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I currently consider taking on another job, but to be honest, I am a bit daunted by the prospect of working 8 hours straight, every day. I have times when I work more, when I get into the flow, but what if I don't? Recently I have read more than once in popular blogs that 2-3 hours of real work per day are more realistic.

In previous jobs, I found 8 hours very hard to do. Maybe it is only my problem because I frequently don't sleep very well and on some days am almost too tired to work. No idea how other people consistently pull 60h work weeks, though. Except perhaps if most of the time is spent in meetings, which is not so taxing (many people doing overtime seem to be managers or team leaders, which might indicate many meetings).

Also, in all previous jobs I ended up surfing the internet a lot. I don't really like that, though - I want to give employers their money's worth. Or do I just have the wrong attitude towards employment?

I suspect surfing the internet is a bit like coffee, news sites are small little excitement spikes for the brain. But maybe I am addicted, and they say coffee makes you more nervous and less able to show consistent performance over an extended period of time. So perhaps if I could wean of the news while at work, working 8 hours would become possible? Or would my brain deteriorate completely (I should add that I usually work as a Java developer).

Edit: one thing I liked about consulting and billing by the hour is that at least if I went home early, I would just charge the client less, so I did not have to feel too bad about it. Maybe I am just not cut out for regular employment?

In reaction to the "are you helping the world" thread, I really wonder what good could we do with hacker skills, on location? Like there are physicians who spend some months a year traveling poor countries and curing people.

Could we as programmers do something similar?

I know what I have to do, but I can't do it. For example, I have planned to install the pebble blog engine on my server. It's presumably very easy: ssh to server, make directory for content writable for user tomcat, edit location in pebble properties file, upload pebble directory to server, edit server.xml to point to pebble.

Why can't I do it? I feel like the people in the Bunuel movie who can't leave the party.

And the blog is just an example. The only coding I managed to do recently is some project euler problems to experiment with Erlang.

The new question from the yc application "Please tell us about the time you (...) most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage" filters me out right there, so far I can't think of anything. How about you? I love that kind of stories, and I suppose giving them away now won't hurt the applicants chances?

I can only imagine that my whole live is a kind of hack: I hacked my girl-friends brain so that she actually went out with me. I hacked my own brain so that I managed to learn Computer Science, exercise regularly and eat reasonably healthy. I twisted my CV in the right way to land that job etc. And so on... But I guess that is not quite what YC is looking for... But I mean, people's life are essentially an attempt at optimizing their standing in the system, are they not?

I guess I am also not quite the "real world" systems hacker, because often it seems to entail taking advantage of somebody else? Ever since I read "The Art Of Intrusion", I remember it's lessons in all sorts of situations. Like today I was standing in line for cinema tickets, which were likely to be sold out before my turn. It would have been fun to try something, but not really fair towards the other queuing people. Not that I had a really great idea, but who knows, something might have worked (art of intrusion style, discover name of some employee of the cinema, then call cinema and pretend that person was supposed to reserve some tickets for me - one idea).

I am exhausted most of the time, because I never sleep well. Doctor diagnosed "restless legs syndrome" and wants to give me pills, but I wonder if there are any other things to try? Just interested in any stories of how people fixed their problems with bad sleep.

The need to earn money is once again weighing down on me. Realistically I don't see any of my projects support me financially in the near future. The obvious choice seemks to do consulting, but my experiences were not so good. I usually don't manage to work on my own projects in parallel with consulting jobs. Typical contracts for me took several months, and afterwards felt like a waste of time (except for my bank account being happy). Small web design contracts usually don't pay very well, and don't require much programming. I am not a designer, so I would have to share the deal with a designer, which makes it economically uninteresting.

What kind of arrangements have worked for you?

I am worried that my CV doesn't really mark me as the ideal founder. It seems to me I wasted so much time in my life (35 years old now), and even the projects I finished successfully (most I didn't finish) usually took too long, and did not reach the scope I was hoping for. In essence, there are not many achievements I am really proud about. It might just be my personal assessment, but still (agents love my Java consulting CV, but it doesn't mean anything to me). I have even publicly admitted to burnout syndromes on HN - big red flag? My karma also shows that I procrastinate a lot...

Anyway, I wonder about your opinions: is it possible to turn around that impression within two months, which is the time I could hopefully dedicate to preparing the next YC application?

I suppose the obvious path to take is to work on a demo day and night, and anyway, giving up is not an option (I might just have to try without YC funding). But still, I am curious about suggestions and opinions.

It is of course also the question if I will be able to pull it off, since historically I tended to get sidetracked. Why should it be different this time? It's not that I don't believe in me, I am just trying to be realistic - for this time to play out differently than the previous attempts, maybe I should have a better grasp on what went wrong and how to counter it, and I am not really sure I have that.

For YC application I have some hope to also come up with an intriguing idea, even though they say they don't care about the idea so much. But what about something like, say, Anybots? They ask for cool projects I have done, and I don't have any - so I didn't even apply in the end... Again it seems kind of obvious to just try to make something cool in the future. Anyway -maybe this post is just weird, or maybe some interesting comments will come in...

Edit: the question is of course a bit related to the "am I too old to startup" type of question. While I demand of myself to be intrinsically motivated, it might be too much to ask. Hoping to be accepted into YC (for example) could provide a good motivation boost.

The one thing all my successful projects had in common: I didn't do them alone. I might still have been the driving person behind them, but it seems I need to have at least some other person take an interest to actually go through with it. (I know that is not the kind of motivation YC provides, that is what co-founders are for. But working towards the application would have an effect, compared to working towards a void).

The mere existence of that website makes me wonder if being part of the Rails community is really something to strive for...