I think all of us 40+ folks are in the same place.
When we first started we didn't mind the bullshit so much because we were too dumb to realize how much there was.
Then we got older and, yeah, it's ridiculous, but we were pretty decent at surfing the bullshit waves so we still didn't mind so much.
Now you're in your 40s and the real obligations of life have started piling up. You've gone from 7 hours of free time a day to 1, and you sure as hell aren't going to spend it learning about the latest iteration of Angular/React/Vue/Svelte/whatever the fuck is next. So you start losing your technical edge. Meanwhile at work you have some dipshit in sprint planning that wants to have the 57th discussion about how story points do not represent time. Oh, by the way, it's December, so we need you to watch that 45 minute security training video again so you don't accept USB flash drives from strangers in the parking lot. Now it's 4 PM and you didn't get anything done today and you start thinking about how pointless all this shit is because all we do is make an app that helps people schedule dog massages...
So, yeah, there's a reason mid-life crises are so cliche. It's like teenage angst. It's not completely justified, but it's not exactly unwarranted either. I mean, what kind of dumbass doesn't wonder at least a little bit if all this bullshit is worth it?
I wanted to help train and mentor people. Went to work in state government as a developer at 47+. Could not be happier. I feel that the obligation of helping tax payers get their moneys' worth is "old school" internet. Being able to present government information the easiest and cleanest way possible on the net. Started doing web dev back around 96 and felt like the ethos have evolved into something I just couldn't ethically believe in anymore. Found a second life doing what I love in state government...oh and they treat me like a human being. Excellent insurance, more time off than I can use, and people (other developers) who believe in what they are building.
I'm in my 40s, working in higher ed, and I feel exactly the same.
As I've gotten older, mission matters more. I don't care about selling ads, I don't care about winning the stock option lottery, and I don't care about chasing only the shiniest newest tech. I care about getting stuff done efficiently with boring tech and helping people solve real problems.
Is higher ed perfect? Certainly not. But I feel like I'm contributing to a broader, useful mission. If I ever leave higher ed, it would almost certainly be for a non-profit or government job.
Not just 40+. I'm just over 30 and I've felt that way for a while. I have a lot on my plate but other than that I live alone so I do have the time and energy to focus on learning the bleeding edge and I do enjoy it. But the truth is, the exact things described in that post kill my motivation. And here's an interesting fact: I spent almost 9 years working in one company. The only reason why I stuck around for so long was the absence of all the ridiculous reporting, filling jira tickets and all that dreadful crap. We had a relatively small but very solid team with simple rules and procedures: everything that needs to be done is done with well-described and documented gitlab issues, each issue gets it's own branch, do what you have to do, push, open a merge request to the lead developer(me for the past several years). Simple and straightforward, releases were always ready well before the deadlines, developers staying with the team for 5+ years on average, even when offered double what they were making. What changed? The exact thing that the reddit post described: new management, endless bureaucratic crap, endless made up acronyms, pointless meetings with tons of questions not worth discussing(ex: "Apple doesn't allow this so we can't do it", followed by 3 hours of discussions as to who should we talk to to get it up anyway) and to top this off: "hey there's this other team that doesn't do anything, we'll mash the two together so they have something to do". As a result all the most senior members(myself included) decided to quit, non-negotiable. it really pains me to see how much ego, bureaucracy and arrogance I see everywhere. Needless to say, I had to make some compromise with all that but it is insanely frustrating.
I feel like most of the software engineering world is going through a Steve Ballmer crisis: the industry is dictated by people who know nothing about the inner workings. As a result unnecessary solutions are pushed down our throats: "We should use X technology". Fine, but why, it will be slow, unmanageable and will leave us pegged to the company that developed it? "Nonsense, it is the best, everybody is using X". And 6 months later...
> Oh, by the way, it's December, so we need you to watch that 45 minute security training video again so you don't accept USB flash drives from strangers in the parking lot.
The ability to mute a tab and have it run in the background is at times a beautiful thing.
Reminds me of "Snow Crash", specifically when Y.T.'s mom games reading a memo at her .gov job:
"Y.T.'s mom decides to spend between fourteen and fifteen minutes reading the memo. It's better for younger workers to spend too long, to show that they're careful, not cocky. It's better for older workers to go a little fast, to show good management potential. She's pushing forty. She scans through the memo, hitting the Page Down button at reasonably regular intervals, occasionally paging back up to pretend to reread some earlier section. The computer is going to notice all this. It approves of rereading. It's a small thing, but over a decade or so this stuff really shows up on your work-habits summary."
I'm always amazed by how long it takes some people to go through these. Just press next as fast as possible to get to the quiz at the end. The questions are always like:
A stranger offers you a free USB stick in the parking lot do you:
A) Put it in the nearest electrical outlet
B) Stick it up your butt
C) Start a fire in your trash can and cast it in
D) Report it to corporate security at extension xxx, notify your manager, and warn coworkers not to use them
We have that too. A second computer works wonders here. Worse is the training I'm doing now which lets you run it in the background but makes you push a button every 30s to continue the training.
Next step, ever watched "15 million merits", an episode of Black Mirror? If you close your eyes, an excruciating sound requires you to open them again and continue watching.
There is something to be said for employers that are less technologically organized and competent. A friend at a company that did this used a virtual machine to run the training.
Ten years later, you will nostalgically think about the good old trainings in 2020 when the web camera yet didn't watch your eyeballs and analyze your face expressions in order to determine whether you need to watch the training again.
There's no good way to certify people on this knowledge from the organization's perspective. Just get your phone out if you're feeling confident in it.
You don't even need to do that. I found a demo for the page visibility api[1] (presumably what they use to detect whether the tab is focused), and found that having the window not minimized is sufficient to make the tab think it's focused. That is, all you have to do is move the tab to a new window, and click your main window. Now your training video is in the background and not taking up any screen space (you can mute the tab if you want), but the page doesn't realized it's not focused/visible.
Not saying that these videos are a good thing, but would doing things like this be proof (assuming muting/active viewing is logged somehow) of gross negligence allowing the company to hold you personally liable if you make a mistake that could have been prevented had you watched the video?
So true... I’m in my early 30s and already started to refuse any meetings without a clear agenda and call out for none stopping blabbering nonsense. It’s been much better for reducing unnecessary overheads but at the same time it would probably only work for my current project which is small scale and I have the most expertise. I will never move or take a job in large development shop with a beaucratic leadership structure.
I decided to start my midlife crisis after a long FMLA (first eldercare, and then raising my nephews). I just couldn't go back to the daily standup agile velocity kabuki. My work has to mean something, at least to me.
I don't know if there's something special about working in web design/development but I see more identity politics here and in the community than I do anywhere else in my life, or in other industries. My partner works in education - that place of reputed wokeness - and while identity features, there isn't the politics in the school around it.
Perhaps webdev attracted a specific kind of person (who felt comfortable with the anonymity of the web?) - or is software development now the same?
Before I left tech the first time I used the wrong pronoun was "free". Second is fireable offense literally classified as hate speech. Most people didn't go to HR unless you are a dick.
I support whatever you want to do, truly. I have a habit of joining a zoom and saying "hey guys hows it going?". It's been really hard to break but I am working on it
Seriously, if I made that mistake the first 5 min of the meeting is attributed to this with some massive history on transsexuality but rarely a mention of Guy Fawkes.
Personally, I think the majority of these people are addicted to their struggle and probably should work on moving past that with a qualified professional.
One of my best friends and most capable mentors came out and I think it's fucking great. Good for her! She handles it healthy and always has a positive anecdote even when I fuck up.
> Personally, I think the majority of these people are addicted to their struggle and probably should work on moving past that with a qualified professional.
A generation that grew up reading about and watching recordings/movies of the civil rights fights of the prior generation(s), with no more such large fights of their own, seeking ever further niche subjects to blow up into something they can fight for.
