Ask HN: After almost 30 years the romance is over - What now?

[what_happened]

For the first time since graduating, I've recently had the possibility to escape the constant mental treadmill that comes with working in most IT departments, and had a look at what life and the world have become in the past 10 or so years. And I've discovered that the main focus of pretty much all of my life fails to excite me anymore - my honeymoon with computers and IT seems to be over. And I'm left asking myself: What now?

Let me explain where I'm coming from: Probably like most of you, I've been exposed to computers at an early age. My first conscious memory of using a computer is playing the original Pong on a black and white TV at a friends house when I was 6 or 7. Since then I've been hooked. When my father got an Amstrad CPC when I was 10 or so I could spend hours on end playing on it, playing with it, reading up on how it worked, later on copying code listings from magazines and finally deciding to learn to program it myself. There were to many things and concepts to explore, learn and figure out. From there I moved on to PCs, fiddling with hardware, learning about IRQs, IO Ports, memory management. Moving on the programming side from BASIC to Pascal, C and Assembler.

And then discovering Linux and Open Source in the mid 90s. Ever more concepts to explore: How does networking work, what is this crazy web thing and what can be done with it, getting into DNS and mail servers. And at the same time being exposed to new programming languages and paradigms seemingly at every turn: Prolog, Java, Scheme/Lisp, Perl and PHP. And on the system side it seemed like there was a new minor revolution every other week, introducing ever more possibilities: A new kernel, a new samba version, the advent of P2P. And on the cultural side of open source there were lots of competent people freely sharing their ideas, teaching, showing, comparing notes. It was a high energy environment, constantly pushing forward.

My main source of fascination came from the exploring of new concepts, and understanding how everything worked and fit together. I stuck to one topic until I understood it, consequently losing interest and moving on to the next bit to explore (pardon the pun).

I graduated shortly after 9/11 and the dot com bubble bursting. Just narrowly avoiding personal bankrupcy on my first stunt as a freelancer which I ventured into with my youthful optimism/arrogance, I consciously started shutting out everything distracting me from financial recovery and keeping my respective job.

Welcome to the treadmill.

Now, nearly 10 years later I'm having my first real look around in a long time and I'm not terribly happy about what I'm seeing. The Open Source revolution seems to be over; very few new things have happened there in these past years. It's all about maturity and stability now, no longer aggressively pushing forward.

And it seems that the children of the revolution turned the gold to chrome, scrambling to squeeze a buck out of anything a buck can be squeezed out of. Instead of the free sharing of ideas I grew up with, I'm encountering more and more the attitude of a guarded sharing of general topics, but the real knowledge and experience seems to be held back because it has to be regarded as a personal asset that might be used to turn a profit somewhere.

Todays big topics leave me pretty much unenthused. As a not particularly social person I fail to be fascinated by the social web. Mobile internet will be the big thing for the next few years, but for whatever reason I fail to be fascinated by gadgets that are the offspring of cell phones and my pentium from way back, reliving the DOS shareware scene through a centralized distributor. Server side scaling is all about variations on few well known themes: Add another cache/key-value store/nosql store, insert another abstraction layer, data and workload decentralization.

So I'm in a maze of twisty passages, all alike. And they all seem familiar. Is this how deep the rabbit hole goes? Did I really reach the end? Or did I just fall out of the loop at some point in the past few years and need a pointer in the right direction? Did I just get old and not notice it until now?

I'm sure some of you have experienced something similar. How did you move on? Did you manage to rekindle the flame somehow? What are your suggestions as to where I should go to from here and to ideally find new worlds to discover and explore?

[edw519]

I've been doing this for 30 years and I'm more jazzed than ever.

Wanna know the biggest difference between you and me? I'm pulled. You're pushed. Let me explain...

I love building stuff. Nothing gives me a bigger rush than getting something working the first time (well almost nothing). But I couldn't care less about the technology. If an abacus, two tin cans on a string, or some BASIC code on a Kaypro II did the job, then that's what I'd use.

What I really care about is how my software is used. And who uses it. There's an endless stream of people who need stuff and an endless stream of problems to solve. For individuals, groups, and businesses. When I encounter a new problem to work on, I use whatever I can apply in my tool box. Sure, I have to upgrade that tool box every so often because I need more to solve my problems, not because I love the toys so much.

You sound like the opposite. You love the toys and look for places to use them.

