social media). Anyway I hope I get it back, true drive vs. drive from sharing/points online. Generally I like creation though, solving things.
Part of the younger days probably just because no responsibility other than doing homework/passing tests.
I work as a manager of a Developer Relations team, but I'm also a software engineer and writer. I've identified two things I "love" to do in my life: writing software (usually automation-type things that make my life or someone else's life easier), and writing (articles, books, etc.).
I discovered that I love writing software when I was a kid (maybe 12 years old?) by writing automation bots for video games: it was so incredibly fun to write a bot that would play the game, level up your characters, and do things that would otherwise take thousands of hours of human grinding to achieve. This passion never left me, and now, more than 20 years later, I still spend a good chunk of time building little scripts/tools/utilities/apps that help me in various ways.
The writing was something that I also got started on early. I discovered my love of writing through IRC where I'd routinely answer people's programming questions and eventually write blog posts explaining answers in more depth than I could fit into a short IRC conversation.
I don't blog as much today (life gets busy), but I do spend a lot of time writing at work, working on the occasional long-form blog post, and ... journaling.
You can't find what you are passionate about, it's not something that gets discovered. You pick it and hone it. Getting experienced, acknowledged by peers, and executing from knowledge all come with time and dedication and you become passionate as you want to drive that thing forward.
I've struggled with this myself, and learned over time that I'm passionate about delivering software - I love it. Now I look for the next harder/larger project and see if I can make a difference for that business.
It must depend on the person. I discovered the things I love (writing, teaching, programming, dualsport motorcycling, GIS) by stumbling across them, then honed (a continuing process for life) those skills because I love them.
Did I choose those things? Or was the moment of discovery the moment of choice?
I gave up trying to find a job that I "love". Don't get me wrong I absolutely enjoy programming, I love many aspects of it, there are just too many things out of my control.
I found hobbies like home improvement, home automation, pet projects around development a lot more "lovable" and easier to stick to.
Not something I love to do for money. I like solving problems, and when I'm fresh somewhere I enjoy it, but once it becomes repetitive I hate my life. When I get the leeway to solve problems, even ones I'm not interested in, I excel. But again, once it stops being solving problems and starts being maintenance, I'm over it. So I have a hard time.
I don't think it's about the field, I think it's about what your role is. I like solving problems, but I can't have that role forever in a programming related environment, so I don't write code for money anymore.
I really like cooking and gardening, but if I were to get a job in a kitchen or picking apples or whatever, I'd hate it. For most people this isn't true, but for me, turning my hobbies into a job turns them into a chore and I start to hate them. I could make a casual business out of them, but I can't do them professionally.
Decide what role you like, and do any job where you can fulfill that role. Maybe you like pleasing people, maybe you like building things, maybe you like the tactile sensation of doing things with your hands. Don't pick a job, pick a role. If it's web dev or a gas station, doesn't matter. Don't let the siren of status and glamour have you broken washed up on the rocks. If the role makes you happy and keeps you clothed and fed that's all that matters.
Some highly intelligent people simply need new challenges. So maybe you don't need to change yourself so much as embrace this new-challenge-seeking behavior as one of your strengths.
As to finding something you love, for a lot of people the problem really isn't the finding. There is something they love, and the hard part is finding a path to the doing of it -- to dropping what they're currently doing, and finding an easy viable way to do the other thing while paying their rent and other bills. And honestly, this is usually made easier by money. If you could stockpile a "stake" and then take some time off to explore only things you're deeply interested in, that might help. Another avenue toward that might be living someplace cheaper, so the money piles up quicker, ultimately giving you more flexibility and freedom to pursue things you love.
Along with this, it's important to be honest with yourself. If you can really get in touch with what you like and don't like about the fields you've been in -- those are the truest clues for what you'll want to do. (I mean, your only other option is to talk to other people doing many different things, until you hear about something that also sounds interesting to you.)
I guess the last bit of advice is have hope. Because that's where it starts.
You can do all those things meaningfully: I think it's really about the end product (physical or not) - if you are making something you don't believe is useful to society, or don't have control over how your efforts are being used downstream, then it can easily become inherently meaningless.