As my career has progressed, I've moved to places with less and less BS and more grownups. Maybe it helps that I'm not in web apps. Or maybe I've been looking for places like that. Maybe some of both.
> When we first started we didn't mind the bullshit so much because we were too dumb to realize how much there was.
…
> Oh, by the way, it's December, so we need you to watch that 45 minute security training video again so you don't accept USB flash drives from strangers in the parking lot.
Admittedly, in the early 90s when I got started professionally there actually wasn't so much bullshit, and yearly security training videos are an example of the kind and extent of how the bullshit has evolved and expanded.
34 and I feel pretty happy freelancing. Freelance IMO is closer to real life for most of the devs I’ve talked to. You are not committed to bullshit, often excluded from company brainwash meetings and actually getting paid by the hour, so you can manage the amount of “life you sell”.
Mentioning corona here, I think the society is desperate to find more IT folks around and loosing someone because of shitty interview process ( which I mostly skip because I’m a freelancer ) is quite sad.
"Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called everybody, and they meet at the bar." --Drew Carey
That said, there are some good (if conflicting) points in there. Large tech companies are worse than startups, usually. Startups become large companies over time, if they don't fail.
Just for the record, I don't hate my job. I suspect many others don't. There's a saying that I recommend: either change your organization or change your organization.
I'm sad for this guy that he let the fat checks keep him in misery until he burnt out on the work. I get how it happens, but I don't think it's a good trade. I hope he finds his way back to health.
Having burnt out long ago on doing sysadmin work, I don't recommend it. It was bad for me at the time, and in some ways I'm still paying the price. What's the point in having a miserable life and then a miserable retirement because you've broken yourself and your relationships?
Yeah but the fat checks act like golden handcuffs, one is reluctant to lose them and will take more shit over time just because of the fat checks. Smart folks realize this and instead of enjoying the lifestyle fat checks bring they live frugally instead and get ready for an modest exit. It is possible, yes
Not really handcuffs. You make a ton of money and move to a lower cost area to work on whatever you want. Financial independence removes way more restrictions than actually requiring a paycheck to live. Even if you stay at the company, just knowing that you have the money to say screw it and do what you want is empowering - Oh, you're going to fire me if I don't do xyz, go ahead because I don't need the job.
Ok, temporary handcuffs. The author of the original post on reddit mentions feeling as if escaping prison so there's something to handcuffs after all
>Oh, you're going to fire me if I don't do xyz, go ahead because I don't need the job.
That is only true when you have accumulate something and are ready to do your thing. Till then one is willing to put up with plenty of BS. But it's true, fat checks offer this alternative of exit. However, they are also keeping one from getting a more sane alternative because they pay isn't as good. There are still decent companies and jobs out there that you can run into if you're willing not to cash in fat checks.
I would love to know where these good jobs/companies are. I work for a company that is consistently highly rated as a best place to work in IT by Computer World. I hate it. They don't even follow their own policies.
I'm pretty sure ageism in tech boils down to this point. People who have been in the industry longer have better nest eggs and can simply leave at any point, so they won't crunch for you.
I recently asked an interviewer (on the 4th and final stage of their ~~gatekeeping~~ interview process during my very last interview when I got to the final boss of this dumb ass game -- the Senior Staff Software Engineer of the team I was interviewing with) if they "did" crunch. His face contorted a bit, it was obvious that I had hit on something. He said yes, frequently, in fact, and that they are "very busy" and "have crunch periods" typically in Q1 and Q4 of _each year_.
I asked him if there were planning process improvements that could be made to reduce the necessity of crunch periods. He sighed at me, turned his head to look out the window next to him, and then gave me a few sentences of tangentially related anecdotes about their planning process and why it's "hard" "because of customers."
It was already clear to me that I didn't want the job if they made me an offer at this point. Thankfully they saved me from having to say so. The recruiter called me a week later to say, "We've decided to move forward with other candidates who we feel are a better match for this particular position."
All I can think to myself at this point is, "I'm too old for this shit."
Not where I live(Europe). Older people I know, without inheritance, who don't come from money (this makes a big difference), tend to have families and took on expensive mortgages, sometimes even a house in the suburbs, so they just put up with huge amounts of toxicity and overtime for the sake of providing a high standard of living for their families, while younger single people have nothing tying them down, often living frugally in shared accommodations, so if you shit on them, they can just pack up and leave whenever, whereever.
On the other side of the spectrum, people I know with any real estate inheritance, tend to not take part in the rat race and just take any chill (governmet)job they can find, as having their housing already covered, means they only need some money for food and bills so they can focus on enjoying life.
You usually only get the fat checks in SV though, where homes are frequently 6-10x national average. So unless you plan to move away (why would you when you spent your entire career there and all your friends are there), you won’t retire any earlier.
> Startups become large companies over time, if they don't fail.
Picking nits, here, but this isn't true. My personal (multiple) anecdata is that a very good number of startups neither fail nor become large - rather, they become stable small businesses.
Seconding this. I've only ever worked at "stable small businesses" and I recommend them as (broadly) the least-toxic category. Few enough people that you get treated like a human, you can have human discussions and bring up human issues, you can build human relationships. But you also don't have the immense pressure of VC breathing down your neck, of growth-at-all-costs, etc.
It's really shitty that the companies that might be actually decent places to work at are diminished as "lifestyle business" by the people who work at the places that are terrible. It really sounds like Stockholm syndrome.
It's interesting that the OP on reddit is describing normal company politics. It exists at every company I've ever worked at, and will exist anywhere there is money, power, and status at stake in the decision making process.
My suggestion is to find a company where you can accept and work within that company's dysfunction, and stay put as long as you have a positive career path there. Every company is dysfunctional in some way, from small startups to large public corporations. As long as there are people involved there is going to be some form dysfunction and politics.
This is actually why I didn't mind he transition from IC to management, because even though I code less, I have the ability to influence the decision making process and improve day-to-day for everybody who reports to me.
I did the same thing moving from an IC to a management role and wholeheartedly agree that now I have the ability to influence the culture within my team of developers and also influence other managers' norms and teams' culture. Yes, I haven't been coding, but throughout the past years I've been able to create and form a team with a healthy culture that has been successful.
Large tech companies have more than one "culture" which various across departments and projects. When I found myself stuck in an unhealthy project I would look for opportunities to transfer within. Usually I was able to find a team that suited my interests and way of working.
Or leave that stress and do something different. I did the same as the author and for the exact same reasons. For some of us, the bullshit is not worth the pay or the other perks. As you state, it exists at every company, so some of us just wise up and realize we aren't really willing to put up with it and move on to happier paths, rather than grinding it out and getting old quick.
I think the hard part, at least in my case, with the "this is normal company politics" is that it's hard to gauge whether that's true or not until you get in the company. Once you're there it can be hard to tell too unless you're in a particular area or division or whatever -- part of the problem, lots of times, are vast differences in how different groups are treated or whatever, due to communication between and to different areas, biases, incompetence, whatever.
In my case my friends blew off what I was saying until I was leaving, and then for whatever reason when I was in the process started actually listening to what I had been telling them for the past several years. "Wait... what??? You mean they do X, Y, Z? WTF?" It didn't matter that mutual friends had left, that they had lost 1/3 of their employees in the past 3-4 years, that 90% of the people in my division had left, that they had surveys (buried in diversity reviews) showing that 50-60% of the remaining people were seriously thinking of leaving. The secret meetings, the lawsuits, you name it. It was always the same response from my friends: "This is normal company politics everywhere." But it wasn't.
What I wished is that I had been mentored more on how to leave to a different organization (I sort of left the field), with an explanation for why. But when you hear "this is the same politics everywhere" you kind of think "ok this is what it's like everywhere."
