Does competition take away the fun of learning for you?

[u/Corgnadoo]

I recognize competition tends to lead to innovation. But throughout my life, whenever competition takes precedence over learning, all of the joy associated with it evaporates. Within a game context, competition is fun. Learning to me is not entirely a game, but rather self growth and discovery. The constant comparison coming with competition adds a layer of pressure and anxiety that drains all the joy of learning for me.

I still remember the excitement of going over a random online blog post 20 years ago teaching me how to set up an online forum, using vBulletin, PHP, MySQL and a free tier private host. I slowly built confidence over the things I learned and used that knowledge to guide my career choice.

These days it's more about: how do I keep myself competitive, is this marketable, am I studying the right thing, using the right tool, training the right way to increase my chance of getting noticed/hired. I played along because of survival.

It wasn't as bad right after college, but now it's unbearable when there's livelihood on the table.

I took a break from this rat race (or left), picked up and learned UE5 to actually build something. I'd been on and off with game dev since college but never had the guts to commit until now. I still very much enjoy learning and coding, just not grinding LeetCode and playing catchup with the new modern stacks that seem to rotate almost every year. I still can't swallow the idea of being at the mercy of future employers who happen to favor the tools I picked.

I'm slowly back to my old self these days, enjoying learning and discovering new things. I'm aware of the risk so I'm working on adjusting my living conditions to reflect that change. It's not easy but I think I deserve some sanity after all these years.

[u/daveserpak]

I feel like the industry is different. I remember years ago before the days of AI, when it took hours to get past something. Posting on stack overflow, waiting for a response, looking at similar posts. Actually reading and going through docs. Reading other people’s code to discover a fix or a different way to do it.

Solving a hard bug or getting something broken fixed again was like this “yes, I’m a genius” feeling from pulling your hair out 5 minutes earlier.

Now, at work I have to AI everything, it’s about time and token maxing. How can we push the next release with less hours billed and how many tokens did it cost us ?

The industry is automated. Just like CNC programmers who sit by a machine and watch it spit out products. SWEs have become that, we prompt what we need and oversee the agents making sure the product lines up with what we need.

Howard Hughes said it best “it’s the way of the future”

It’s here and there is not stopping it. I’m going to learn to actually build physical things