Ask HN: Need advice from veteran software developers

I've been programming for 6 years and I feel I'm in a loop and not making a progress.

Basically I want to know is how to become better.

Few questions for you:

- how do you learn new codebase?

- do you ever stop struggling?

- what helped you become productive?

- are you 10x? do you know how to become 3x?

To me it feels no matter how much time passes I keep on struggling. Every ticket is a start of new torture. I learned design patterns but it didn't really help. I have read lot of code and written lot of code, but against code bases that are like 8 years old there is really no way to "get it". There is just too much inconsistent abstractions going on. Too much complexity everywhere.

I don't consider myself stupid, but I just feel hopeless, like you would if you were a climate scientist and seeing world just produce more and more greenhouse gases despite all you said and did. Trying to stop unstoppable force.

I change jobs every 1-2 years and most of my career as a result has been in noob stage of learning new tools, codebase, framework, industry, etc. It takes like 1 year to even feel productive. So this is probably the big thing. But at few jobs things never got easier so had to leave, there it was politics, scrum.

Speaking of scrum/agile/points/crap/etc... wtf. How to take something vague, force you to give an estimate over 2 line description and then cry when it's wrong. I feel any team or company that uses scrum is masking for its incompetent management.