The thing is, sometimes it's not the same everywhere. There are good places to work and bad places to work, and places that are good for some people and bad for others.
If it is bad everywhere (cf. Musk's complaints about "MBA-ization" of America), then society needs to have a serious reflection on itself (maybe that's the signal in the noise of US politics lately?).
FWIW, my experience is consistent with your bit about "as long as you have a positive career path there". I think at some level that's what prompted me to leave -- I got the sense that the reasons why some people were favored and others in the institution were not was all about weird purely personal factors, like who goes to who's wedding etc. (Yes, I believe social factors are important, that it's important to be cordial and genuinely friendly and positive and empathetic... but there's a point where all of that normal "being a good person and colleague" doesn't cut it anymore, and might actually be a detriment).
It exists at every company I've ever worked at, and will exist anywhere there is money, power, and status at stake in the decision making process.
Status at stake, yes. Power? Power over what? Another “microservice”? And money, an extra 50% bonus maybe? That’s not “money”. Employees are getting rich absolutely nowhere. When real money is at stake you’d know. People get serious, quick.
I have a hypothesis that post-industrial-era management-as-a-profession is going to become such a disadvantage that 30 person companies with 28 ICs and 2 exec/founders are going to become the norm, upsetting companies many times their size.
Already half of white collar jobs could be automated with two weeks dev effort (per role). That assertion is based on hundreds of conversations with “business” people at my clients. You’d sadly not be surprised how many people forward emails or update spreadsheets for a living.
It exists in varying amounts in different companies and departments. I don't work in tech, but I know there are some departments where I simply will not work because I would become miserable. There are other departments that have a lot of positive traits, that work well as a team and have good communication. Sure there can still be the odd bit of politics and dysfunction, but that is not the norm and it is not in excess either.
Everyone working in the software industry needs to understand the basic principles of financial independence. At some point, you will either burn out or will get pushed out. This is a high-reward high-cost (in terms of mental strain) line of work.
Financial independence is what will enable you to walk away from a toxic situation. I suggest starting here: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Getting_started
I thought about this but its all about balance, money spent in your 20s and 30s is more valuable than in your 40s. That doesn't mean don't save at all just be balanced with a slight tilt towards saving more.
Most of the people doing FIRE are not the types who spend money on expensive stuff. If they were, they’d be doing fat FIRE (uncommon). Most people doing FIRE do not have high standards of living. If they did, it’d run somewhat counter to FIRE. The people who can do fat fire are just lucky and got rich and should be ignored promptly.
There is also the problem that many bought real estate far before it was as fiendishly expensive as it is now, bought stocks and were part of companies during wild bull runs, and act like you can reproduce their success trivially. (You can’t)
Also, I think of spending in your youth as an investment in memories. What is the point of getting all your best trips in at 65 (just before dementia sets in) when you have at best 30 years to enjoy them. If you did the trips when you’re 30, you’d have decades more to enjoy them and could actually go on them. Living for when you’re senile is a scam.
Wow, how about finding something you enjoy / a team you enjoy working with and doing that instead? I mean 40 years is a long time, and what do you do then after? Nothing? Or browse HN all day? Or do a job that you enjoy?
I think you're kind of missing OP's point. No matter how enthusiastic you are at the beginning of your career, that field of things you enjoy and teams you enjoy working with is likely to narrow over time for a couple of reasons.
Everything's more fun when it's new and you're learning fast, but less and less seems new as you gain experience. A lot of "new" things are obviously reincarnations of things you learned long ago. Others just seem obviously stupid according to whatever biases you've accumulated (and we all do). Over time, you have to roam further and further afield to find anything truly new and not stupid. Sometimes that's so far afield that it's beyond anything that would have ever interested you even when young.
As for teams, well, some things are just pretty constant. What job is not going to have tedious planning sessions, testing woes, source-control and deployment drudgery? Only one where you're a prima donna pushing all of that onto other people, or one headed for disaster because you're all incompetent cowboys. If it was all fun and games, they wouldn't pay so much for people to do it, and liking your immediate team only gets you so far.
Neither burnout nor retirement is like a light switch, going instantly from love to hate of the entire profession. It's a gradual weakening of the attractions and strengthening of the discontents, until you reach a tipping point. It might seem sudden or unexpected, but quite often it really isn't. It's something people can plan for, and that many more should.
As for what to do after, why do you assume that not wanting this career any more means not wanting any career (or hobby) at all? Second careers are not uncommon, and often one of the things that's frustrating about "always on" tech work is being pulled away from something else one enjoys. "Software development or nothing" seems like a really bizarre dichotomy.
Thats exactly what I meant! I am in my 50s and I just retired after nearly 30 years in software development, much of it in cutting edge AI. As you say, after a while, you've seen everything and its not quite as interesting the second time around. I still enjoy coding and reading stuff, just not for a living. I get to do whatever I want which is a reward in of itself.
...my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.
I held out for a little over 30 years, but ultimately reached a similar point. I just lost patience with the various ways I was forced to keep a part of my brain devoted to work at all times, with the focus on "move fast" over quality, with the dizzying array of bad choices in languages, idioms, and configuration/deployment methods, with the endless ego wars, etc. Note that none of these had much to do with the work of writing software itself; they were all aspects of doing it with other people and even more specifically for profit. After having worked at a dozen jobs and even more projects, I knew that switching again would seem better for about a year and then descend into the same grind, which I was disinclined to do when I didn't really need to. So I left.
To be fair, while I do think the tech industry has some problems (which I've expounded on elsewhere), a lot of my misery was self-inflicted. I might have been able to put up with a lot if I were the kind of person who uses influence to cherry-pick the most enjoyable tasks, but I'm the kind of person who takes the most important unclaimed tasks - which are often unclaimed because they're unpleasant. I'm proud of that, but it's not conducive to happiness. Failure to find that balance is mostly my own fault.
So my advice to anyone reading the OP (or my own first paragraph) and thinking along the same lines is: spend some time figuring out what kind of role or specialty within tech would actually make you happy and work toward it ... or toward a comfortable exit if that's your conclusion. Chasing dollars (especially FAANG/VC dollars) might work out almost by accident, or you might end up damaging yourself. Just drifting along, doing what everyone else does or says you should do, will not cut it.
"I'm the kind of person who takes the most important unclaimed tasks - which are often unclaimed because they're unpleasant."
I feel you. I've always been one to fill the gaps on the team. You need someone to learn this new tech/process/etc - sure, I'll do it. It's hurt my career. Now I'm 9 years in and I'm not an expert in anything (anything that matters - they outsourced the tech/system I was an expert at), just average/passable at a bunch of stuff. I'll be an intermediate developer permanently.
You can spin that around to a positive if you want to. I'm in a similar situation where I know just enough about a lot of things and that is my strength. I can be assigned to pretty much anything tech related which means I see a lot of different projects and roles (as a freelancer) which keeps things exciting for me instead of burning out after 6 months on the same mobile app with the same tech stack and the same people.
Sometimes it significantly helped my career, when the New Thing that I learned became important and interesting and a gateway to new experiences like giving talks or traveling to other countries. But other times it left me toiling in the shadows while others had all the fun. Like anything, I guess, it's a mix.
The new stuff for me has always been boring things that we are required to do. Usually they are a small volume compared to the regular work, so they aren't seen as valuable.
For example, I learnt the basics of Blue Prism, as I was asked to. It's really just an automation stop-gap until the underlying system can be updated or replaced to handle the target scenario. Then I was told we wouldn't even be using it, so I learnt it for nothing.
being able and willing to learn new things is one of the most attractive qualities for candidates when we are hiring.
we try not to execute on that in the sense of rewrite it every 6 months, but it is typically a signal for individuals who possess some level of humility, patience, willingness to get trained up, struggle a little bit, etc. - all very important things for technical staff.
This really resonates with me. I'm becoming jaded as well.
