Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Search - "zero motivation"
-
>be me
>drop out of uni studying civil engineering
>"self-taught" "web programmer"
>start freelancing in 2010
>Make money, feels good man
>clients keep me busy, feel important
>Code just for the fun of it
>be 2019. Married, code to make ends meet
>lose all interest
>mere sight of the ide makes me want to bash the screen
>have zero motivation
>never get any projects done
>become broke af
>look at old friends on fb. They are "Something".
>look at real software engineers and programmers with education
>realize I am an imposter
>start dropping all projects and studying theory
>become more broke
>start taking "motivation pills" to just start working again
>lose all motivation and pissed at all the real programmers and engineers for their success
>be me on May 20, 2019 at 2:56 AM
Yep, this is the end.29 -
It all started in the year 2013.
I was 13 years old back then. I was a fan of Minecraft and so I learned how to setup a bukkit server and ran it. Installing plugins was fun, because I could be a "hacker" and change the configs.
After a while, (~2014), when I was in the 9th grade of elementary school, I saw Unity. A free game engine. Of course, me being a 14 year old I was intrigued and so I downloaded it, made an account and a new project. I had absolutely ZERO knowledge of programming. Didn't even know what languages existed, so i resorted to presets and poorly put together characters + weapons.
After some time fiddling around with Unity, I've gotten a hang of the basics (not programming related).
My actual programming started when I started High School (year 2016). It's a computer engineering school and for the first part of the year, I've learned from my teacher in C# (Console.WriteLine/ReadLine/Loops/Variables). At the second semester I started to gain interest and motivation to program at home. I did the programs we made in school (random number guessing game) but better. Improved it, added colors.
After that, I started developing in Unity - Actually learning something and having the ability to develop something all by myself. It keeps driving me on. In the second year (the year I'm visiting right now) I tought myself HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP. I'm very happy and also can't wait to discover and learn new things in these languages!
My latest project was an Android application for my father that he asked for (it calculated the price of the 3D print he would make).
// Sorry for the long post!
EDIT: Forgot to add a fun little detail. All my classmates make fun of me because I program so much !
Also: Tabs > Spaces8 -
zero motivation for anything, i just want sit outside in the sun at the lake with ice cream and not in front of a screen. And not being bothered by the new vacum cleaner loud deep learning rig of the data science department in this open floor office.
I fucking forgot my noise cancling headphones. FML2 -
As a developer, I constantly feel like I'm lagging behind.
Long rant incoming.
Whenever I join a new company or team, I always feel like I'm the worst developer there. No matter how much studying I do, it never seems to be enough.
Feeling inadequate is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with a severe inferiority complex for most of my life. But starting a career as a developer launched that shit into overdrive.
About 10 years ago, I started my college education as a developer. At first things were fine, I felt equal to my peers. It lasted about a day or two, until I saw a guy working on a website in notepad. Nothing too special of course, but back then as a guy whose scripting experience did not go much farther than modifying some .ini files, it blew my mind. It went downhill from there.
What followed were several stressful, yet strangely enjoyable, years in college where I constantly felt like I was lagging behind, even though my grades were acceptable. On top of college stress, I had a number of setbacks, including the fallout of divorcing parents, childhood pets, family and friends dying, little to no money coming in and my mother being in a coma for a few weeks. She's fine now, thankfully.
Through hard work, a bit of luck, and a girlfriend who helped me to study, I managed to graduate college in 2012 and found a starter job as an Asp.Net developer.
My knowledge on the topic was limited, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good mentor and some great colleagues. To teach myself, I launched a programming tutorial channel. All in all, life was good. I had a steady income, a relationship that was already going for a few years, some good friends and I was learning a lot.
Then, 3 months in, I got diagnosed with cancer.
This ruined pretty much everything I had built up so far. I spend the next 6 months in a hospital, going through very rough chemo.
When I got back to working again, my previous Asp.Net position had been (understandably) given to another colleague. While I was grateful to the company that I could come back after such a long absence, the only position available was that of a junior database manager. Not something I studied for and not something I wanted to do each day neither.
Because I was grateful for the company's support, I kept working there for another 12 - 18 months. It didn't go well. The number of times I was able to do C# jobs can be counted on both hands, while new hires got the assignments, I regularly begged my PM for.
