amozoss

Been in a rut and burned out. Here's what has been helping

1. Exercise, keeps my energy up.

2. Wake up at the same time (helps me fall asleep at night)

3. Make a plan the night before for 1 thing I want to accomplish the next day.

I also found the book Feeling Good by David D. Burns MD helpful. He has several ways to retrain your inner voice to recognize when you're self sabotaging.

Maybe they were an intern

I do feel like it's rather mild most of the time.

As I said, I don't really understand it myself. It's very strange to lay awake at night though. I feel like it's triggered by stress, but like... not stress I feel like I even care about. Sometimes my body decides it cares to be stressed but my mind doesn't care.

I'm probably just normal and didn't prepare enough /shrug

Thanks for your perspective.

I like what you're saying in that I should stop worrying about being someone I'm not. Show up and be honest about what I am good at stop focusing on all the puzzles that might show up.

My interview today I felt went a lot better. I at least solved the problem, although it was super easy... but so were the others... I just felt unprepared (and hadn't slept), so I think my brain left me, maybe?

Today I at least had a plan: 1. Write a simple test case first 2. Get the most basic version working 3. iterate from there

It's what I do everyday. I just wish my brain would have remembered that for all the other ones.

My favorite interview in the past was when the company took a ticket off the backlog and I asked questions to solve it. Aka they hired me for a half day.

They were available to ask questions, but mostly I was there figuring it out by myself.

In this case, I had never used golang before, but by the end of the half day, I had a solution I was happy with.

Sure they took a risk giving me access to the entire codebase... But as a tool to assess my ability it was top notch.

Later, when I was working there, that same ticket got prioritized and it ended up taking 3 or 4 days to solve by other team mates (my solution wasn't quite right).

Thanks for the insight.

I've handled several high stress situations on the job. E.g. servers are down, customers are pinging support. Everyone doesn't know what to do.

I've solved problems several times in that environment. I have the battle scars and I'm used to doing that.

I am much more comfortable in a giant legacy codebase that I've never used before, trying to fix a critical bug that is losing the company thousands of dollars per minute than I am during these live coding sessions.

I realize tons of it has to do with practice so I plan to do that.

It's just confusing to have an entire decade of high performance (with references to prove it) to be judged on how well I can dance with a funny hat on.

I'm not whining, I'll do the work. I just don't have time right at this moment, if that makes sense.

I'm lucky in that I don't actually need a job yet.

Hence the reason I decided to go in pretty much cold-turkey. I wrongly assumed a decade of shipping 5 SaaS products from scratch (some completely by myself), that have real revenue, and thousands of users, sometimes millions.

They only want to see me dance with a funny hat on

Nothing else seems to matter.

I mean I get it, they need to screen people.

Is there not another way to screen people though that doesn't amplify my anxiety?

Thanks for the response, I really appreciate it.

For the most part, I've learned to live with it, but it has greatly been amplified by these interviews lately.

I've also had it happen to me when I'm on business calls when I'm acting on behalf of the business to make a good impression.

And of course, public speaking, but I feel like that's pretty normal.

I like what you're saying though, just knowing there is a backup plan when things aren't going as planned, in and of itself is treatment.