My most hated thing about the industry: the amount of people who do not give a shit.
These people try to do the least amount of work possible. They actively try to stretch a day's worth of work into a month. They do not want to learn anything, even on the company's dime. They have zero passion and pride. Often they are vicious; they will act so kind and diplomatic but they are sneaky snakes that will take credit and control communication. They would shoot their own mother to look good (apologies for the morbid exaggeration). I know that this might be common elsewhere but I feel like our industry has seen such demand, and 90% of that demand was filled with awful people. The poor visibility of actual work done allows these people to continue feeding of the flesh of true, honest, hardworking devs. I've been eaten alive once too many and I'm sick of it.
It sounds like you're dealing with narcissists, one of the most toxic kinds of people possible. You run into them eventually and they're good at influencing people and masking themselves. Pointing them out to others does no good unless you have a lot of reputation. But if you educate yourself, you can see through most of their schemes, detach emotionally, and keep your sanity.
Dr Ramani is a PHD psychologist specializing in narcissism, she has great yt videos. I also recommend educating yourself about gaslighting, manipulation, invalidation etc. Don't take everything you hear at face value.
(My hypothesis is that large companies turn to crap largely because they eventually end up recruiting toxic but charismatic people, not really because of their size.)
>My most hated thing about the industry: the amount of people who do not give a shit.
This is why they're not burned out.
And IMHO, this sounds a lot like sour grapes. To be rewarded for good work your management needs to know you're doing good work. For them to know you're doing good work you need to tell them. This is just a basic fact of life. And it's not super hard. You just need to maintain a relationship with your boss and ideally your boss's boss.
So your solution is to just not give a shit like everyone else? The reason that I've become so good at my craft is by giving a shit. The reason that my projects always succeed is because I give a shit. Not giving a shit puts a ceiling on your career as a developer. Not giving a shit will prevent you from learning. The irony in my situation is that I am investing in myself by doing the work, I am learning and improving myself while others stagnate. I try to remind myself of that.
> And IMHO, this sounds a lot like sour grapes. To be rewarded for good work your management needs to know you're doing good work. For them to know you're doing good work you need to tell them. This is just a basic fact of life. And it's not super hard. You just need to maintain a relationship with your boss and ideally your boss's boss.
Sour grapes? Only one or two sentences complained about recognition. I'm talking generally about the majority of developers at big orgs. Deal with management? I work in a global org that already has plenty of communication issues, people don't want to be bothered. Moreover I don't want to deal with politics as I am a long-term contractor. I try to remind myself that I just need to bill my hours and forget about it, but I'm essentially treated as an employee and my insane efforts carry a team of 8 people (including other contractors) that literally do nothing while reaping the pay and recognition. They run mouse movers all day and enjoy their paid staycations. "Spend the budget" -- since I provide 10x the value then give me 10x the pay, the other guys are doing nothing while it's expected that I work my ass off. A manager that I befriended once told me "yeah that's usually how it goes, team of 8 but one or two guys do all the work. typical" How is this acceptable? If I give up like the others then I am no better, I become the person I despise and I contribute to the horrible culture that has taken over the industry in big orgs.
>So your solution is to just not give a shit like everyone else
I'd say give a sustainable amount of shit directed at tasks rewarded by management.
You shouldn't see your coworkers as different from you. They're just further along the path to enlightenment. The ending points of this path are effectively:
(1) Finding work that you're passionate about and pays
(2) Finding work that allows you to do something you're passionate about
Unfortunately the opportunities for (2) are far more abundant than the opportunities for (1). The lucky/smart/motivated ones can attain it. For the rest of us there's just (2).
You're climbing burnout mountain now. At the top of that is a long slide called Midlife crisis that ends in the valley of enlightenment.
Interesting take. I appreciate the perspective. Maybe I just need a new work environment. I miss working with smart, driven people. Thanks for your thoughts, this is therapy for me.
I completely agree with the advice you got there and I'll add one thing on top.
I give a shit about what I do. I know my employer does not give a shit about me though. My advice: keep a timesheet!
It's amazing how much unpaid overtime people give their employers if the employer doesn't make you fill a timesheet. It's awesome to look at your own timesheet and see that you really really don't need to feel bad about stopping working at 2pm on Friday because even that still keeps you in overtime territory. It doesn't mean you don't give a shit. You gave it your everything while you did the work, you cared about the code you wrote and you still got way more done than the people sitting in the office for 60 hours a week while goofing off on Facebook. The whole WFH thing makes this much easier because you don't have to dread people's turning heads when you leave the office that early.
The other thing is "unlimited vacation". If you have that at your job, make sure you check how much vacation you are actually taking. Companies actually like unlimited vacation policies, which should be enough for you not to like them. People tend to take less vacation under such polociee. Nobody wants to be the one that took the most vacation for some reason and companies exploit that. So keep track and just take the amount you think you should take (within reasonable limits). E.g. 30 days a year is completely fine. If you work in technology in Germany then 30 days is very likely the amount you get, even if you are fresh out of university.
One way to get out of this rut is to go into sales. As a software engineer gone sales, hear me out:
1. You're valued more the older you get (Opposite of engineering)
2. Your job is to talk to customers and collaborate with your coworkers to get a deal done (No more internet explorer bugs)
3. You learn an awesome skill (sales) that helps you navigate through the bs politics of not only work but life.
If anyone is interested in my transition from engineering to sales, happy to chat! Email me at ju.lee@segment.com
I can understand the frustrations. I don't know why people do that to themselves working under these conditions.
I work for a non-software company and don't have to deal with tests, I solve problems with software. I can use the tech I like. I am measured only by results. If I have problems that negatively affect my performance, I get opportunities to get my energy back, be that another project or some free time. There are these companies out there. Maybe not as prestigious, but there are advantages if you like going to work.
Don't ever work for people with an inferiority complex, they will constantly try to throw themselves against you and you should know your own worth. There are enough jobs for softies out there that you can leave that behind.
Both my previous and current jobs are with non-software companies and I feel that makes a big difference. My job prior to these two was with a software consultancy firm. While I loved the people at that company, I got burnt out from the constant stress of overlapping projects, bending over backwards for clients, and needing to stay billable.
For the last 6-7 years, I work at a much more relaxed pace, am respected and appreciated for the work I do, and am able to separate home/work life. I don't get to work with the latest technologies and there isn't as much opportunity to move up the ladder, but ultimately, the joy for me comes from solving problems and making fellow employees' lives easier in their daily jobs.
I think another factor in all of this, is that I live in flyover country and the mindset seems much different here than on the coasts.
The only problem I have with the post is that they have the luxury of quitting. People like myself are trapped in the job. They're likely making 5x many people's salary if they are a principle engineer at a large tech firm.
I dream of quitting everyday, but I know I have to deal with this job for the next 2 decades at least (about 9 years in). I'm miserable and know I'm wasting my good years, but I have to support a family.
I'm curious how exactly you're trapped. Do you have any dependents? I'd understand in that case but, if you were single or unmarried, then I would argue that you aren't trapped at all.
Yep, wife and kid. Wife won't contribute financially and refuses to move to a lower cost area. She also complains about our 1800sqft house being too small. Not sure how I ended up in such a bad situation... oh wait, it all changed once we got married. Damn legal documents.
They were probably talking about the places where some counties have their own tax imposed ( like SF ) so you pay a lot of money for the privilege of living there so taking a lower paying job gets hard unless you leave. I could be wrong tho.
I have county property tax in PA too. It's only about $500 per year. Maybe they mean school property tax, or their area combines them? The school tax for me is about $3700. I could see that getting astronomical if the house is big enough.
If your making 5x seems like it shouldn't take 30 years to build up enough to move on to something else and still be WAY ahead. Maybe it's time to consider if your lifestyle is too expensive... Sounds like you'd be happier if you had less upkeep + a more enjoyable job
I've had my job outsourced, been subjected to office politics, been passed/screwed over for promotions, seen the company violate its own rules to my detriment, etc ect.