My suggestion: Take a break from the technology and put yourself in more situations where people can share their problems. This will give real human meaning to the technology. I bet you'll be chomping at the bit to build something for someone in no time. For me, being pulled by a demand motivates much better than being pushed by a supply. Maybe it can be for you too.

[vidar]

This is an important distinction, its a subtle change in perspective but very satisfying.

I would also like to add that perhaps the reason why it sometimes feels like nothing revolutionary is coming out is that it happens so often now.

[heliodorj]

The main motivator and source of satisfaction for software developers is the human aspect, not the technology itself. Is your product making a difference in someone's life? Who are your customers? The difference between these two approaches explains why college grad developers go into finance thinking they'll work on 'neat' problems and a few years later hate they jobs because at the end, their contribution to society is simply a number that indicates profit and not a single person's life has been significantly affected. In the end, we all just want to be appreciated. Like edw519 pointed out, go solve people's problems. Everything else will fall into place.

[sendos]

[edw519] What I really care about is how my software is used. And who uses it

[heliodorj] The main motivator and source of satisfaction for software developers is the human aspect, not the technology itself. Is your product making a difference in someone's life?

I think these two statements show a profound misunderstanding of what motivates a lot (if not most) hackers.

What gets a lot of people into this field in the first place, and is a source of major satisfaction, is, "wow, I can make it do this!"

A true hacker will be say things like:

* "I just turned my toaster oven into a TV remote control!"

* "I just made fully-functional web browser using COBOL!"

No one will ever use the above creations, but the satisfaction is still there for person who accomplished them.

I don't think, at least in the early stages, people who go into this field get excited by who or how many people end up using what they did. It's the pure thrill of getting things done that were not possible before that excites these people.

Of course, there is a second source of major satisfaction, which is to see your creation being used by many other people. This is huge, but I think is a distinct source of satisfaction than the one I mentioned above.

The third distinct source of satisfaction is, of course, making a ton of money from your creation.

I don't know about young programmers these days, but, when I was programming my first Amstrad CPC, I was being motivated mostly by the first type of satisfaction: getting this box to do what I wanted it to. The thought of my programs being used by others and making money from them didn't really cross my mind at the time.

Maybe what the author of the OP is starting to miss is the pure thrill of making something new, something exciting. Building another social networking website, even if it gets lots of users, simply isn't technically challenging or exciting (it is extremely challenging from other points of view, but you won't be breaking any new technical ground)

I think the software industry may be going through what others went through before it:

* Airplanes: In the beginning only "hackers" where in on it, trying to make planes get off the ground. In a few decades, most of the major advances had been made, and new people entering the field just wanted to find ways to use the existing technology to make money (e.g. Frequent flyer miles)

* Telephones: In the beginning, there were lots of technical problems with getting great phone quality over landlines. In a few decades, most technical problems were solved, and people came in to use the existing technology to make money (e.g. "Call 555-1234 to hear your horoscope for $3/min")

Maybe something like this is happening with computers today. Most of the major non-AI problems are solved, and now people are coming into the field to use existing technology to make money (e.g. Facebook, Yelp, Groupon, Youtube, etc)

If and when we get to some decent level of AI, the bar will be raised and a whole new set of problems will be attacked. So, AI-type problems (speaker-independent and accent-independent voice recognition, image search, natural language search, translation between languages, etc) seem like a great area to be in for someone who gets a thrill from making something totally new. Unfortunately, the whole AI field seems a bit stagnant at the moment. It will take someone with a totally new take on how to do things to take AI to the next level.

[DenisM]

That's a Patrick-level post right there. Make it half as long and you can successfully impersonate our bingo card hero. :)

[sdrinf]

Welcome to the law of Diminishing returns. Your choices fundamentally boils down to the following:

-Take the blue pill. Stay in wonderland. Pick a technology, any technology. Drive yourself into it deeper. The rabbit hole goes much, much further, than you can imagine.

-Take the red pill, and wake up: the rabbit hole goes the other way, too. On first basis, you have the ever-exploding number of scientific disciplines ( http://www.turtlshel.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/43056172... ). Even further, society isn't merely a collection of engineers, and scientist: other people have all kind of different jobs.

Furthermore, they are equally convinced, that their field of choice was the right one; and from their own perspective each one of them was right.

Since you're HN, you might have a particular interest towards this field we call "business". Now, this is not what people around you -who are called "managers" btw- do. A good working definition for engineers is: Business is the ability to actualize a job that needs to be done, on which you're retroactively hired (or fired) by society as a whole. Or, as PG put it: doing stuff what people wants.

