6 ms·

Ask HN: Is any senior dev reasonably happy with their job?

94 points by taway_1212 9y ago

Is any senior dev reasonably happy with their job (as opposed to it being a tedious grind for money)? If so, what do you do and what are your working conditions?

alexnewman 9y ago
I am a contractor who has a few startup exits under my belt. I hack and work to help and further man. I don't need the cash and don't have a family.
- madamelic 9y ago
  So you're a contractor who just jumps between startups? How do you get started with this? Just a network with lots of entrepreneurs I presume? :)
scarecrowbob 9y ago
Well, I dunno what "senior" is, but we do agency-style work for clients and my boss bills me that way. I'm on a very small team where I'm the technical lead and I code every day. I make whatever tech decisions I want. I have a salary that's not large, but I also work a 30 hour week. 100% remote and nobody cares when those 30-ish hours are as long as I get stuff done and make some rare client meetings. I trust my boss, who does the sales for the company, and generally she sells these really great projects with a lot of padding so there is always plenty of slack (praise bob). Sometimes the projects are kind of dumb, but I'm still learning new things and they are large enough in scope that I can dive into some fun stuff. So with all that, working is not a bad deal for me at all... it's something that I spend a whole lot of time doing, but it's also fun and pays well and I still have time for my 16-year-old, a girlfriend, and playing some music with friends.
- bradgnar 9y ago
  want to work there
swalsh 9y ago
If you're not happy, and your job feels like a grind... it's probably time to get out. Life's too short to hate what you do for 8 hours a day. You should identify what motivates you, and try to pursue that. For example, I found I was not really motivated by technical challenges anymore. I found I was more interested in the business. I cared about the problem my code solved, why the code was needed, and who it helped. At the time I was a "Lead", but the path I was on only lead to me being pigeoned holed into more "technical" positions. They let me pick how to build it, but I was never exposed to the why we're building it (more than the context required to build it). I found consulting as a way to expose myself more to the business. Fortunately, I had built a great network, and that gave me a start. I've only been doing it for about 8 months, but I'm far happier with this than when I was just another "senior engineer".
- hartator 9y ago
  Isn't consulting still working on the how and not the why, just a different way to be paid?
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    Yea. Instead of a boss, you have a client. Different side of the same coin. For every true "why" job out there, there are 100 "how" jobs.
  - reboog711 9y ago
    I've been consulting for 17 years... Even though the company is just me, I approach it as a business and do a mix of hourly projects and fixed fee projects. At any given time I have 1-3 projects going on at once. What I work on depends primarily on the client. With some clients it is all about the 'why' and we do real business analysis. These are massively rewarding. Other clients treat me like someone who "Shovels poop for money" and just want me to do whatever they say. These are not as rewarding--but are often profitable.
GuiA 9y ago
All the senior devs I've worked with who seemed truly happy at work were that way because they spent plenty of time with their family, volunteering, and just doing stuff outside of work that was meaningful to them. None of them poured everything they had in their job, tying it with their identity. People in that latter category tended to be more brilliant in general (for example a problem comes up and they immediately know of 3 different ways to solve it, half a day later they tested all 3 for that particular problem, half a day later a first implementation is up and running, while it'd take most other people a full week to reach the first step), but they seemed to have way more up and downs with their mood and happiness and general. Obviously this is a generalization from my ~10 years or so in professional dev environments. As a senior dev who tends to identify more with the second category in terms of happiness fluctuations, I've been trying to be more like people I've known in the first category.
- jshaqaw 9y ago
  This is not confined to tech. When I look at senior people in all the fields my friends and family work in, you have a small core group who - bless them - live for the work and thrive on it, a good chunk of very successful people who like it enough and realize the fullness of life is not entirely in the job.
mattnewport 9y ago
Yes, but mostly because I co-founded a company working in an area I was interested in and enthusiastic about (VR). I work remote from home (the company is currently fully remote) and we all have pretty flexible working conditions.