> I've had my job outsourced, been subjected to office politics, been passed/screwed over for promotions, seen the company violate its own rules to my detriment, etc ect.
I mean, I've seen all those too and that was only like 2-3 years in. So?
It's normal workplace behavior.
I think most of us are just upset with capitalism, tbh.
I don't have a problem with capitalism. I just just hate the at-will employment. You sign a "contract" that basically says the company can make all the rules and change them anytime without notice.
"It's normal workplace behavior."
It sucks to see that you don't care at all about integrity.
This sounds like every big company ever, more or less. As a principal engineer your role is more political than technical. The title is prestigious but if you want to be happy, there's nothing wrong with topping out as a senior engineer with no direct reports or broad architectural responsibility. The pay at that level is already (for me) more than my parents ever made on two incomes, plus equity. And i don't have to worry about the politics and the infighting. Just build things until the weekend
Many of those frustrations are with people or processes put in place that one can't change.
It's why many of us try to rise up the ladder to get some level of "control" in a company to fix those frustrations. But then many miss solving the problems they previously worked on and realize that creating change isn't so easy after all.
So that leaves us in search for a company that one can be themselves, provides a feeling of accomplishment, and creates happiness. That's a tough mix to find.
For me, the only solution to this problem has been to start a company of my own. Sure it brings it's own problems, but the satisfaction and happiness it brings is well worth it.
About 7 or 8 years ago, I hit a point of "I'm going to quit tech completely." I felt everything this guy was feeling. Loved programming. Hated the people I invariably ended up working for.
I spent a month on unemployment, looking for my Next Thing. Ended up doing more programming than I had done in the previous year. Went freelance. Suddenly, most things were better.
Started to hate things a little bit again. I was never very good at finding clients, so I got stuck at a single, long-term, full-time one, and was feeling stagnated. Changed my focus from webdev to VR. Loved the work, but couldn't find clients. Ended up an employee again. Right back into the same, old shit.
Eventually ended up at an established, non-tech company that decided they wanted to start doing their own R&D on improving their offering. Everything is great. This company has the best culture I've ever seen. People work and are happy to work, but it's not a cult that fawns over the company. The company is small enough that everyone knows everyone else, but not so small that we're constantly rushing around, looking for money.
Moral of the story: never trust an MBA who has studied the tech industry. My boss now has an MBA, but it was more "this is what I'm going to study to help out in the family business".
I don't think that's the case. Psychology (however weak grounds it stands on) says that the primary reason for burnout is losing the belief that your work matters and then continuing that work for a prolonged period.
it’s a lot higher than you might expect but i don’t think it’s endemic to software at this point. there’s a bit of a cultural shift around mental disorders and the old stigma attached.
i’ve seen a lot of people i know, from preschool teachers to principal scientists, get an ADD or ADHD diagnosis in their later years. the acknowledgment of a disability is much easier now.
all of that said, the use of adderal, vyvanse, and concerta has skyrocketed in the last few years in high school and college and most people just carry the habit forward at this point. my experience with interns and software engineers who define themselves by their job has been a high use of methyl salts to enhance productivity. i’ve mostly worked in the bay area though, and before moving there did not see that pattern as much in non valley workplaces.
I was diagnosed at 32. Ritalin has been life changing.
Continuing medication is not really "carrying a habit forward".
A major shift in thinking in the last 15 years is to realise that ADHD is not a juvenile condition. It lasts into adulthood, but the symptoms change because the brain has changed and because of acquired coping mechanisms.
"Adult ADHD" is just ... ADHD. The medications continue to be a useful treatment.
sorry that my phrasing “carry the habit forward” was heard as a negative. that’s not my intent, i view habits as morally neutral. i workout every other day and consider it a habit i carry.
i would’ve used a term like “continue the addiction” to emphasize my disagreement with that action. i appreciate the insight and will work on clarification in the future.
"The first example of a disorder that appears to be similar to ADHD was given by Sir Alexander Crichton in 1798."[1]
Mild ADHD was less of an impediment before industrialization. It's less of an impediment if you have a secretary at the office and a wife at home. Self medicating can help.
What does a severe case look like if you don't know what you're looking at? Maybe shiftless, maybe dim, maybe accident prone, maybe hot headed, maybe a drunk.
Do you think people didn't get PTSD before the name was invented?
I was diagnosed with ADHD in my fifties! I'd known I likely had it for some years, but the formal diagnosis came late. Alas, none of the meds I tried worked, or they had unacceptable side-effects. So I mostly rely on monitoring my own behavior and trying to establish good habits. The results are mixed.
It's unfortunate you didn't have luck with medication. One thing to consider is asking your psychiatrist whether there are pharmaceutical trials you can join, one of those might be helpful.
The addreall comment blew me away too. When did smart people start taking PEDs?
My guess is that software development is a field where it is more common for folks with the ADHD hyperfocus to excel, but if there is a problem brewing it should be addressed.
> My guess is that software development is a field where it is more common for folks with the ADHD hyperfocus to excel
Your guess isn't quite right. Hyperfocus is not something that can be turned on and off, and the subject of hyperfocus is not chosen at will. It's a symptom that demonstrates that "attention deficit" is an unfortunate misnomer. The problem in ADHD is not a lack of attention, it is reduced ability to govern attention.
More recently, one of LessWrong’s favourite topics is nootropics for intelligence enhancement.
Less recently, Terence McKenna’s critique of caffeine and the industrial revolution and the concept of a “tea break” to give tired workers stimulating caffeine to boost productivity, and how easily that became the norm instead of a siesta or a marijuana break or knocking off early for the day.
Being smart doesn't make you immune to medical conditions.
But yes, there is also an issue with abusing these things. I don't know anyone who does this anymore, but I also don't work in a particularly fast-paced environment, nor do most of my friends.
My building used to have a dealer (cocaine, marijuana, stims). You'd place and order and the drugs would show up in your mailbox. It was an open secret.
I remember when I started coding 15 years ago, I was one of a tiny handful of people in my town who learned how to code. I got into coding because I enjoyed it. My dad advised me against it and said that I should be a lawyer instead. There weren't many jobs back then for programmers; especially in the town where I lived.
The only opportunities were web development for local businesses so it looked like a bad financial move at the time but I enjoyed it that much and not many people were interested in it back then.
But it feels like something went seriously wrong along the way. The industry seemed to have turned into some kind of giant ponzi scheme which attracted all kinds of crooks... People who don't give a shit about coding; it seems that these people managed to get themselves promoted into all the decision-making positions.
The industry is so rotten. Luckily, I managed to get into blockchain space which also has a lot of rotten parts but somehow I managed to secure an income from working on my own stuff so I don't have a boss anymore. Now I'm building a sane/intellectual community from the ground up and being extra careful about what kinds of people we allow in.
I used to think that the current setup of writing software, with prevalent scrum, talking-head managers, resume-driven development, byzantine tech stacks, draining practices such as heavy CI/CD and code reviews etc. is what makes the jobs unpleasant. But then I watched the documentary about the creation of the first Netscape web browser around 1995 or so, when they presumably didn't have any of the above. And yet, the interviewed people were still clearly on a verge of burnout. One of the developers said that she plans to quit the industry in her early thrities as she cannot imagine doing this for her whole life. So I guess the hard part is the task itself, not the circumstances.
> But then I watched the documentary about the creation of the first Netscape web browser around 1995 or so, when they presumably didn't have any of the above.