Regardless of how you choose, a good partition of it is going to be soul-searching. There are 2 pieces of media I'd strongly recommend for that:

-Randy Pausch Last Lecture [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo], and

-wishcraft, which is a short book, available freely from http://wishcraft.com/.

On an ending note, I feel for you. Every time I've been down to this alley, I always always wished I'd have done it earlier. If anything, you should know this: the direction of your life does not boil down to singular moments, as you've described in your initial post. It's something that must must must be constantly evaluated, and course-corrected based on any new piece of life-data you happen to stumble across. And it's never to late to change things.

[glenra]

I'd toss in another piece of media, Elizabeth Gilbert's short (20-minute) TED talk on creativity and "genius":

http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html

(I tend to re-watch that one whenever I feel like I'm stuck in a creative rut, have run out of ideas, or just aren't talented enough to achieve my current artistic goals.)

Also useful advice: Find ways to hang out with a peer group. Try browsing meetup.com in your areas of interest.

[india]

I think the "loop" is indeed moving on. The last real mini-revolution this side of the line probably were torrents. The whole social web is just wrong. It's centralized. It's not the web - it is a corruption of it. It is like the great minds who could design truly de-centralized, robust, reliable and truly social structures have all just vanished. There are so many difficult and important problems around but no one wants to solve them just because there is a huge ??? before the profit step. It is indeed a bit sad.

But there is some real fascinating stuff happening in hardware. We have freaking humanoid robots and private rockets. And nothing excites me more about the future than 3d printers. And there is a real and true to the soul open source like effort going on in there. Reprap, makerbot and that awesome 75k inr 3d printer from china... printers that can print themselves! Hardware specs that are shared and re-shared. Ideas and insights shared with gay abandon. No major patent threats anywhere in sight so far. It is the free world.

[snarkyturtle]

I have to disagree with you to an extent about the state of the net today. I look at it as something like a movie studio. You're getting upset at all the big blockbuster stuff. The things that have little to no plot but yet rake in billions of dollars. What you don't get is that it allows studios to invest in things that have more risk, because it has potential to sell and there's a market for it.

The same could be applied to the net and to software tech. I mean, look at ycombinator and all their startups. Things like Facebook, Twitter,etc; their popularity is only natural because we all can't design a website. They give the average joe the tools that they need and they go crazy with it. The more money they make, the better, because it gives the little guys the chance to make something better. Maybe not revolutionary, but some original idea that solves a problem and gains revenue from it. And who knows, maybe out of all of that something revolutionary will come out of it. But it's hardly winding down as you say.

[what_happened]

This sounds like something to look into. Are there any resources in particular that you can recommend?

[rdtsc]

> There are so many difficult and important problems around but no one wants to solve them just because there is a huge ???

I have thought about this the other day -- "what has happened to P2P technologies?". There used to be a lot of excitement about it, there was flurry of academic research on distributed consistent hashing, lots of P2P networks appearing, and now, it seems, bittorrent is all that is left of it.

[mindslight]

It's not that these projects/people have vanished, they've just been eclipsed by the much louder self-promoting "social web 2.0" community. It's much easier to write naive single-actor code than mutually-suspicious distributed applications.

(also, you're forgetting at least git)

[zedshaw]

I actually probably have nearly the same history as you. Graduated about the same time as you. Been fascinated with computing as long as you. And just about as fed up with the current state of things as you.

I think the difference between us is I've got some notoriety so I'm looking to at least try to tear down the current situation before I get out of here. I figure might as well give it a shot, and if it doesn't work out I'm smart enough to change careers.

So I say, if you're not interested in it anymore, then try not doing it for a while and do whatever else you want. Even if this 2nd career is a total failure you at least tried.

[what_happened]

The hard part here, of course, is coming up with something else to do. While basically sound advise, after years of a wakeup-work-eat-bed cycle while worrying about the negative content of the bank account, thinking around a corner is hard, let alone thinking outside the box. But I'll try not to force the issue and see what comes up.

[noonespecial]

I'm younger than you by a little (or about the same) I think, and I'm not overly impressed with "social media" either. It feels like we've just been renaming the basic things computers can do with fad names since the turn of the century.

It feels like the endless potential has been wasted. All of the amazing things we could have done with computers and we used them for like-buttons and lolcats. Wow great, another app to tell people who don't care where I am and what I'm doing at this very moment. I'll try to contain my excitement.

