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Ask HN: Modern software development is killing my passion. What do I do?
In the first years of my career, I worked on packaged software. We wrote it, tested it, then put it up on a website. Life was good. I worked mostly with C/C++ at that time.
My career was stellar during those years. I was young and getting promoted super fast. With a limited scope of tech, I could dive into it and learn a lot quickly. Whenever I joined a company or switched teams, I became a "go to" person that people sought for help. I felt motivated to learn and deepen my knowledge.
Then everything started moving to the web. Any piece of software was written in at least a dozen languages and frameworks. Then came package managers, and package managers within package managers. Dependency hell.
I just can't keep up with things anymore. I learn the basics and do my job, but I feel I can never get a good grasp on things. Years ago I felt like I knew what I was doing. I had a mental model of things and I could reason about them down to assembly level. But now, applications are spread over different languages, tools, frameworks, plus everything is distributed, in a way I can't build those mental models anymore.
Whenever I look at the mess of technologies that seem part of every app today, all I can see is complexity. Things seem to optimize for "coolness" instead of maintainability, simplicity and stability. People love frameworks built atop layers of complex and often flaky software, but don't realize that all that abstraction makes it hard to debug an app when something goes wrong.
I estimate I spend 80% of my time dealing with:
- Broken dependencies
- Figuring out how to integrate components A and B, which weren't written to be compatible with each other
- Waiting for some remote server to come back up so things will work again
- Rewriting code because some new X framework is supposedly better
I'm getting burned out by this. I feel like I churn, churn and churn, but don't add value.
Is anyone else here suffering from the same issues?
- wprapido 11y agosteering away from web might do the trick. try developing and marketing your own products / services, where you are not forced to use the latest framework, rather valued and consequently paid for value your software brings and problems it solves. as of burn out, take a sabbatical if you can afford it
- greenyoda 11y agoThere's still a lot of programming out there that's not web or app programming (e.g., on the back-end side). Also, in the enterprise world, there's much less chasing of cool new web frameworks or languages. For example, there's nothing cool in the web sites where I do my banking or stock trades.
- eswat 11y ago> For example, there's nothing cool in the web sites where I do my banking or stock trades. Canadian banks are starting get into the churn playground though. Many have released or soon will release websites using Angular 1 and are hiring warm bodies like crazy.
- eecks 11y ago> Rewriting code because some new X framework is supposedly better You obviously should not be doing this. Who makes this call?
- burnoutbytech 11y agoHigher ups.
- AnimalMuppet 11y agoThen get different higher ups. Sane management goes a long way.
- hashkb 11y agoThis can't be overstated enough, most management is completely insane; and working with them becomes an exercise in validating their sanity.
- YeGoblynQueenne 11y agoI can only say this to you: No, no, you're not alone [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jg4ekLG9Zo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jg4ekLG9Zo
- tmaly 11y agopick one tool/framework and stick with it till you can write web apps like writing a letter. its better to have one good tool than dancing around the mirad of new frameworks.
- bbcbasic 11y agoThis means you need to be darn picky when applying for jobs. You may need to go far into an interview process to find out they use dogShitJS and you then turn them down.
- J_Darnley 11y agoQuit and let someone else have your job.