There are basic needs: clean water, clean air, infrastructure, transportation, logistics, etc., etc. And also "non-tangible ones". You can get much more authentic social respect if you work on products/services that people unambiguously like and need.
I recommend, for example:
- Biomedical: signals, images, ... (I've done a bit)
- Anything GIS, urban/transportation planning, geo-spatial analytics, cities, etc. (my chosen specialty, very fulfilling).
There's lots of number crunching, but also human-entry string processing (fuzzy matching, etc.). Actually, very versatile programmatically. And then there is fast graphics (OpenGL, etc.) - not my favourite part, actually, but you can outsource it partly.
You get to work in very multi-disciplinary groups, so you can really assess where you want to go long-term. I was surrounded by people with very similar training to mine - technologically it was pretty good, but topic-wise it was a bit of an echo-chamber.
Thank you. How does one go about working in "Biomedical: signals, images" /other fields you recommend. I'm a graduate in Engineering. Do I need further education ?
If you are high in openness (likely) you will need change and creativity to feel alive. On the other hand, most job will want to keep you in the same place to extract the maximum value from what you know.
You might need to find something where that part of you can grow: start a company, technical sales, consultancy, etc
Five or so years ago I started to "implement" GraphQL, the Query language from scratch. Lexing, parsing, designing an AST. I had to rewrite everything multiple times, added validation and an execution engine. At some point I realized what I've actually built, the foundation to create an npm-like system for APIs, using GraphQL as the universal integration language for any kind of API. Since I understood how powerful this concept is I'm unable to stop working on it. I'm now turning this into a product/company, it's called WunderGraph: https://wundergraph.com/ Btw. the engine and everything is open source, it's written in Go: https://github.com/jensneuse/graphql-go-tools
The past year I’ve fallen in love with life. This has been a combo of a few things - I found work as a consultant where I get to share a unique perspective that when paired with the work of others produces outsized results.
I get paid moderately well by nearly a dozen clients but am the lowest paid team member on each team on a monthly basis - so I don’t feel too much pressure to deliver exceptional results all the time - and the number of clients I have means if I get 1 win a year for all clients I can have a true win each month professionally.
These wins and experiences make me feel like I’m growing and contributing.
Aside from that I’ve developed open and honest relationships with my lover and my friends and see them regularly and I live with housemates so I get my extraversion solved through work and natural interactions even in covid. The honest relationships with my lover and number and depth of friendships has allowed me to not hold any desires back from asking while having less pressure to be the doer of everything. Teams and ideas naturally form over time which has led to fun side projects and profit as well.
I prefer now to give perspective rather than advice but I’d say having a “deal centric” attitude and meeting a lot of people and trying to start things with them - usually based on some process that provides value so you have a process to lean on - seems pretty solid.
For instance building internal portals for small teams or organizations and taking a small ongoing fee to do it could help you. Instead of project based work with a time bound - low to moderate monthly fees with a variety of people can allow you to find creative energy where product management, analytics, etc can help other peoples visions come true over years.
You can see visions come to life without too much stress and avoid a single point of failure.
Happy Christmas and lmk if you’d like to work together on something like this.
Not sure it will "solve it"... yet following Adam's (Douglas?) suggestion to become top-25% in three fields.
Then merge those fields.
That has worked awesome for me. I merged technolgy (software dev/sys adm) with motor sports and with management. Love it so far. Good luck and Merry Christmas!!
Actually there is. When my daughters were on the Airgun 10 meter team (recent national champs), I spent some time investigating how to create a low-cost SCATT system using a relatively inexpensive laser with 3D-printed mount, USB connected cameras, and OpenCV. Something kids could use in a hallway at home vs. the range. The solution was very feasible as I got to the point of mocking it up and testing it. Daughters decided to drop shooting, and other side-dev projects took over. But you sound like you might love doing this. Cheers.
That said, do you find yourself spending most your time making or consuming? At some point I just started making stuff for the majority of my time and this was a tipping point for starting to improve my skills in particular areas and narrow my focus.