Maybe not scrum and CI/CD stacks. Talking-head managers and various byzantine process decisions stemming from that and from management-resumé-driven decisions they did have; in fact, the agile movement was a reaction against that. CI/CD was a reaction against often heavy manual testing and endless bug hunting fromm bugs discovered far downstream (often, in prod) and the attendant pressures. Sure CI/CD may suck, but getting a ticket from support because the installer for your enterprise product with license cost starting at over $100K/year shipped to customers with a syntax error in the install script and the accompanying pressure from customers (and thus from sales, and thus from engineering management) that go with it isn't great, either.
At least I imagine it wasn't for the dev team; when I experienced it in 1999 I was the support engineer who identified the problem...
Scrum and CI/CD helped with some of the issues. But created its own storm of them. However, we backfilled the time that stuff freed up with other things.
Usually if scrum is failing is because of a lack of trust. Someone wants to know every detail of what is going on and will use the only process they have, scrum, to bash it out of you. They end up backing waterfall into scrum and thinking they are 'agile'. I am currently watching a perfectly functioning set of scrum teams being torn down due to a rethinking of what scrum is. Adding in 20-30 mins more work per story. Just to get the 'paperwork' right plus 4 different review processes before a story can be worked on. That does not sound bad until you realize the org is popping hundreds of stories every 2 weeks.
Then toss in 'devops' where you have no responsibility to change anything but get all of the 'responsibility' of being yelled at because it is broken. Hanging out with a pager just incase something breaks. And it will, usually at 3am on a sunday and the tech support guys just call you without even opening the logs because that is what it says to do in their RTS guide. But it turns out you need the guys who wrote the code to look at it because they just checked in something 2 weeks ago and the whole thing just went O(N^N^N), and his phone is on mute. But you have no auth to check anything in or change the machines but the dev does.
> it's not the job itself, it's the whole system that makes it unbearable after a while.
Absolutely this. I'm in my mid thirties and I've been working professionally since high school (worked full-time through college). I still love the craft but I've had a hard time finding companies I enjoy working at long-term. Thought I found one, then we got acquired and the work and culture changed. The acquisition was probably a good thing as I don't know if we could have weathered COVID as a small company, but that fact only makes me lament the more the inevitable unbearability of it all.
I say this to underscore my agreement. It's not just one job. It's the whole system that seems unbearable. After a while you give up on finding the mythical company that fits you.
As someone with a small tech company I need to work with bigger tech companies to connect with their API or vice versa, I always notice how little these guys often care about just anything. Everything takes ages and costs enormous amounts of money and they seem to botch up even the simplest things. From not being able to craft proper HTTP headers to messing up UTF8 encoding. When we asked one of them to help one of our clients with his ERP they said they'd be able to help us in 6(!) weeks. Mind you this was a small ask.
I truly hope my company will not turn out like that, because I don't think I'll survive that. I've been in the game for a while, but I'll need to survive at least another 30 years of working. God help me.
The author seems burned out given his age. (I'm going to assume a male author given how few women were in the field 20 years ago.) I went through the same stage after working for a mid-sized financial institution. I had a plan to retrain as a physical therapist. I left the job and lived on savings and my wife's salary. Six months into it I started to write software again: I missed it. So I contracted for 1.5 years and wound up working in-house for a university as a developer. Here I stayed for 14 years now.
Early in my time at the university I started to feel again the way the author describes. When I started to attend local tech meetups and started to take university CS classes out of interest, I started to feel rejuvenated. About 3 years ago, I changed to a team of much younger developers. They used modern tools, had less bureaucracy, and developed distributed applications, which I had little experience with. That was the step I needed to get excited about development again. Now I'm working extra time on my own because I enjoy the work. I'm also taking up niche areas, like language design, in my personal time.
To anyone reading this who might feel the way the author does, I give the advice to focus on finding your cultural fit and figure out the priority of your values. When I worked for startup companies I loved the absence of bureaucracy and the rapid adoption of new technology. But I hated having to wear a lot of hats: I really despise desktop configuration and system administration. My current team has some bureaucracy but we have teams to handle the things I dislike. So it's a compromise that I feel works in my favor.
I went into a non-tech role and then still “code” as much as possible. It’s terribly liberating as I don’t have to do much of what’s called out in authors complaint list but still has all the fun of solving problems writing code.
It was hard to find such a position but I’ve bumped into quite a few others like me who are “crypto coders” who do their work that’s really only possible with software. In some ways I actively don’t want people to know I can code as then word gets out and I might be “forced” to code.
Although I’m probably a terrible programmer compared to really good ones, I did support myself for a decade or two.
I’ve got a hard to describe job but it’s like part data analyst and part technology strategy. Most of my peers don’t code or have people who code for them so it’s one of those things where my outputs are evaluated and don’t care how I get them, but since I can just code them myself my life is a lot more peaceful.
There’s a lot of data product people who can’t code. My org doesn’t buy or sell data so it’s really just about figuring out ways to link stuff together.
I've had a very similar but very different experience.
I've dealt with basically exactly what the OP described, but have had a very different takeaway from it. I don't let it affect me at all, it's something I do for 8 hours a day (extremely rarely more than that) and then don't ever think about it or talk about it.
I develop software in my spare time because I love software, hardware, and building things, but in my day job I might as well be a janitor for all the similarity it has to making things.
It sounds like OP puts too much stock in being fulfilled at work (which is great if you can find it), but I have a more pragmatic "I give them 8 hours of my day in return for money (and some growth) and that's it" attitude, which I find helps my mental health much more.
If my job gets to a point where I think that spending 8 hours a day isn't worth the money or that I'm not learning enough, I quit.
This is what burnout looks like. My advice to folks is to make moves well before you get into a headspace where quitting an entire industry is your last option. Once you've burnt out, you might not be able to stomach even the best possible job for you.
I've been there before. I burnt out as a teacher and almost burnt out on software development, too. What has worked for me is to spend a lot of time introspecting my own motivations and needs, and then working hard to identify places that are good candidates. This took longer than it sounds like it should. But it's hard to break out of the impressions I built from my lived experience of what it seemed like work had to be like.
I'm really happy with work now. I don't have the Thank God It's Friday or the Sunday Scaries, which characterize a job I have to endure, rather than one I mostly enjoy.
I tried that this year and failed miserably. I don't know how it is at other places but I sat on zoom 6-10 hours a day with new clients giving them architecture pre-sales guidance and I have never had a week of work burn me out so much. I had no energy to talk to anyone after work, including my partner. It turned into me dreading going to sleep because at 8am I had to sit on zoom and try to summon all of my charisma for 6-8 hour long calls a day. I lost all agency of my own schedule. Couldn't pop off and go walk my dog in the park with my partner for 30 minutes without worrying about a client message I COULD NOT MISS (leadership).
I'm glad I tried it, it's unfortunate I didn't do well as it really knocked my confidence down but I'm happy to have found a supportive and good environment after that back in SWE. Lots of bad companies/jobs, but there are some good ones.
I'm hoping the same story goes with tech sales at some places and that ship was just on fire and I didn't realize it because I had no prior experience to look back on.
edit: And then the culture. The enterprise sales culture. I'm sorry but I never want to encounter it again. The amount of slack messages I got that were "hey" and waiting for me to respond there was wild. But the biggest was nobody at all cared about what I had going on. Just a worker drone to shutup and generate revenue no matter how close to burn out you get.
Maybe it was a bad year to make the jump. The normal sales job (from a non-sales person POV anyway) seems to be business class travel, eating the finest foods, drinking the finest booze, going out and entertaining the engineers for stuff they were going to buy anyway, and then cashing big checks.
Yeah, started right before the pandi, was 60% travel but before I ever got to travel we went into lock down and it became 100% zoom.
I'm curious if being in person would have helped me, though. I'm not sure how much it it was zoom exacerbating my anxieties or my own anxieties/introversion burning me out.
(or the terrible company)
edit: I was a PSE not really tech sales, I did have to do engineering and got the hard technical questions all day long. It's not your run of the mill sales job, the sales person used me as their tech arm. It was mentally exhausting.
