Motivation, inspiration, feeling "behind"

Hey Lainons, I've been writing C#soykaf for my dayjob for the last couple of years while still trying to study more interesting languages (CL, racket, haskell) and concepts like compiler design, combinatorial logic, graphics programming in my spare time. Feeling more than a little burnt out at this point. Feel like the dayjob snuffed out the passionate interest I had in CS/mathematics. There's so little time to go as deep as I want to. How do you find motivation to continue working on hobby projects, studying math, studying the actual "science" behind "computer science"? How do you make the time for it? From where do you pull inspiration from when you just want to quit?

>>27750 Do all your reading in the WC, but eat no grains or fibers and leave a stack of books in there. Your reading speed will increase by 10x and you'll find yourself doing problems while you wait. Wolfram swears by this and there's evidence Feynman did it too.

>>27773 >Wolfram swears by this Gonna need a source on this. Reading on the toilet is fine; you can end up with hemorrhoids if you're in the habit of straining absentmindedly tho

If you don't like your job anymore, why don't you quit it?

>>27779 >If you don't like your job anymore, why don't you quit it? Yes, that might be the best option.

>>27782 >>27784 So, I've been thinking about this. The most obvious reason is that I have a house, and bills to pay. I switched jobs in the last year (same field and basically the same work) to get higher pay and guaranteed remote work. If I quit then I'll either need to get a different job or figure out how to make money on my own. I do not want to work another dayjob for someone else even if it's in a language I think is cool. Selling my labor is just a way to pay my bills. Willing to hear otherwise though. Perhaps I should have made a thread on building up side income?

>>27750 i have the same issue as you, (and even the same dayjob C#, but more interested in CL or haskell and other hobbies). Maybe struggle through it, and mix in some things in your day job that might be a little more interesting, like doing builds in F#/Fake or automating your own little utilities in common lisp. Other than that you can try for early retirement (look up early retirement extreme for a crazy example of frugal living), and try making money from your hobby interests. (i'm pretty much there, but i experimented with having no job and it was lonely, kinda sad really, but i need to build something social up that i can do outside of work) Don't forget to have some physical/non tech hobbies like dancing, music or exercise though.

>From where do you pull inspiration from when you just want to quit? is that not motivation enough? you dont want to end up doing this forever, right? if you want to get out you have to build the knowledge and skills that will be your ticket out.

>>27796 If you just switched jobs, you probably shouldn't switch again. Just keep working while building the skills for a job you want.

I was listening to an interview with Andrew Kelly, the creator of Zig, and he mentioned he used to work for a year or two to save enough money to quit work, then spend as much time as he could without a dayjob working on whatever floated in his mind (zig in this case), when he ran out of money he looked for another job; repeat. You could do this although you'd either have to have a really good salary or be very frugal (maybe if you don't have to pay rent). Honestly I'm a bit in the same situation as you, I ended up doing frontend development for my dayjob and I despise it, and the worst thing is that I'm also in college so I barely have ANY time left to spend on my own projects, because after 6 hours of work and 5 hours of classes I still have study, eat and sleep.

>>28293 > he mentioned he used to work for a year or two to save enough money to quit work, then spend as much time as he could without a dayjob working on whatever floated in his mind (zig in this case), when he ran out of money he looked for another job; repeat. Been following roughly the same pattern, it's more comfortable that going wageslave all the time. There's no real point in having loads more cash than you need when it comes at the cost of not having the time to even use it on anything worthwhile.

>>28293 I put myself in a load of debt for some property so it would take some time to save enough but that's not a bad idea. I've got some long-term ambitions for the place I bought which will open the door to side-income. Good luck sticking through college; I didn't and it took me longer to get where I am (but I have more appreciation for QA engineers than most software engineers). >>28295 How long have you been doing this? How does the re-hiring process work for you? Do you work in software or do you just pick up a dayjob in whatever?