Regarding Making vs Consuming, I realized why I never got consumed by gaming. I can only sit down and play a game for a short while, before my brain starts wandering and thinking how I could build something myself.
Civilization relies mostly on people doing things that they don't love.
Plumbers may like to plumb, but they don't like doing it in bad conditions or as many hours as they do. Same for farmers, construction workers, garbagemen, and so on.
I really like selling drugs. I mean, I really like it. I spent 25 years coding, and I hated it. I hated the techbros who ruined the industry, I hated the dudebros who invaded every San Francisco coffee shop to talk loudly about their investments, and I really, really hated the way the tech crowd shifted from being kind of wild anarchist DIY hippy hackers to being right-wing law and order, thin-blue line types.
Now I produce sell Cannabis & Psychedelics in California where it's sort of legal. I have a huge social life, I've networked with dozens of other artisanal pushers, and now I can pickup like-minded girls and guys by saying "Hey, want to come back to my place and roll Molly or trip on shrooms?"
I make more than twice as much as I did as a backend developer, mostly in BitCoin and cash, and all I do is hang out with people. I haven't had a major depressive episode since my last day of work where I quite by sending him some scat porn and a video of me pissing on my work laptop.
Making music.
It is a life long project.
Learning to play instruments (guitar first then drums, piano and bass)
Then understanding what ‘my’ music is and developing that relationship.
Meeting my soul-sister and making ‘our’ music and understanding how creative magic is.
Becoming a producer and all the tech parts of recording, engineering etc
Going through the phases of life and music with regards to ego/success and just standing back and just feeling complete love towards this amazing thing we have been blessed to be part of the human experience.
I built a fairly simple browser extension that users love to use. Heck, people even paid for it (it's freemium but an open-source project). Now and then, I get an appreciation email from a user, a notification from the chrome web store that someone rated it 5-star, or a new purchase notification from Stripe.
Random doses of serotonin make my day. In a nutshell, I love working on it because people find it helpful and value it.
This idea of loving your job in the way you're describing is silly. Do what makes you the most money without making you miserable. Or keep changing, who cares? I love my job because I can afford a nice life for my family and being 100% remote affords me a lot of flexibility to spend more time with them. My work tasks themselves are secondary at best.
Spend all that energy and time thinking about improving your personal life. Work on your marriage/kids/family/relationships. Love those things.
Don't feel too bad if you can't find something you love to do for a long period of time. Many many people don't know what they love to do their entire life. And that's totally okay.
We've been exploring... We might like doing A for 1 year or 2, then switch to love doing B for a few months, then switch to C for another 3 years... It's normal.
How about thinking in this way - What you don't like to do? Just avoid things you don't like to do as much as possible, then you'll be happier.
For me, I started computers at around age 13. Didn't know at the time that most computer jobs were highly specialized, so I absorbed knowledge and developed skills in a wide variety of areas. Ended up as a SysAdmin simply because that was the majority of my responsibilities at my first computer related job. But I also program, design/architect solutions, do low level hardware, etc. That means I can have a job in one area, and use the other skills to make me more valuable in that role than I otherwise would be. So that is my passion, impressing others and being a highly prized asset due to bringing in multiple other skills into my primary role.
The other passion I have (that really is very similar to my primary skill) is woodworking. Anytime I need a particular furniture piece, I design it, buy the materials, cut it up / drill holes, and make my own flat-pack kits for final assembly. This hobby got a lot more fun when I finally realized that I could actually make straight cuts if I properly squared off the saw blade, and started using higher quality wood (instead of standard-grade construction lumber).
In a corporate structure I haven't found any one pigeonhole I like.
I was fine being an individual contributor because I got to listen to Spotify all day with noise cancelling headphones, while learning new coding techniques and playing the compensation bump game, but only as long as compensation bumps seemed practical and got me closer to my goals which became less true over time, especially as stretching compensation desires came with a lot greater scrutiny and impossible expectations.
Being an executive was fine for compensation goals but I didnt like that it was sales. I didnt like balancing all the relationships. I didnt like that my approach to business as a one-off expedition to the new world isn't matched by people that imagine building a corporate forever-home.