Maybe its just classic burnout or a more troubling creeping pessimism that affects more than just me.

What gives me hope is that these things seem to happen in fits and spurts and the biggest jumps seem to start in the down times and recessions. When they arrive they are fast and unexpected and usually made from bits of the ordinary that had seemed boring and innocuous until put together just right.

It seems like we're about due. I don't know if it will come from open source hardware, desktop manufacturing, DIY biohacking or something I haven't even considered, but I expect it, and soon.

[jtolle]

Hey, someone has to stick up for the lolcats!

I'm only half joking when I tell people that computers were invented so that my wife and her family and I can sit around drinking margaritas and watching Jan Terri videos on YouTube...

[andymoe]

"I've recently had the possibility to escape the constant mental treadmill that comes with working in most IT departments"

You wrote some pretty prose but you did not really tell us what you know or what you have been really doing with your life for the last ten years.

When someone says "IT Department" I think large (or small) corporation supporting a group of people who actually bring in the money. The key reason these places are so soul crushing is that many times management does not know how to use them effectively to help the bottom line by making smart technology choices. You are just a cost center.

The other reason they are soul crushing is that 2/3rd's of your colleagues are probably all kinds of incompetent and should have been fired or never hired in the first place.

In any case the trick is to get out of there as quickly as possible. (It took me 10 years too and I'm still not recovered career wise or personally) Get yourself employed by a technology company working on their core products. All the sudden you are not supporting anyone (except maybe your customers.) and you may find it a much more pleasant experience.

I would also suggest making friends with some people more successful than yourself and really try and learn from them how to manage you finances correctly. It's something that many families just don't teach.

Finally I'd recommend reading "The wealthy Barber"[1] to get an idea of what a healthy financial situation and practices might look like.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Wealthy-Barber-Updated-3rd-Commonsense

[metamemetics]

>the constant mental treadmill that comes with working in most IT department

I think: >my honeymoon with computers and IT seems to be over

should read: >my honeymoon with IT seems to be over

Be careful not to confound a distaste with IT with a distaste for computing in general. Thinking about negatives in a global terms rather than a specific terms is one the key depressive thought patterns.

Thinking about a negative as a global\general state is highly destructive: I did bad on this test, because I suck at studying\am dumb. The end result is learned helplessness.

Thinking about a negative as a specific event allows you to view problems as solvable: I did bad on this test, but it was because I didn't study or prepare enough in this specific incident. The end result is positive, you will study more in the future.

From your post it is clear you are getting stuck in the former thought pattern, I wish you the best of luck getting out of it.

[MK5]

I was born in China and all my first memory is about little me saying "I'm going to join the red army and become a scientist and save the world". The world, which is China. And then, I've moved to Europe in the early 90s. I've discovered something new: my dad's mac. First, I was only playing Go and dark castle on it but then, I've started asking myself how to make my own games. My parents are all engineers and they told me a lil' about Dos, FreeBSD but also Linux. I've received my first PC at 11 and the first thing I did is playing Fallout. The second thing I did is using a hex-editor to crack the save to get the best weapons :p And I've also received Internet at home! Life changing! I've actually met people "like me". Very smart people indeed. And I've learnt much more on the web than at school and I felt I was apart of another world. IRC was more real than IRL. And thanks to the Internet, I've read a lot of tutorials and ABCs so I started writing my first lines in C/C+ and ASM at 12 and never stopped... well, I've actually stopped. One day, at 21, I discovered I wanted to do something else. I mean, I still like technology in general but I've actually stopped reading hackers blogs, cookbooks and I stopped trying every crackme challenge over the web. I was fed up with all of these things. I felt I was just a rebellious kid trying to prove to himself how smart he was. So I stopped. And so I've asked myself exactly this question same question: what now?

Well, "now", after 3-4 years, I'm doing a business degree. I've also met the girl I love. I've also played in a French TV series. Oh, yeah, I've also been all around the world. Actually, I did many things. Much more than expected. I thought, when I stopped living before my PC, that I'd maybe find a new "hobby" and just farm it like I've farmed C/C+. Nop, nothing about farming just "one" thing but doing, sometimes casually, many, many different things.

But guess what? I've started a Web-startup (elive.pro)! Just like that. Because I can. And because I still like technology. And because if I was fed up with the hackers' environment 4 years ago, now, it's pretty different for me: I don't know much about the so-called Web 2.0 and I want to learn, to do something. And meet new people. Smart people.

