3 ms·

Indeed, I am feeling that my lifetime may not be enough to learn all the things I am required to. The general feeling I have is that if I do not do this effort

Indeed, I am feeling that my lifetime may not be enough to learn all the things I am required to. The general feeling I have is that if I do not do this effort of gaining expertise, I am not fit for life. As a bit of context, I have been applying for work for about a year now as a software developer in the DACH (german-speaking EU), to be able to eke out a proper living and so far, every job inquiry, every human contact I have made boils down to "me not being good enough" in some respect. Even though I am sure to perform well, given standard compensation and a reasonable work environment. Everything starting from my education, my life, to my work experience has come under scrutiny and has become more fragmented and harder to coagulate as a coherent story as a result of this constant requirement for me needing "higher expertise to qualify". Over the course of my life, I have encountered hundreds of situations where as a result of my own lack of expertise in some domain, I was oblivious and even sometimes happy to accept completely unacceptable results, bad products/workmanship or horrible relationships. As a result of bad experiences thereafter, I found myself studying how to manage things on my own, as consistently endangering my very own life didn't appeal to me. So I feel myself pressured into studying more JS frameworks, more foreign languages, more programming languages, more engineering, more medicine, more chemistry, more psychology, more design science, more product science, more construction science, more everything until I achieve a level of reliable expertise. At the same time, I am painfully aware of the fact that on my deathbed I will heavily resent the fact I had to spend all this time on personal expertise when probably "we could have had nice things" instead. To be honest, I feel resentment over the fact right now.

scarecrowbob 4y ago
"The general feeling I have is that if I do not do this effort of gaining expertise, I am not fit for life." That's really the more pressing issues that you need to work on. We all have blind spots about how things or people work, and we're all in a condition where "good enough" is almost always "good enough." If it helps, the slow process of remaining curious and caring about the people and work you encounter that will build expertise, and that's a thing that takes decades to show itself. And while we can do many things quite expertly in life, we can only do a few of these at a time. What you might understand is that, to take just one domain, people looking to hire programmers are looking for is someone who knows about a certain domain, so anything that you're doing outside of whatever narrow field you're discussing with a single person doesn't really matter as far as many people are concerned. T0 the person hiring a junior JS front-end developer, the chemistry skills isn't often relevant. Further, there is very little learning that a person can do outside of a job. That is a problem, but the way I personally solved it was to lower my expectations for jobs until I got one, and then keep looking for new ones until I found a position I have been quite happy in. However, all that is outside of the problem you are describing: simply being a person is enough to make you "fit for life". You don't need to be consistently grinding on learning new things if that's not an end-in-itself for you. Simply being good enough at one or two things is what almost all of us have to be okay with, and so what you might consider is which specific issues leading you to feeling this resentment. Are your expectations unreasonable? Are the people you're dealing with assholes? I suspect that answer to either or both of those questions my be yes; the fortunate thing is that either of those are easier and more useful to deal with than, say, becoming an expert physicist.
sdwr 4y ago
I'm looking for a dev job now after a few years off... it's painful! I put my hope into each application, hearing nothing back most of the time stings. And all the while time is ticking. My instinct is to go learn more, make another project, stall it out and come back when I'm better prepared. I can't really see what one more project is going to do for me though. What feedback are you getting? Is it ghosting that you're interpreting as not being good enough?

scarecrowbob 4y ago

"The general feeling I have is that if I do not do this effort of gaining expertise, I am not fit for life." That's really the more pressing issues that you need to work on. We all have blind spots about how things or people work, and we're all in a condition where "good enough" is almost always "good enough." If it helps, the slow process of remaining curious and caring about the people and work you encounter that will build expertise, and that's a thing that takes decades to show itself. And while we can do many things quite expertly in life, we can only do a few of these at a time. What you might understand is that, to take just one domain, people looking to hire programmers are looking for is someone who knows about a certain domain, so anything that you're doing outside of whatever narrow field you're discussing with a single person doesn't really matter as far as many people are concerned. T0 the person hiring a junior JS front-end developer, the chemistry skills isn't often relevant. Further, there is very little learning that a person can do outside of a job. That is a problem, but the way I personally solved it was to lower my expectations for jobs until I got one, and then keep looking for new ones until I found a position I have been quite happy in. However, all that is outside of the problem you are describing: simply being a person is enough to make you "fit for life". You don't need to be consistently grinding on learning new things if that's not an end-in-itself for you. Simply being good enough at one or two things is what almost all of us have to be okay with, and so what you might consider is which specific issues leading you to feeling this resentment. Are your expectations unreasonable? Are the people you're dealing with assholes? I suspect that answer to either or both of those questions my be yes; the fortunate thing is that either of those are easier and more useful to deal with than, say, becoming an expert physicist.

sdwr 4y ago

I'm looking for a dev job now after a few years off... it's painful! I put my hope into each application, hearing nothing back most of the time stings. And all the while time is ticking. My instinct is to go learn more, make another project, stall it out and come back when I'm better prepared. I can't really see what one more project is going to do for me though. What feedback are you getting? Is it ghosting that you're interpreting as not being good enough?