jcadam 9y ago
Not really. Not enough challenging/interesting work to go around it seems. My current job doesn't even really involve 'developing' anything. Mostly going to meetings and writing documentation. I've tried hunting for a new job, but there's definitely a glut of senior software engineers these days. This current job, whilst boring as hell, pays well and doesn't demand overly long hours from me. And since I have my side project(s) to serve as a creative outlet to satisfy my 'coding' urges, I've stopped caring about finding other work for the time being.
mej10 9y ago
I don't find my job to be a tedious grind at all. I enjoy working as part of a team (specifically my current one) and helping to make everyone around me and the business successful. I have had to shift around the day-to-day tasks I work on occasionally, but finding and working on high leverage parts of our technology and business is pretty rewarding.
nuclearghost 9y ago
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by senior, but my title says I'm senior (6 years exp, 3 in this job). I would say I'm beyond reasonably happy. I found a good company with senior management I can believe in and co-workers who are strong technically and easy to work with. Although the industry, advertising, is no one's favorite, our mission is to make it suck less while supporting people who create real journalistic value which I can get behind.
kenbolton 9y ago
I work from home for a profitable business-to-business startup servicing the payments underwriting industry. I did not know such an industry existed before working on this project, and the job came through my alumni network on LinkedIn. I just started my fifth year with this organization. My responsibilities include everything engineering; everyone else focuses sales. I've met one of the three co-founders twice, first for an interview and second for a weekend with his family. All three co-founders join me five days a week for a brief standup/scrum and one day each week we include a sales and strategy update. They pay in the range of my market value and have steadily increased my equity share of the enterprise. I supplement that income by teaching sea kayak technique and rescue year-round and snowboard instruction in the winter. I try to put in at least four hours of work every day, including weekends, and balance that with four hours of year-round kayaking, hiking, house-work, seasonal snow-sports, or some other physical activity. I do this "job" to keep my brain sharp and hope to continue well past the point of typical retirement. The same applies for my non-"job" activities. If I did not need to worry about saving for retirement, I would probably still do this. The joy comes from solving problems, not from stacking cash. Become the low-key hero your co-workers need. p.s. I started kayaking seriously twelve years ago because I would see these people in their 70s surfing big waves in 16' boats. "That's what I want to be when I grow up, that or retired!"
- gorpomon 9y ago
  You are living my best life, kudos to you good sir.
- chuck32 9y ago
  "I try to put in at least four hours of work every day, including weekends, and balance that with four hours of year-round kayaking, hiking, house-work, seasonal snow-sports, or some other physical activity." Well done for achieving work-life balance.
  - kenbolton 9y ago
    Appreciate the sentiment, but gotta admit that I feel like I am still pretty far from this achievement. I suspect that balance is a goal that will remain perpetually just out of reach, and I am fine with continuing to work on it! To that point, I started skateboarding last week in an effort to improve balance. Rodney Mullen is my new hero.
SFJulie 9y ago
I have 19 managers, none of them understanding the job at hand and a family I can't see because of 3h/day commutation. Else the job is fine. Ho! And I inherited a fork of 500k slocc using 5 languages and so much frameworks I can't count them anymore. I am the janitor of a huge codebase with a management under acid, but it pays enough for me to not sleep under the bridge, so I guess I am happy.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- autotune 9y ago
  That sounds... pretty bad. If you are really in SF there are plenty of jobs around the Bay that offer a good life balance and prevent you from having to sleep under the bridge, just have to look for them.
- gwbas1c 9y ago
  You're probably on a sinking ship and don't even realize it. If it's really that bad, I suggest quitting in with the smallest amount of notice you can give and hopping on the job market tomorrow. Remember to thoroughly vhet your future employer. Job interviews are a two-way street. There's nothing wrong with finishing an interview and then telling the employment agency that you don't want to continue the interview. I did that a few times while looking.
dacracot 9y ago
34 years of experience... I am reasonably happy with my compensation and work/life balance. I am not reasonably happy with what I do 40 hours a week, primarily because I do not control the high level objectives, nor the resources to make it happen. This is why they pay me, to do their bidding. I'm ok with it because it allows me to make my time outside of work, fulfilling and meaningful.
scarlac 9y ago
Yes. Senior Freelance Full Stack Engineer at the moment. ~18 years of coding, ~15 years of professional work. Been in startups, both my own and as an employee.