On top of that, the stress and anxiety that going through cancer brings comes AFTER the treatment. During the treatment, the only important things were surviving and spending my potentially last days as best as I could. Those months working was spent mostly living in fear and having to come to terms with the fact that my own body tried to kill me. It caused me severe anger issues which in time cost me my relationship and some friendships.
Keeping up to date was hard in these times. I was not honing my developer skills and studying was not something I'd regularly do. 'Why spend all this time working if tomorrow the cancer might come back?'
After much soul-searching, I quit that job and pursued a career in consultancy. At first things went well. There was not a lot to do so I could do a lot of self-study. A month went by like that. Then another. Then about 4 months into the new job, still no work was there to be done. My motivation quickly dwindled.
To recuperate the costs, the company had me do shit jobs which had little to nothing to do with coding like creating labels or writing blogs. Zero coding experience required. Although I was getting a lot of self-study done, my amount of field experience remained pretty much zip.
My prayers asking for work must have been heard because suddenly the sales department started finding clients for me. Unfortunately, as salespeople do, they looked only at my theoretical years of experience, most of which were spent in a hospital or not doing .Net related tasks.
Ka-ching. Here's a developer with four years of experience. Have fun.
Those jobs never went well. My lack of experience was always an issue, no matter how many times I told the salespeople not to exaggerate my experience. In the end, I ended up resigning there too.
After all the issues a consultancy job brings, I went out to find a job I actually wanted to do. I found a .Net job in an area little traffic. I even warned them during my intake that my experience was limited, and I did my very best every day that I worked here.
It didn't help. I still feel like the worst developer on the team, even superseded by someone who took photography in college. Now on Monday, they want me to come in earlier for a talk.
Should I just quit being a developer? I really want to make this work, but it seems like every turn I take, every choice I make, stuff just won't improve. Any suggestions on how I can get out of this psychological hell?6 -
Not sure if you'd call this an insecurity but regardless; frontend.
Much of the stuff I develop is meant to be user/privacy friendly.
Like, at the moment I'm developing an end-to-end encrypted notes web application. The backend is a fucking breeze, the frontend is hell for me. I'm managing mostly but for example, I need to implement a specific thing/feature right now and while the backend would take me about 15-30 minutes, I've been only just thinking about how I'm going to do this frontend wise for the past few fucking hours.
My JavaScript skills are quite alright, html is manageable, css only the basics.
And before people tell me to just learn it; I. Fucking. Hate. Frontend. Development. My motivation for this is below zero.
But, most of the shit I write depends on frontend regardless!3 -
Just went through a breakup. 7 months pretty much wasted. Felt like whiplash when I realized everything was a lie.
The worst part is my motivation is zero now, and I have projects and deadlines and hopes and dreams that all just seem fake now.
Just like opening the fridge at 1am to find nothing, and then again at 1:05am, and then again at 1:10am, hoping for something to be different, I open vim, then :q, then run ls about 5 times to see if anything's magically changed, then browse HN for a few minutes, open vim again, close it, etc. Motivation is zero.5 -
Have you ever worked on a project, for which you felt absolutely zero motivation, and every fiber in your body opposed any productive effort on it? What kind of project was that, and how did it end up?8
-
A brain whenever someone is working on a project:
Does the person I control have motivation? If so, I remember the person of another task so he/she/helicopter can't work on it.
Does the person I control have time?
If so, I set the person's motivation level to zero.
After this extremely accurate research I think we are better of by removing our brain.
BTW, I publish this research here under the MIT license.3 -
I always want to work on a bazillion side-projects but don't have enough time because college, work, etc. Now that I have all the time in the world to work on side-projects I have zero motivation and just waste my time on YouTube.
This sucks.9 -
I've been a frontend engineer at 6 companies for the last 10 years. Both big and small companies currently at the largest I've ever worked for. I'm totally over it. Maybe burnt out is the term. I have zero motivation to do any work or coding. I'm not a lazy person. I love working, solving problems, learning new things. I'm just sick of what I do. I used to love following all the newest tech trends, following devs on twitter, checking hacker news and creating side projects. Now I feel like my job has lost all that joy and excitement. I work remote and have been for the past 3 years. I wonder how much of that, not having any social feedback and interaction around the job has attributed to me feeling like this. All the JS frameworks suck. PR reviews, process, requirements; I'm just tired of everything. Has anyone else experienced this? If so, what did you do? Were you able to find the passion for programming again?14
-
What do devs here do when lack of motivation strikes hard? I have lots of projects in Swift and RN in progress but zero drive to touch them.
