Your comment is a day old already, but I'll reply anyway.
Can you elaborate what you mean with anxiety and distractedness?
I've switched from developer to product owner, and then back to developer after two years. The problems I'm having with my role came back instantly.
I'm anxious that I'm not good enough, taking too long for everything, not smart enough to understand complex existing code that I have to modify.
This anxiety alone keeps me from properly focusing on the job at hand. And the more time pressure there is, the worse my focus becomes, because I feel I have no time to understand everything properly and have to hurry, which only leads to a worse solution and more problems in the end.
Add to this the 'normal' distractions of working in an open plan office.
Listening to other people's experiences sometimes helps. Yesterday I watched Sandi Metz' talk "All the little things", and also reading about Clean Code in general, and about imposter syndrome sometimes help me think that it's not really my fault and that I'm at least an average developer.
Then again, I'm also prone to asking too much of myself and being overly ambitious, also with sports, nutrition, life in general, so I'm not really content with being an average developer.
But being 40 already, I feel like it's already too late to become really good at anything, when I have 20-year-old colleagues who are already presumably better than me, despite me having 10 years experience in various roles and companies.
And then there's so many things that I could improve in, systems architecture, frameworks, backend, frontend, databases, OOP principles, learning new languages etc, that I don't even know where to start and the whole endeavour seems futile already.
That's when I ponder quitting the dev role again and switching into something else, but how often can I do that before my CV looks like patchwork and nobody will hire me because they don't really know what role I'm actually qualified for?
That's my struggle, anyway. Having worked as a developer for quite some time, but not really feeling like one.
I think it's a running dialogue in the mind that I need to quiet. I have specific problems, but if I solved them a new set of things would arrive to my mind.
I appreciate reading your thoughts, I think there are a lot of universal problems there. With so many things to learn, I just remind myself of the Joel Spoelsky essay, fire and motion.
Thank you for your post, it really helps me a lot.
Can you elaborate what you mean with anxiety and distractedness?
I've switched from developer to product owner, and then back to developer after two years. The problems I'm having with my role came back instantly.
I'm anxious that I'm not good enough, taking too long for everything, not smart enough to understand complex existing code that I have to modify.
This anxiety alone keeps me from properly focusing on the job at hand. And the more time pressure there is, the worse my focus becomes, because I feel I have no time to understand everything properly and have to hurry, which only leads to a worse solution and more problems in the end.
Add to this the 'normal' distractions of working in an open plan office.
Listening to other people's experiences sometimes helps. Yesterday I watched Sandi Metz' talk "All the little things", and also reading about Clean Code in general, and about imposter syndrome sometimes help me think that it's not really my fault and that I'm at least an average developer.
Then again, I'm also prone to asking too much of myself and being overly ambitious, also with sports, nutrition, life in general, so I'm not really content with being an average developer.
But being 40 already, I feel like it's already too late to become really good at anything, when I have 20-year-old colleagues who are already presumably better than me, despite me having 10 years experience in various roles and companies.
And then there's so many things that I could improve in, systems architecture, frameworks, backend, frontend, databases, OOP principles, learning new languages etc, that I don't even know where to start and the whole endeavour seems futile already.
That's when I ponder quitting the dev role again and switching into something else, but how often can I do that before my CV looks like patchwork and nobody will hire me because they don't really know what role I'm actually qualified for?
That's my struggle, anyway. Having worked as a developer for quite some time, but not really feeling like one.