> I did have to do engineering and got the hard technical questions all day long. It's not your run of the mill sales job, the sales person used me as their tech arm. It was mentally exhausting.
I had a role similar to what you are describing at one point. I got to the point where I was basically mentally exhausted and short-tempered all the time. I had a lot of in-person meetings and strongly preferred web meetings. With web meetings you only put on your game face for the length of the meeting. With in-person meetings you travel to, you need to put on your game face for much longer, including before and after the actual meetings.
IMO the way to not destroy yourself in PSE roles is to basically be the type of person who is okay with having a very superficial technical understanding of the wide range of things you see at customers. Otherwise there are an infinite number of technical things you can become an expert on, and other people in your team and sales people will absolutely crush you under the weight of all the different questions your customers have.
At least for me, I was an technical expert in a bunch of enterprise level technologies and duct tape stuff that basically translated into nothing if I moved a bit out of the software I was responsible for. Some people are okay with that. I was not and it really crushed my mental state after a few years.
And to people outside of Engineering, SWEs have flexible hours, can work from home, are paid really well, can take breaks whenever they want, can actually go on vacation without constantly checking their email, and can switch jobs easily.
Sure, some SWEs at are making $500K a year, work 2 hours a day, and get their underwear washed with free laundry service.
Some sales people have a royal life that they pay for by traveling like crazy and working crazy hours to deal with internal and customer politics. But a lot of sales people don't have unlimited expense accounts and their job is a slog to try and convince people to take a second meeting and buy something at some point.
Tech sales works if the company you are working for has a good product that sells and a good sales culture. Lots of people are in software sales jobs that are basically just dealing with internal sales politics and customer politics to get somebody to make a decision to buy something based on "vision", not really product merit.
If you don't mind saying, what is "highly paid" in this context? I have no concept of what sales people make compared to SWEs. How much (if any) pay cut would I be looking at if I took this route?
Pffffffft I am resisting my natural tendency to get very angry at reading this. Sales is a profession where the top 1% of earners are like lottery winners and the bottom 99% of earners are like customer service.
In software engineering, the gains are much more equally distributed and the contribution to society is more valuable.
Keep in mind that sales engineers usually have a good sized base salary, unlike pure sales people. With that comes a smaller commission than sales people.
As for contribution to society, I don't agree. The big winners is software make some pretty toxic stuff.
These companies are generally looking for people with a good number of years experience in a domain. It also helped that I had a consulting background and had helped closed deals in the past.
The interview was mostly about making sure I mixed well with other people. There was a coding challenge, but not leetcode style. I had to write a program that solved a real world sort of problem. A surprising number of people do fail this, even though naive O(n2) solutions can still pass.
The transition was a bit of a shock. They just threw me in the water. Like many of you, I have impostor syndrome. Being put forth as a expert on a system I knew little about was very awkward. It took about 6 months for me to be comfortable with what I am doing.
I do not spend all day on Zoom like others in the comment section. Instead, I deal with a smaller number of high value deals. That distinction in probably key to whether the job is better or worse than SWE.
Agree 100%. Similar situation; been doing this for 20 years; in my 40s now. My exit will be into rental properties and flipping houses. Not ready quite yet; might have another couple years in me, but we're planning on it.
Thanks! Have done my share of remodeling in the past. Not easy work but the goal will be to get to the point where we can hire a team of workers and just do the finances / design / management. Same as anything else, right? Takes time to get a base going / get a process down, but I'm up for a new challenge.
I think this is an advantage of working remotely. That way most of the work interactions are strictly about the code[1]. All things considered, I get a mostly good deal: working on what I actually like to do, coding, while avoiding most of the bullshit.
So, I'm adding this as another reason to keep avoiding co-location as much as possible.
[1]: And, well, online meetings discussing what to code and how to do it; they're often pointless, particularly the daily ones, but bearable.
My solution is freelancing and online entrepreneurship. I quit my last job right before lockdown, and since then I've been building my own products and doing freelancing to stay alive.
While it's arguably more stressful, it's at least good stress. Everything you do is about making a good product and making money. There's no politics, just users and clients. The act of software development turns into the craft that you wanted it to be at the corporation/startup, instead of monkey work with little to no stake in the outcome. I'd rather be poor than waste my life.
Another good thing about it is that I decide when the product is finished. Every time I've gotten a job at a startup, I built the product in about a year then was forced to stick around for the endless revisions, updates, new features, etc. It seemed like work for the sake of work. What happened to the lazy developer trope? I believe 90% of it is superfluous, and the main product + good marketing is what's actually important for revenue and satisfying users.
A dog-walking app should be finished in a few months. The end. It's not like the software somehow erodes over time (unless you keep screwing with it and adding stuff). If the users are happy, just cash out already.
Finally, you decide who you work with - as a partner, not an employee. That changes the dynamic a lot. You can say when you're done, and you get a real stake in the outcome.
Since the coronavirus, working as an employee in software has lost its lustre. You don't get the big beautiful office with bean bag chairs, you don't get to socialize, you don't learn anything, and you sure as hell don't control your hours.
Oooof, this hit me hard. Burnout to the max from the sound of it.
The only way I've managed to solve any of these qualms is to just tell my boss, more senior engineer, director, etc, "No". Work is a relationship just like any other and your job will treat you exactly as you let it, and if you never say no or stick up for yourself and say I don't like this or that, of course it's going to grind on you.
Just like everything else with life, there's going to be some bad with the good, just be sure to draw a clear line in the sand as to what you're willing to put up with and when it gets crossed, stand your ground.
When I read his "I'm sick of..." part, I think you could replace most of that with any other industry (modifying the coding specific bits with industry specific bits).
It really sounds like the root cause is hating working for a large company.
I do freelance software development work and I experience none of those issues in my day to day. That includes never having done a coding interview in ~20 years of freelancing.
I think to survive in this field you must detach yourself from yourself. I remember burning out at every job, just like OP. But when I stopped "thinking" and looked at myself from a third perspective, I could see the politics and grind work affecting the "me". But just observing that phenomenon and detaching yourself from it prevents the stress.
I can't relate with the OP because tech lets you write your own ticket. There are so many different types of jobs and opportunities.
> I'm sick of wasting time writing worthless tests
You can find a codebase to work on that aligns with your testing preferences
> I'm sick of endless meetings and documents and time tracking tools.
I found a gig without heavy process. It was one of the main criteria in my job search.
> I'm sick of reorgs.
There are well organized, flat companies that don't suffer from endless team reshuffling.
> I'm sick of everyone above middle management having the exact same personality type.
Tech lets you work remotely and choose who you interact with. I live in a middle class Colombian neighborhood. When I finish Zoom calls with Americans, I can walk out my door and am transported to a different world.
I'm glad OP found a new city and job that work better. Not sure they needed to leave tech. They could have started a bootstrapped small company (no VC), or gotten a corporate sponsored open source gig, or whatever.
Very interesting thoughts. I'm also at a similar point in my career, and my experiences have been really different. I still enjoy my work more than ever. I've never worked in "big tech" that long. However, I do agree that companies become more corporate over time so it's up to you to fight back against these tendencies and make the job you really like. Of course that is harder in large companies but it is still doable to make an enjoyable niche.
This was sad to read. I've been in jobs I hate before, and had burn out, but I feel privileged to work at a role I love with a group of people I respect (helped start a company).
To anyone else reading this who has felt the same, the entire industry isn't this way. Yes we have many issues in the tech industry. My current rule is to only work with people I believe in, and on problems I believe should be solved.
In my 40's and been coding since I was 6. Still love it. I even stepped down from management roles to go back to development (but switching industries to one that I'm passionate about) and it's made all the difference.
There's a lot of software development out there and a lot of different companies. Sometimes it's better to not work for a pure software company.