You know what? It's all about love. Technology is for many of us, our first and our real love. You will rekindle the flame. But sometimes, even if you really love something or someone, you have to let it or her/him alone.

So, let the technology stuffs alone. Try new things and one day, you'll automatically come back to your first love. Maybe not as a developer but definitely come back somehow.

[nitrogen]

+1 for patching save games :)

I hex-edited my Commander Keen save games to get effectively unlimited lives and ammo. I'm glad to see at least one other person was motivated by the same concept.

[CRASCH]

I have a very similar background. Scary similar. I'm older though. I've had similar feelings at various times. Is this it? Really? Lame...

I used to get excited about new technology and it did seem that something cool and amazing would come out all the time. Just an endless stream of wow. I just can't get hyped up about some mash up, retread, or social widget. I don't think I've changed I think the industry has.

That isn't really a bad thing though. It is an opportunity. I used to wait in anticipation for someone to come to market with a product or solution I foresaw. That rarely happens now with market driven development. That is the opportunity. Don't languish that the amazement isn't there. Make it. You have the skills. I'm sure you see the deficiencies. The industry is now so stagnant in true innovation, this gives us, the technical entrepreneurs the opportunity to innovate.

How to rekindle the flame? I don't know if this will work for you. This is what I do. I buy a new toy and hack on it. A computer or phone. I find a new programming language or something like pfsense (router) and play with it. Find some software that sucks and build one that doesn't. Scratch an itch.

What itch would I scratch right now if I wasn't busy. I'd build a soft bios driver that would emulate a CD/DVD drive. This would load an emulated CD/DVD driver into a PC bios just like a SAS card loads its driver into the bios. This would allow you to select multiple iso images from a usb drive and then boot to that emulated CD/DVD. Right now you can't really do that.

[aufreak3]

This is kind of a useful sign actually. When things look bleak like this, it usually means you're on the verge of something radically new ... and that's exciting to think about. Its like the guy who said "lets close the patent office 'cos everything that can be invented has already been invented."

This might be useful too -

A long time ago, someone on HN wrote about a similar give up point he came to in his life (sorry can't locate that post, but I recall it quite well). He decided to take a year off the industry - completely cut off. Just doing stuff like rock climbing, traveling, etc. .. until one day he had an epiphany that he'd taken up software in the first place because he loved it. He then got back in, full of enthusiasm.

So looks like taking a total break for a while can make things clear.

[c23gooey]

Ive done something similar in my life.

I took a year off from working the web and did things like courier work, bush regeneration and bus driving.

After a couple of months in each of these jobs i would get mentally restless and i soon discovered that the reason that i was working in the web world is because it is interesting and i am good at it.

Sounds like the OP took a step back to see all the other amazing possibilities in life, but didnt step back long enough to appreciate his own position.

[jhuckestein]

I'm nearly a decade younger than you, so take this for what it's worth.

You said when you were young, you were fascinated by computers and learned everything about them. Try to imagine again what it is like to be young. What would fascinate you if you were growing up right now? Maybe it's not even computers. Maybe this really is the end of that rabbit hole for you, who knows. Is that such a bad thing?

Try getting out of your comfort zone, too. Join a sports club, go on a long trip, meet new people, pick up a hobby. You may feel that way, put you're not stuck by any means. You can do whatever you want now. How liberating! You can reevaluate what you want from life and set sails once again.

I've been in software since I can remember. I'm super enthused by the opportunities I see right now. Yet, I hope that one day I will get to do something entirely different. I think life is too precious to do just one thing.

Oh, and another thing: If you don't like the social web, skip right to the object web. Why can people understand that tables are MADE of wood, HAVE four legs, are MADE in China, which IS a Country REPRESENTED by a Flag that LOOKS red, which IS a color that IS ... and so on ... and computers can't understand that? How can we teach them? That's my current favorite fad ;)

[erikstarck]

I think you have to remember that the future is already here but not evenly distributed. What you perceive as boring other people may view upon as almost magic. There are so many markets left to disrupt and improve with technology. There are so many problems yet to be solved, so many people yet to be helped.

Maybe if you apply your knowledge of computers to new domains the spark will once again be there.

[mahmud]

Empower the non-technicals. Help students and researchers in medicine, law, humanities, communication and the arts make better use of technology.

