Ask HN: Getting over Burnout with Imposter Syndrome
Some background on me: I've reached a point where I quit my job of 11 years without notice due to sheer burnout. Shortly after I was hospitalized for a bit.
I'm trying to recover, getting back into healthy routines.
I'm also suffering quite a bit of imposter syndrome due to not having a 4 year degree.
I'm suffering from a lot of analysis paralysis trying to select a side project for a portfolio. Once I decide, I get another layer on how I'm going to implement it. And eventually it winds up feeling like I'm better off not doing any of them.
In my last job I was responsible for a mission critical service in the form of an apache module. Which I can attest is a rather hostile environment. So I'm pretty battle tested in the c/c++ arena.
In my spare time I've reveled in physically based rendering. So I've got enough trig & calc in my head to be dangerous.
My asks of HN:
- What are interviews like these days? How important is it to have a visable portfolio of working projects?
- How much of the AI hype is HN nerds nerding out about AI versus actually implementing AI, versus gluing AI apis together?
- How do you keep yourselves engaged with pet projects? My github is a field of projects 1/4 of the way completed before I lost steam on them.
I need some hope that future employment is possible.
I hope you're well on your way to recovery. I've got a few ideas I can contribute to:
> I'm also suffering quite a bit of imposter syndrome due to not having a 4-year degree.
A degree isn't a finite indicator of a person's knowledge, capability, or achievements. 39 months after getting mine, I still haven't landed my first paid tech job to enter the industry, and I don't see that happening anytime soon, if ever. Granted, I haven't tried much in the past year, but it wasn't any better when I did.
I once rejected the notion outright because, with obvious bias as a college student, I felt it invalidated everything I'd worked toward. But it's become apparent my degree meant nothing in the industry.
On the contrary, you got a job and remained employed for 11 years. That piece of paper, or the lack thereof, didn't make a difference in what you experienced and accomplished.
> I'm suffering from a lot of analysis paralysis trying to select a side project for a portfolio. How do you keep yourselves engaged with pet projects? My github is a field of projects 1/4 of the way completed before I lost steam on them.
Personally I... don't. I started one of my projects back in August 2024. I made a homepage, UI, and a basic database schema... and then I blanked out on how to progress and hardly touched it for 11 months.
I got some wind in my sails again in July - almost a full year later. A whole year of new experiences and insights, inside and out of the tech domain, led to better practices and features never conceived the first time around. So even if you're not coding or even looking at your project, who's to say you're not progressing with it?
I read of this phenomenon in innovation called the S-curve, where advancements appear to occur rapidly in a short time due to a change in tech, paradigm, or process. Perhaps the next burst of progress simply requires time to find and cultivate through many seemingly insignificant insights gained from other experiences. No point in rushing through - if I'm not working on it, it's not the right time.
That's also why I have like a billion (okay, more like 3-5) projects going. I hit a brick wall on one, so I work on something else where I have a clearer vision. Eventually, something triggers a flash of inspiration, and with a fresh mind, I can return and hit that burst of progress in the S-curve again. Eventually, I'll have many projects with lots of progress due to the staggered curves.
Conceptualizing a whole project is daunting, too. Too many bells and whistles lead to a paralyzing spiral of overthinking and self-doubt. Everything has to be perfect and fleshed out. But the mantra of "done is better than perfect" rings true. Once there's a solid foundation, it's much easier to incrementally improve the project, rather than trying to get it right in one go, and eventually reach what was envisioned.
I find it important to remember why I started a project in the first place. With my own imposter syndrome, I always gravitated toward doing what was considered best practices to be a "real software engineer." I could never do right by myself, so I overcomplicated the tech stack and implementations to hell, following the words of others, trying to prove myself. If it wasn't complex and grueling, I wasn't doing anything worthwhile.
However, I eventually reminded myself that the code is the least important part of my software project.
I never started a project to have code, but to address a personally close issue or fulfill an itch. If the project addresses that goal, then why does it matter if the load times aren't perfectly optimized? Why does it matter if it doesn't scale to millions of users when I haven't even gotten 1 yet? Who cares if it's not "impressive" enough to hypothetical people I've never seen?
Implementation has its considerations, but shouldn't be to the point of blocking all progress. Certainly not to where working on the project isn't fulfilling anymore. So, sometimes, after a long paralysis, I yell at myself mentally to, quote, "Just freakin' do it already, for the love of everything holy, just write the fudging thing- [insert more aggressive self-yelling]", overriding my thoughts to do without that pesky thinking.
But yeah, those are my accounts with those challenges. Good luck wherever the future takes you!