I think it's possible to avoid a really stressful corporat job and still develop software. For example, working for a small startup or maybe an individual small client. Or launching your own startup if possible.
For me, it has not been possible to avoid corporate stress and BS and still maintain a high salary. I moved to another country.
This is me. Twenty years at my current company (with various increasing roles & responsibility). It's good pay, but not crazy. It's stable, and I have seniority.
Stealing phrase (paraphrasing) from a recent HN comment...
TLDR: Two kinds of work are doing and justifying. Those of us used to doing are really bad at, and demotivated by, the justifying.
Sorry, I should have book marked it.
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Finally listening to Graeber's Utopia of Rules. It's kinda blowing my mind. Like a firestorm in my head.
Graeber's The Democracy Project has even more radical, useful explanations. His distinction between "rational" (following the rules) and "reasonable" (doing what's right, fair) gives voice to something that's been plaguing me for decades.
Graeber supplies more of the puzzle pieces for how capitalism (in the USA) came to mean corporatism, and how these paradigms necessitate the Kafka/Brazil (movie) style bureaucracies we all hate.
It's really an amazing time to be alive. I came of age reading Peter Drucker, Buckminister Fuller, Donald Norman, and many other humanists. (The conclusions of the proto-libertarian stuff never made sense to me. I always thought of myself as whatever the leftist version of libertarianism would be. Same complaints, different conclusions. I had no idea that makes me an anarchist. It took me reading Graeber to finally start understanding what Chomsky's been talking about.)
Looking back, I truly didn't understand how far out of the mainstream their notions were. The humanists made sense to me and I guess I assumed everyone was on the same page. Alas, I've always been an outsider in my own land.
With the rise of post-capitalism and renewed interest in direct democracy, empathy, participation and so forth, my world is finally starting to make some sense.
I find it funny how this post has so many comments and points yet it is quickly sliding out from rankings. Is this whole subject supposed to be kept secret by the industry? Is YC being an accomplice to this?
It's actually in line with PG's writing. He had an essay where he wrote that, for smart independent people, jobs are not the answer (and startups may be). However, now he's holding stock in so many companies who need to hire those smart and independent suckers, so that his own writing may be backfiring on him.
OP needs to get out of big tech and work at a startup or small-mid cap company. There's significantly less of what he hates and more time to do what he loves.
I'm glad he's taken decisive steps to increase his life satisfaction. I was a serial startup entrepreneur who kept trying, wouldn't give up and eventually got good at it and then was profitably acquired into a big public tech company. Initially, I didn't especially like it and I also pretty much sucked at "doing BigCo" well. Fortunately, my acquirer was one of the better examples of the BigCo breed. Generally, well-run, ethical and at least trying to do the right thing. Despite this, I found the patterns that had worked for me as a tech startup founder, didn't work nearly as well in the context of a tech BigCo. I say "context" because the actual activities my job entailed were remarkably similar but the 'system' was quite different.
I decided it wasn't really working and that they were probably going to figure out that my way of thinking wasn't a good fit for their context and we'd part ways on good terms. Instead of just waiting around for this, I decided I would try to use my remaining time and 'rope' to try to learn as much as I could about why my previously successful patterns didn't work in this context. So, I essentially stopped trying to do what I was 'supposed' to do and instead looked at the organization's objectives behind my tasking - and try to actually help deliver what they really wanted. Technically, this could be considered insubordination but I tried to be as subtle about it as I could while still being effective. I figured I might get myself fired faster but instead, I was actually partially successful in getting "good things" happening. So, I doubled down on this approach and escalated. I got reprimanded by my direct manager (a very senior exec) for not following specific orders but no one was too upset because it was clear I was trying to act in the best interests of the company. Those of you with relevant experience can probably guess what happened next. I got promoted because leadership decided I was just "difficult but getting stuff done". This led to nearly a decade of my constantly escalating my efforts to "do the right thing", even if it wasn't exactly in the order or approach I was instructed to take. I managed to continuing to deliver enough success (along with some failures in-between) to not get sacked. Eventually, I escalated my "do the right thing" so far, we did end up parting ways but it was mutual and they were very nice about it (by this time I'd pretty much told everyone around me what my approach was). I'm happy I stayed and did it this way. In the end, I worked my ass off, delivered good value for the company, made really good money and when we parted ways both the leadership and I felt the net of my service at the company had been a success.
In short, I think the OP could have possibly stayed around to figure out the "meta" game of that BigCo. Maybe a good mentor would have helped. Alternatively, maybe it was just a lousy company or a 'broken' group within the company.
> I'm sick of wasting time writing worthless tests. I'm sick of fixing more tests than bugs.
I think as an industry we need to look at tests, particularly unit tests, and Test Driven Development (TDD) through critical lens. Writing unit tests is seen as a virtue while in reality how much value an individual unit test adds given the cost of writing, running and maintaining unit tests.
What baffles me the most is TDD. I have seen front end teams of startups doing very simple apps following TDD. I have delivered complex data pipeline project without writing a single unit test. I wrote functional tests and lot of monitoring tools for the pipeline. But not a single unit test. It worked perfectly fine in production. For technically simple projects I just don't see any value in following TDD. And the value of unit tests for simple projects should be very carefully thought through.
TDD only works when you're building something to a pre-defined spec. But so much of what we do has no spec, or a spec that is constantly in flux. Add on to that the fact that anything we would need that does follow a strict specification is probably already implemented, there ends up being very little need for TDD in the wild. It's great if you need it, but few people actually need it.
Still, if you start your day building one thing, I strongly assume you know what you're going to build that day. And you start with writing a test to confirm you actually built at the end of the day the thing you planned. Will you keep that test? Maybe yes, maybe not, but you got your confirmation at the end of the day. This is TDD for me.
It is the processes around tests that mess up devs day I think. Having the rule of all tests need to pass for a submit and no way to just remove failing tests due too over zealous review process. Tests testing the implementation rather than the problem. Old tests on undocumented code. Etc.
I wholeheartedly disagree with TDD part, I get it unit tests are more fragile in fact, I prefer integrations and module tests over unit test but doing the test upfront it a worthy investment, because speed up the development (because you only have run the test to validate the new feature) and also more often than not after the feature is done without the tests then the tests are never made
SW people are well payed to provide RoI for their company. If you get the opportunity to do something you like then that's great. But ultimately SW people left to their own devices will never ship product. This is why you have people like Program Managers and people managers to drive the product and the resources to deliver to schedule. Processes like Agile and SCRUMs are there to stop SW people from getting wayward and failing to deliver. It's how the business maintains control of their investments (i.e. SW developers).
Sorry no,that's just delusional. Software gets shipped despite Program Managers and SCRUM masters, not because of them. Agile was developed by Software devs to manage management and scope,you got the whole thing backwards.
When we first started we didn't mind the bullshit so much because we were too dumb to realize how much there was.
Then we got older and, yeah, it's ridiculous, but we were pretty decent at surfing the bullshit waves so we still didn't mind so much.
Now you're in your 40s and the real obligations of life have started piling up. You've gone from 7 hours of free time a day to 1, and you sure as hell aren't going to spend it learning about the latest iteration of Angular/React/Vue/Svelte/whatever the fuck is next. So you start losing your technical edge. Meanwhile at work you have some dipshit in sprint planning that wants to have the 57th discussion about how story points do not represent time. Oh, by the way, it's December, so we need you to watch that 45 minute security training video again so you don't accept USB flash drives from strangers in the parking lot. Now it's 4 PM and you didn't get anything done today and you start thinking about how pointless all this shit is because all we do is make an app that helps people schedule dog massages...
So, yeah, there's a reason mid-life crises are so cliche. It's like teenage angst. It's not completely justified, but it's not exactly unwarranted either. I mean, what kind of dumbass doesn't wonder at least a little bit if all this bullshit is worth it?