I'm glad you made the commitment to change something in your life. Your previous job, and perhaps the way you approached it, was obviously not healthy.
1) The degree anxiety is understandable, but just in your head. I run a comp sci program for high schoolers as an replacement for universities. They don't get a degree but must learn how to signal they are capable. It's a skillset that most people don't learn until later in their careers. In your case, you likely have accumulated a number of valuable skills in your previous job. Since you haven't switched jobs, you haven't had much practice in communicating your skills to potential employers. Most engineers I know hate this, but it's sales/persuasion, and it's unavoidable and beneficial for you in the long-run. Take the perspective that you don't have a skill issue, but a signaling issue.
2) RE: AI - I would learn the fundamentals, only if you're interested in the engineering aspect of it, and implement some toy projects just to keep learning. Try vibe coding, it's not going to kill you haha. Learn about its benefits and limitations so you can at least comment intelligently if it comes up.
3) Shipping projects is hard psychologically unless you've developed discipline or there are other constraints/deadlines. If I were you, I'd work on projects in a more social manner. That means building with other engineers, talking to people who would benefit from what you're building, or just helping out existing communities. The socialization would help keep your spirits up. It's also the best way to build relationships and open other opportunities.
4) Hiring/recruiting is going through big changes now, partially due to the rise of AI generated applications. Building trust via other channels is going to be much more important moving forward. We've had to more or less turn off all inbound hiring and rely on our vetted professional networks due to the massive glut of applications. Job search is brutal now, but it's just as bad on the hiring side. We're going through changes were the old methods don't work anymore, and the new haven't been figured out yet.
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!
I'm glad you made the commitment to change something in your life. Your previous job, and perhaps the way you approached it, was obviously not healthy.
1) The degree anxiety is understandable, but just in your head. I run a comp sci program for high schoolers as an replacement for universities. They don't get a degree but must learn how to signal they are capable. It's a skillset that most people don't learn until later in their careers. In your case, you likely have accumulated a number of valuable skills in your previous job. Since you haven't switched jobs, you haven't had much practice in communicating your skills to potential employers. Most engineers I know hate this, but it's sales/persuasion, and it's unavoidable and beneficial for you in the long-run. Take the perspective that you don't have a skill issue, but a signaling issue.
2) RE: AI - I would learn the fundamentals, only if you're interested in the engineering aspect of it, and implement some toy projects just to keep learning. Try vibe coding, it's not going to kill you haha. Learn about its benefits and limitations so you can at least comment intelligently if it comes up.
3) Shipping projects is hard psychologically unless you've developed discipline or there are other constraints/deadlines. If I were you, I'd work on projects in a more social manner. That means building with other engineers, talking to people who would benefit from what you're building, or just helping out existing communities. The socialization would help keep your spirits up. It's also the best way to build relationships and open other opportunities.
4) Hiring/recruiting is going through big changes now, partially due to the rise of AI generated applications. Building trust via other channels is going to be much more important moving forward. We've had to more or less turn off all inbound hiring and rely on our vetted professional networks due to the massive glut of applications. Job search is brutal now, but it's just as bad on the hiring side. We're going through changes were the old methods don't work anymore, and the new haven't been figured out yet.
Good luck!
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!