Slimming that down further and leaner in other projects, I do like that my precision strike team can execute fast and that I can contribute in all areas, but its hard to focus.
I’m more satisfied with creative arts, which I used to subsidize with my jobs until those become fulfilling as well, so maybe I can just do art again, since the market for that just got super lucrative.
I didn't truly love what I was doing until I found a personal purpose for life that ties together all aspects of my life so far. Essentially, I had to reflect enough on what I've gone through to see what paths I'm on and where I want to go.
I seek to help all beings collaboratively learn how to better program their bodies and meet all needs while denying none, through science, art, and love.
Since then, I've rebuilt my identity a few times over. I've also helped conceive and am nurturing a new person. Helping them explore the world everyday is so exciting and challenges the status quo of parenting in the area we live so hard, some people literally get angry watching us, will take clandestine photos, and call the police.
I've also come to enjoy the process of exploring and healing from traumas I've experienced.
There's a finite list of human needs for surviving and thriving. Learning about those gave me something to reflect on and pinpoint needs I wanted to focus on helping others meet.
Also, finding ways to integrate what I've learned from different fields into what I'm doing may have helped me keep from feeling boxed in.
Human beings learn to regulate their body temperature by being exposed to it. They're out in the cold without clothes because that's their choice. When their body is past its ability to stay warm, they'll ask for clothes. We check in with them and have warm clothes available for them when this is going on. We also have learned from other cultures that live in much colder climates to watch for the second shiver. The thinking is that the first one is the body relaxing into the cold as it warms up and the second one is the body shivering to create more warmth than it can from simply relaxed breathing. This tracks with my experiences in the cold.
Cold exposure is necessary for thriving. In the US, there's a culture of fear of cold exposure. It helps build up immunity and simply the basic operation of self-regulation.
Years of depending on clothes and machines to regulate our body temperatures seems to be leading to less resilience, not more.
Love to do? I volunteer to teach preschoolers how to ski on the weekends and then go skiing with my family and friends. It brings me great joy and the community that surrounds the organization I work with is absolutely incredible.
The rest of the week I do the software development. I like it most of the time, sometimes I love it, and sometimes (thankfully less of the time and not recently) I hate it and can barely bring myself to call into stand up.
On the balance though, I am deeply grateful that I like my job. I don’t think finding paid employment that you consistently “love” is feasible for most people. Besides, jobs, people and organizations change over time, so loving being a Dev in 2007 doesn’t mean you’ll love it today.
If you are in work you on the balance like and it provides the ability to be fulfilled outside work I’d say count yourself lucky and don’t sweat not having found something you “love.” Perhaps eventually you’ll find that thing, perhaps not, but if you look back at your career and say you mostly enjoyed it then I’ll say you are be looking back at a successful career.
I'd question the implication behind the question. There's nothing inherently wrong about switching fields unless there's an effect of it that's undesirable like it working against developing seniority. But arguably it gives you a broader perspective than someone who's only worked in a single role.
I graduated in journalism, worked early in localization, started my full-time career in customer support and quickly moved into a technical focus, then switched to software engineering. My journalism degree has been useful in how I think about communicating in the office. My customer support and localization background gives me a particular empathy both for end users and "internal customers".
That said, I wouldn't say I -love- software engineering like I love music (which is a hobby I have no professional aspirations in). I'm not someone who consistently does Advent of Code stuff (I need a real problem to motivate me, not a puzzle or toy problem), but I find the projects I work on satisfying and I like (most of) my coworkers.
I have one thing that gives me a deep sense of fulfillment and a feeling that I was not living those few hours of my life in vain. That is writing fiction.
paradoxically (or maybe not) it is not as rewarding process-wise as writing software, which has the strongest instant gratification loop after, maybe, video games.
You can’t really be a writer, however, unless you want to die in poverty, etc.
You don’t need to change anything. Also you don’t need to stick to one field only. Many of the most successful people in History were actually multi-talented and polymath. The most interested people I had a chance to talk to also had experience in multiple fields and activities. People like you are curious, and this is a virtue.