Asking for a friend ... 😂7 -
Motivation * Time = Result.
But anything times zero is still nothing.
Why do I never have one or the other at the moment?!
5 month old son means I usually don't have any time but we've got him into a routine where he's in bed around 7pm. Yet after that I don't have any motivation or energy to work on projects.
Before December I was super motivated. Not sure what's happened but it's infuriating. -
Serverless and death of Programming?!
_TL;DR_
I hate serverless at work, love it at home, what's your advice?
- Is this the way things be from now on, suck it up.
- This will mature soon and Code will be king again.
- Look for legacy code work on big Java monolith or something.
- Do front-end which is not yet ruined.
- Start my own stuff.
_Long Rant_
Once one mechanic told me "I become mechanic to escape electrical engineering, but with modern cars...". I'm having similar feelings about programming now.
_Serverless Won_
All of the sudden everyone is doing Serverless, so I looked into it too, accidentally joined the company that does enterprise scale Serverless mostly.
First of all, I like serverless (AWS Lambda in specific) and what it enables - it makes 100% sense and 100% business sense for 80% of time.
So all is great? Not so much... I love it as independent developer, as it enables me to quickly launch products I would have been hesitant due to effort required before. However I hate it in my work - to be continued bellow...
_I'm fake engineer_
I love programming! I love writing code. I'm not really an engineer in the sense that I don't like hustle with tools and spending days fixing obscure environment issues, I rather strive for clean environment where there's nothing between me and code. Of course world is not perfect and I had to tolerate some amounts of hustle like Java and it's application servers, JVM issues, tools, environments... JS tools (although pain is not even close to Java), then it was Docker-ization abuse everywhere, but along the way it was more or less programming at the center. Code was the king, devOps and business skills become very important to developers but still second to code. Distinction here is not that I can't or don't do engineering, its that it requires effort, while coding is just natural thing that I can do with zero motivation.
_Programming is Dead?!_
Why I hate Serverless at work? Because it's a mess - I had a glimpse of this mess with microservices, but this is way worse...
On business/social level:
- First of all developers will be operations now and it's uphill battle to push for separation on business level and also infrastructure specifics are harder to isolate. I liked previous dev-devops collaboration before - everyone doing the thing that are better at.
- Devs now have to be good at code, devOps and business in many organisations.
- Shift of power balance - Code is no longer the king among developers and I'm seeing it now. Code quality drops, junior devs have too hard of the time to learn proper coding practices while AWS/Terraform/... is the main productivity factors. E.g. same code guru on code reviews in old days - respectable performer and source of Truth, now - rambling looser who couldn't get his lambda configured properly.
On not enjoying work:
- Lets start with fact - Code, Terraform, AWS, Business mess - you have to deal with all of it and with close to equal % amount of time now, I want to code mostly, at least 50% of time.
- Everything is in the air ("cloud computing" after all) - gone are the days of starting application and seeing results. Everything holds on assumptions that will only be tested in actual environment. Zero feedback loop - I assume I get this request/SQS message/..., I assume I have configured all the things correctly in sea of Terraform configs and modules from other repos - SQS queues, environment variables... I assume I taken in consideration tens of different terraform configurations of other lambdas/things that might be affected...
It's a such a pleasure now, after the work to open my code editor and work on my personal React.js app...2 -
I was originally employed as a Full Stack Python Developer. But this year so far, I only did operations. Now I also got a project to host the legacy Python 2.7 Plone/Zope applications of another company entirely on our infrastructure. This means, that I'll do hardly anything else from now on, i.e. no programming. It was already decided that we'll do the project, and it landed on my desk when everything was fixed.
So I'll quit my job to build my own company with some friends, but I can only leave after a two month notice period. So I have to do the project anyway, for which I feel absolutely zero motivation.
I wanted to become a good programmer, but in my last two jobs I just was a mediocre Ops guy. This is because most other programmers would make even worse Ops guys then me.7