Lots of great comments here and on the gist. My 2¢:
I graduated CS in 2000, and from 2007-2010 worked at Google. Towards the end of that time I was struggling hard to get anything done; even just dragging myself into the office was difficult. I began to believe I really was an imposter: good at programming contests, interviewed well, but incapable of actually accomplishing anything. That spring I quit, and spent the summer volunteered at a dance camp, where I worked 12h a day doing mostly manual labour. I had never been happier or more hard-working; the only thing that could dent my productivity in the slightest was if the kitchen ran low on grub.
I seriously doubted I would ever go back to working with software again. I had no desire to do it whatsoever; indeed, I had lost confidence in my ability to hack any kind of actual job.
For the next seven years I did a lot of dancing, traded my skills as a photographer for passes & expenses attend events I wanted to go to, volunteered doing manual labour and A/V work in the summers, and eventually started teaching dancing locally. The latter at least brought in a little income, though not nearly enough.
During those years I did (checks spreadsheet) a mere 18 hours of coding spread over a dozen days - mostly writing small tools to automate my photo editing workflow.
Then, in 2016, a good friend of mine proposed to more or less create a job for me, working on what might be described as a modern rewrite of LambadMOO. It was my dream job, offered to me on a plate, but I wasn't sure I dare take it. Fortunately he didn't take no for an answer, started back in 2017 and three years later I am doing better than I have in a long, long time.
Sure: I'm still a lazy bugger (here I am on HN instead of coding!) and there are days when I don't get much done. And I'm more like a 1x programmer. But I love this project, have worked harder on it than anything else I've ever had as a job, and am so grateful to have been reminded how much I enjoy programming (at least when I am working on something that I care about).
Because of the economic situation my contract is likely to end in the autumn. I am genuinely doubtful about finding something else as fun and motivating as this has been—but I no longer worry that no tech work will ever interest me again, or that I'm no longer capable of feeding myself with my technical skills.
I graduated CS in 2000, and from 2007-2010 worked at Google. Towards the end of that time I was struggling hard to get anything done; even just dragging myself into the office was difficult. I began to believe I really was an imposter: good at programming contests, interviewed well, but incapable of actually accomplishing anything. That spring I quit, and spent the summer volunteered at a dance camp, where I worked 12h a day doing mostly manual labour. I had never been happier or more hard-working; the only thing that could dent my productivity in the slightest was if the kitchen ran low on grub.
I seriously doubted I would ever go back to working with software again. I had no desire to do it whatsoever; indeed, I had lost confidence in my ability to hack any kind of actual job.
For the next seven years I did a lot of dancing, traded my skills as a photographer for passes & expenses attend events I wanted to go to, volunteered doing manual labour and A/V work in the summers, and eventually started teaching dancing locally. The latter at least brought in a little income, though not nearly enough.
During those years I did (checks spreadsheet) a mere 18 hours of coding spread over a dozen days - mostly writing small tools to automate my photo editing workflow.
Then, in 2016, a good friend of mine proposed to more or less create a job for me, working on what might be described as a modern rewrite of LambadMOO. It was my dream job, offered to me on a plate, but I wasn't sure I dare take it. Fortunately he didn't take no for an answer, started back in 2017 and three years later I am doing better than I have in a long, long time.
Sure: I'm still a lazy bugger (here I am on HN instead of coding!) and there are days when I don't get much done. And I'm more like a 1x programmer. But I love this project, have worked harder on it than anything else I've ever had as a job, and am so grateful to have been reminded how much I enjoy programming (at least when I am working on something that I care about).
Because of the economic situation my contract is likely to end in the autumn. I am genuinely doubtful about finding something else as fun and motivating as this has been—but I no longer worry that no tech work will ever interest me again, or that I'm no longer capable of feeding myself with my technical skills.