But if something is bugging you about this, maybe you could invest some time giving one step back and getting to know yourself better. This will make the exploration on your options more assertive. Study your personality and temperament. Read some biographies of successful people with the same personality of you. Consider options of fields that are more dynamic and let you work on a wide variety of fields (e.g.: entrepreneurship).
Instead of looking for the right activity for yourself, I’d suggest looking for the right mission or purpose for yourself. Doing any task in any fields but that is actually linked to a strong sense of purpose is much more fun.
I'm a corporate design manager (happily so), so my industry is slightly different than yours, but I see this question pop up enough in my circles it felt relevant to say the below ...
One of the greatest mistakes I see fellow designers do is try to make their 'passion' into their job - expecting their moonshot webcomic idea to be the bread+butter income, artisanal print hobby to pay the same as a corporate career without a sizeable investment or insane time sunk into marketing, you get the picture.
Early on I made a point to do short contract/internship stints to find our what I "didn't" like to do corporate-wise (packaging, digital design, print design), and narrow down to the parts that left me vaguely looking forward to the next day (experiential design, a team that's enjoyable to work with, autonomy, management). Note that the happy bits are almost as much team dynamics is it is the work itself, if not moreso.
For me it was starting my own business. Just coding away is not interesting to me - even though coding is the thing I enjoy most about my work.
To me it's important that I get to decide what I want to work on and what direction I take with the business. A big part is also that I own the code I write.
> I have worked in many different fields(web dev, analytics, product management) but can't seem to stick to one.
I’ve moved around a lot in my career as well. For a few years my objective was to work my way from a low paying IT help desk role to an Engineer at FAANG/tech company. My other motivation was to work on things that were interesting to me. I used to worry that the diversity of my career experience and duration of certain jobs could work against me in finding future roles. It turned out that my diversity of experience was an asset to my future career prospects.
I think that is the nice thing about a tech career. You can do a lot of different things, make decent to really good money doing it, and you aren't penalized for trying different things.
If book suggestions are helpful, I found “Designing Your Life” by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans to provide a helpful framework on how to think/act/prototype your way to what works for ya. Not sure if it’s everyone’s cup of tea but I found it useful.
You’ll probably “love doing” anything where you have autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
I love problem solving and mentoring people.
I would be happy doing this in any context. My career is in software development but if I worked at a bakery, restaurant, or any other job or company I can think of I’d probably find ways to build teams, mentor people, and solve the hard problems.
For the first few years of my career I tried to build things that I was interested in and would obsess about the thing but was in love with the process itself. Later in my career I would look for companies with a mission and a purpose that I loved and a founding team and leaders I aligned with.
I don’t think loving what you do day to day is important or even loving the mission or end goal. A job can just be a job and you can use maximize for free time and/or compensation and use them as the autonomy part for how to spend your free time to master something for a given purpose. That purpose can be something bigger than yourself or just your own personal fulfillment which is also worthwhile.
I plan to retire from tech in a few years and do something else, not because I no longer love it but because I want to try new aspects of problem solving etc. would love to sell physical goods like a cafe or plant store or something.
It sounds like maybe you’re framing the problem wrong. Instead of looking for a magical feeling from the day to day tasks of a specific role or field, try to think about society, how you want to fit into it and what you want your contribution to be (purpose), find a company or non profit or whatever that is trying to move the needle on that topic and have that impact, and then look for roles where you can develop mastery and have autonomy.
Alternatively try different hobbies and interest and try to find one that inspires you. Founder, musician, scientist, philosopher, etc. who inspires you or looks cool. In awe of the guitarist from led zeppelin and then pick up a guitar and work at it every day to develop mastery. Once you reach some level of mastery in some thing you can better reason about other things you might be interested in in a personal or professional context.
I love building Web products. Being a Product Owner.
How: By quitting every company after doing my maximum. I’m deeply sour, because many people around me succeeded younger at being recognized, generally because of ethnic or gender reason, but I had to walk away and I have succeeded in establishing my company and I’m the PO. I’m also the laundry guy, the accountant and the principal engineer with my 2-5 employees, but I’m still making half a million dollars, so it does seem that I was discriminated in companies compared to my abilities.