There are boatloads of abandonware tools and libraries that real people depend on for their research, work and livelihood. I am talking about things as varied as sensor data capture software running on MS-DOS, to high-schools that have one PC for every 100 students. There are opportunities everywhere, look around and give someone light.

[cdavid]

Open source still makes a big difference, especially in 3rd world country. I went once to an open source conference in India, it really opened my eyes to a whole new way of looking at the movement. Maybe that's what you may want to look at: software which really makes a difference today for many people.

[luckystrike]

it really opened my eyes to a whole new way of looking at the movement

Interesting. Can you share more details on the new perspective you got from being there?

[fauigerzigerk]

You know what I find pretty amazing is how much data is out there in the public nowadays. It wasn't like that 10 years ago. For a very long time AI has suffered from lack of automatically extractable knowledge about the world, lack of sources from which to learn, lack of feedback loops. And now, suddenly, we have so many sensors everywhere and we have so much public expression of knowledge, intent and action.

Shouldn't we be able to build machines that are much more capable of interpreting every day goings than we used to be? There is still so much boring routine work that people do. I think the next revolution in computing is imminent and I think the very recent abundance of data from which to learn will be what makes it happen.

The way I (as a robot) look at social networks is as a source of interactions from which to learn about humans.

[fbcocq]

Well, computers and the web are just tools, like a hammer. Due to its fascination and novelty when we were young it's easy to forget that while we're here discussing the intricacies of building a better hammer, others are out there erecting cathedrals with it. Maybe take a look around and see what you can actually do with it, learn something not related to IT and see if you can push it forward by improving the IT side of it.

[xentronium]

There are several big things you didn't mention, AI and neural networks, for example. You could also try robotics and engineering stuff (watching how a piece of silicon and metal becomes alive is priceless).

[kls]

This is good advice, the problem is that you are suffering burn out. !0 years sounds about right. You need to get back to your roots and one way I recommend to do it, is to get into embedded. It gets you back into a small reward loop where little things net positive feedback. The other thing that I recommend to people is get closer to a research discipline. If you are really that burnt out, try applying your trade to a secondary science that you are interested in, chemistry, Bio-Engineering, astronomy something like that. There are a lot of cool projects that need help with code.

[what_happened]

AI (neural networks/fuzzy logic/genetic algorithms) were actually part of my focus at university, and something I felt pretty exited about back then. That never went anywhere afterwards though. The realities in the job market here are pretty much anti-innovation for the most part ("We can't do that - we'd be one of the first companies in germany to work with XXX" is something I've heard pretty much verbatim more than once).

Maybe I should read up on my differential equations and give Kohonens "Self-Organizing Maps" another whirl, just for kicks.

[borneogamer]

Strangely enough, this happened to me 4 years ago. I think they called it middle age crisis? Anyways, what I did then was switched from being in IT field to aquaculture. I built a fish farm, raised some fish, learn all about aquaculture, built a profitable little business.

And yet... something techies deep inside me keeps stirring. The need to create something shiny and new and the feeling I get when I say "I made this" is just indescribable. Thats why early this year I sold my fish farm and started an IT company... again. :P

[chopsueyar]

Can you provide more details about your fish farm? What type of fish? Size of tanks? Time to "harvest"?

[tocomment]

Wow, that sounds amazing. How on earth do you get started with something like that?

[richardw]

I wouldn't worry about it too much. Accept that you need a change for now and re-look at it every so often. I've been coding since '84. I've found myself very jaded by computers a number of times in the past and I'm definitely not chasing every technology thread I could be. But hey, sometimes it comes back and you see the same stuff in a new light, or you discover areas that really do interest you, or you combine what you know with a new domain.

Don't force it. Let it go until you enjoy it again.

[chopsueyar]

Can you provide details of your personal experiences in this regard? (Very curious, not trying to pry.)

[Tichy]

"The Open Source revolution seems to be over"

http://github.com

[vorg]

> The Open Source revolution seems to be over; [...] And it seems that the children of the revolution turned the gold to chrome, scrambling to squeeze a buck out of anything a buck can be squeezed out of. Instead of the free sharing of ideas I grew up with, I'm encountering more and more the attitude of a guarded sharing of general topics, but the real knowledge and experience seems to be held back because it has to be regarded as a personal asset that might be used to turn a profit somewhere.

Too true. Some of the newer "open source" projects seem to be run by suits posing as geeks, where the source is open, eventually, but nothing else.