>>28295 >>28295 Do you not have problems getting rehired? Are companies not concerned about the gaps in your resume? I would've guess they'd use it to low ball you into accepting a lower offer

>>28400 >gaps in your resume https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ufwxkurKKg

>>28400 >I would've guess they'd use it to low ball you into accepting a lower offer Lookup the going rates before interview, helps with not falling for obvious scams. >Are companies not concerned about the gaps in your resume? Vaguely, but working on personal projects with money you saved up isn't exactly damning. Helps when homelab-ing is one of your hobbies. The thing to consider is that if they care, they won't even answer you back to start with, so the ones that do respond are willing to at least consider it. >>28430 tl;dr would've been appreciated. Exaggerating NDAs is helpful. Pandemic also makes it a lot easier to explain away. I had money saved up and didn't feel like endangering my life for no reason. I'm a programmer, not a soldier. I also have a feeling this is a USA-centric thing. I didn't have to explain away much at all in my previous interviews.

>>28464 Another thing. That example about remote work. Did he not read the fuarrrking employment contract before signing? That's soykaf you get on paper.

I'm slowly devising two strategies that solve this problem. # A) moving toward per-project gigs with gaps inbetween - 2: outperforming day-to-day work, ie clearing up the work backlog and then doing a project on my own while waiting for more work #2 can work because my average hourly rate is steadily growing enough for me to sometimes go a couple of days without anything to do, both approaches take into account context switches between various projects of varying sizes.

>>28526 I do tech for a giant non-tech company. I'm routinely outperforming my peers with little effort, which leaves me plenty of time for doing whatever I want. Last week I probably worked 10 hours but I don't feel bad because I wrote some automation that saved the equivalent of my monthly salary, every month, forever. I wrote another program that automated an entire team's tedious work (I don't think they're that happy though).

>>28649 Brilliant, anon I am glad that works for you. After making that post I'd started outpacing my day-to-day work again (something I used to do back in the day but just to prove myself) and pretty soon I started working on my own stuff for like half a day before even realising I'm still waiting for work. I can see my interest in programming has gone back to normal plus I'm starting to suspect I am even more creative now. Even the quality of my work, at work, seems to be higher. It takes a bit of organization in order not to lose energy in switching contexts but if you do it well it works perfectly. One thing in my case though is that a 9-5 day structure is lost, since I bill my clients by tracked time some days I work the whole day with little breaks & some days I almost don't work at all - which I feel is even more natural for programming.

>>28673 I have a salary job but my pace of working is similar, I'll have weeks that I'll do barely anything and other weeks where I willingly put in 12 hours a day, furious coding.

>>28673 >>28526 Status report: discovered that while I can no-problem outpace bugfix work, feature requests can be such meticulous and long-lasting work (and tedious, obviously) that all the momentum you'd gained just dies out. A possible solution to this, then, would be to automate feature development. One approach is that of the github copilot - simply match similar logic and suggest autocompletion. Will report again if I stumble on something there.

>>27750 This exactly how I feel. Also looking for answers. Will continue to monitor this thread. Great insights so far.

>>27750 >How do you make the time for it? I have no life or close friends. I should probably kms. >From where do you pull inspiration from when you just want to quit? I don't; i quit when i want to. Okay, caffiene helps me focus sometimes.

>>27750 If your hobbies are really interesting and you can live really frugally you could setup a patreon or make videos about it on youtube.

>>27797 Not OP but >Don't forget to have some physical/non tech hobbies like dancing, music or exercise though. maybe i will. well... sedentary are comfy but worth to try a bit i guess.

I'm probably going to leave programming as a hobby and seek work/education from another field. >>27779 >>27773 > reading in the WC Disgusting. Just like using your phone in the WC. >>28293 >work for a year or two to save enough money to quit work, then spend as much time as he could without a dayjob working on whatever floated in his mind (zig in this case), when he ran out of money he looked for another job; repeat. That's great advice.