I wish I hadn’t a million dollars a year and I had a sense of belonging instead, and wasn’t sour, but such is life. I feel like Donald Duck.
Striking out on your own and being successful at it is impressive and congratulations for that. It doesn’t seem to be evidence to me in any direction about whether you were discriminated against in prior companies. The outcomes, whether good or bad, are concentrated when you own the company.
A judge would seek fact, intent and prejudice. Intent is largely here, explicit in company policies (“We need to help women achieve management positions” kind of thing) and national policies. Fact is here and prejudice is here.
I retain my judgement and will seek revenge against society. One should never implement an intentional policy of systematic discrimination. I will seek revenge.
I have no advice on how to find a professional field that you can fall in love with, as I pretty much fell in love with mine (mobile dev) on the first go (back in '09).
Just realize that being love with something doesn't mean it is always blissful. I love my partner to a deeper degree than I do with any other person (we have no kids), yet we do sometimes fight and don't get along.
It is the same with any job or profession. Realize this and I think you might become more content with what you do.
Outside of an professional setting I must say that after getting my self an espresso machine two years ago I've fallen in love with making and tweaking my shots.
I got my self a Sage Barista Express, which had good reviews as an entry level espresso machine with enough possibilities for tweaking as well as a built in canonical ceramic grinder capable of reaching espresso grinds.
It has served me well, and I've only slightly adjusted the grind burrs.
I have been looking into perhaps going for something a bit more advanced, and then a machine that has two boilers (the Sage has only one, and it can take a bit of time to make espresso for a whole dinner party).
Apart from the machine I also got my self a propper tamper that fits well in my hand, a Acaia Lunar scale capable of 0.1 gr accuracy that also has different triggers for tracking flow time and then a couple of VST precision baskets (the sage ones were alright but I decided to try these out).
Most important of it all though is the high quality coffee I get from my local roastery :)
Working in a lot of fields and not sticking to one is in itself valuable. You should capitalize on your need for novelty and perhaps work at a higher level, a generalist who can connect the dots across many areas and lead others.
I’ve jumped around a bit, I’ve done many different tech roles in end user companies (client side).
I’ve found I love three things - designing tech solutions but only what I’m passionate about, business (non-tech: finance, risk mgmt, commercial etc) and am passionate about empowering people rather than fleecing them (in a b2c context).
I’m happy with what I’m currently doing as I’m working in the business space now but ultimately think my place would be bootstrapping a user enabling solution and I’m in the early stages of making a side project to hopefully achieve that.
For me it is whatever keeps me excited I went from ops to engineering to automation to data analytics and learning data analytics as I do my job. I take advantage of internal transfers and I am open about what my areas of improvement are when it comes to tech knowledge it didn’t stop managers from hiring me. Be honest with what you can and can’t do and don’t be scared to try new things and take opportunities within your own organization (much easier to go back to your previous responsibilities if things don’t workout)
Nobody forces you to stick to one kind of role. It's okay to try a couple of roles.
I love (computer) science research and (software systems) development, so that's what I have been enjoying since age 11. Over three decades on, I'm a professor of artificial intelligence, which gives me maximum freedom to play around and invent new techniques. Among other things, I get paid to read HN, write papers and software, and teach the next generation some interesting topics like machine learning.
Lots of good advice here about paying attention to the patterns of what you like versus dislike.
For me, I love being able to sit down and concentrate for 5 hours and make progress on a coding activity. (Advent of Code is almost catnip for me; I’ll save up a week’s worth of them and blow a half a Saturday on them.) Other people thrive on social aspects of team/project work.
Naturally, I picked a job that gives me virtually none of that focused coding time, so there’s that…
I have a crippling fear of specializing in a field. I fear that I'm "settling" for something and might miss out on something better. But as a nihilist, nothing is anymore better or meaningful than what I do. Hence I keep trying different things, never happy, never satisfied and never having an answer to "where do you see yourself in 5 yrs?".
Can anyone else relate? If so, have you solved this problem in your life?
For guidance on this topic, I’d recommend the book “Deep Work” by Cal Newport. I think the relevant part of the book would advise that loving what you do requires sticking with it long enough to develop mastery; and the opposite pattern of bouncing between topics “looking for passion” is a recipe for mediocrity and dissatisfaction (I’m probably overstating his case a bit). But the whole book is great!
It was the "so good they can't ignore you" book of his.
With that said, both books are excellent. In my opinion "so good they can't ignore you" explains why you should want to become very good in something, and the "deep work" explains how to become good in something.
Separate career from what you love. Spare time to do what you love, and what you love need not be grand. Create a block of time and see what you do: netflix, social media, video games, whatever. That is what you need to do, imho (for a while anyway, 1-3 yrs). Only after that you can find what truly nurtures your soul (and is socially acceptable as “that which i love”).
Sounds like you just have a lot of interests. You might never find one you like more than the others. Nothing wrong with that.
It could be that you will never love technology, but you might love art, music, science, trade work, teaching. Maybe try to make a list of the things in your life that bring you the most joy and motivation and see how they fit in a Venn diagram.
Apparently I love building a call center CRUD app, and the surrounding tooling and processes. The tech itself is boring, but it allows me to focus on the truly hard parts of software development.
I didn’t like my job a year ago, but now that I’ve been given a mandate to improve things both code and process wise I’m really happy.
I had a rock solid base in the piano, and then my enjoyment of that process has led from one enjoyable endeavor to the next. It is a little bit like reading in that way. Readers find that their next book is the result of their prior reading. It is almost as though the book selects the reader.
Treat life like a gradient descent algorithm. Analyze your current landscape, adjacencies, possibilities and try different things. See what happens. You will get disinterested or fail 99% of the time. But that 1% will lead you to the next iteration down the gradient. Rinse and repeat.
Many different fields? I count 3, and they all sound software-related, so you could even argue you've worked in one field and 3 different specializations.
The answer is really simple: try something new. Choose randomly, go on a hunch, put yourself out there.
Have you managed to find decent employment in al of those areas? If so, why worry?
Why not try to accept you are who you are, and apparently this is part of who you are currently. It seems to work out fine (if it does), so no need to worry.
Follow the Döpamine. I listen to my brain very carefully, and when it shows the slightest interest in anything, I pursue that interest. I have bad ADHD, and it’s the only thing that has ever really helped.
Was doing web & mobile dev. Went back to school for an MS and was able to score a more research oriented role after getting lucky getting an internship and then busting my butt to prove myself.
yes, i currently work on static type analysis for python, and i love it. i've always been interested in programming languages as a hobby - just trying out random languages, learning about new programming paradigms and ideas, reading up on interpreter and compiler design - and when i had a chance to join a language tooling team i jumped on it. i've enjoyed aspects of other jobs before but i think this is the first one i really love in the "not even thinking of looking elsewhere" sense.
You might find benefit to writing down your thoughts about each one of the previous occupations and see if there are any recognizable patterns that you can identify and address.
I did a lot of job-hopping the past few years looking for the right place to work, and I finally found it. I look for companies that respect work-life balance, don't want me to work too hard, and have excellent engineering culture that values high quality work and has managed to retain their senior employees. I deliver great work, they make money off of the code I ship, everybody is happy. I can crunch every once in a while but we all understand that it sucks and isn't a long-term strategy.
My father was a funeral director & coroner. He would NEVER claim he "loves what he does", but he used his career to build a life for him and his family. I look at my career the same way.
What do I ACTUALLY want to do? Develop video games, make music, write fiction. But nobody is shelling out for that, and even if they are, I'm not good enough at it to compete. I know if I pursued any of my passions, I would have to work much harder for much less pay, and be treated much more poorly by my employer. I know my limits and I know that I cannot thrive in a situation like that, I've done it before, no thanks.
Part of growing older is mourning the person you could have been. If I had a time machine, I would have stayed in better shape, practiced guitar more, invested my time more wisely. But I can't, and honestly my life has turned out pretty great by trusting my instincts.