unpythonic 9y ago
I've been a programmer for 30 years, and I could reasonably be considered to be a senior dev. Yes, I'm very happy with my job. I work at a company which cares deeply about solving hard problems well, and that care translates into good working conditions, great work/life balance, support from management for engineering concerns, and a very nice benefits package. There is also a focus on having separate promotion tracks for managers vs. more technically inclined people. There have been jobs where I have either tired of the novelty of the problems, changes in management, changes in company policy, etc., but at that point I find a new job in a better company and continue to find happiness. If you're not happy where you are, and you are considered a senior dev, then take responsibility for yourself and find a position that you enjoy. If you're locked into a company because of golden handcuffs, lack of local resources, or family obligations, then find activities outside of work that provide what you're missing.
- spike021 9y ago
  If you don't mind me asking some questions: How do you feel about working in this industry? Have you moved jobs a lot? The reason I ask is my parents have been "working" or in their adulthood as parents/slightly before having children for roughly 30 years and for the most part have kept the same jobs. So as a new software engineer fresh out of school, they find the idea of needing to switch jobs for higher pay, new challenges, etc. to be a bit unbelievable and disagree that I should eventually do that.
  - cableshaft 9y ago
    It's a different world nowadays. Switching jobs every 1-3 years is more the norm now than being a lifer (for most industries, not just software dev). They're probably coming from the perspective of the time they lived in, and don't realize that the world has changed quickly around them over the decades. And the younger you are, the more expected it is. My parents are the same way.
  - TomMarius 9y ago
    Yes, switching jobs is necessary in IT most of the time. Some HR people will even see staying at one job for too long as weird.
donatj 9y ago
I was for about four years. Then something changed, the tone of the office changed. There's a drive to get poor quality work out the door fast rather than high quality work when it's ready (which is why I took this job to begin with).
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  Yeah. Jobs and teams are good... until they're not. No good situation is forever. But if you've got management sanity, good coworkers, and interesting work, don't casually walk away - until it changes.
shortoncash 9y ago
The best job I've ever had is about 10% interesting and 90% horrible grind. I've come to believe the secret to getting something out of a career is learning to love the grind. Incidentally, that 10/90 ratio happens to dominate everything else worth pursuing also. Sports in particular. You get that initial ramp up high and then when you hit the part with smaller and smaller gains, that's where "learning to love the grind" kicks in. It's much harder than it sounds, too!
- vlunkr 9y ago
  I think this is about right. I really enjoy starting new projects and tackling new types of challenges, but I always end up spending more time on maddening bugs or re-implementing some variation of a feature you've already built 10 other times. Staying focused and excited for that stuff is the hard part.
- ChemicalWarfare 9y ago
  right on. one of the reasons folks who jump ship too often look suspect resume-wise. not always the case but those frequent short gigs look like the person is prone to bailing after the ramp-up honeymoon is over and it's time to get sh1t done.
  - pmoriarty 9y ago
    "one of the reasons folks who jump ship too often look suspect resume-wise. not always the case but those frequent short gigs look like the person is prone to bailing after the ramp-up honeymoon is over and it's time to get sh1t done." Reasons I've quit jobs after a year that had nothing to do with lazyness (in fact, I'm often one of the people who puts in the most hours in my teams, and praised for it so as long as I keep putting in the hours): 1 - There's no connection between my boss/team-mates apart from the work. We have nothing in common. We see the world differently. We like different things. Interactions not related to work are strained. We probably wouldn't choose to spend time with one another if work didn't force us to. This is actually kind of a big deal, since I wind up spending most of my waking time with my coworkers, who it'd be nice to actually like and enjoy spending time with. There's only superficial due dillegence you can do for this during the hiring process. Most people seem at least decent during the interviews. It may take time to find out they're really not your type of people, and you're not theirs. 2 - Getting blamed for something out of my control, and having no power to change it. You can't fix it because the boss says no, but you're the one who gets blamed when things go wrong. 3 - Being surrounded by a company full of money-chasers, whose sole reason for existence seems to be to make more money. This is related to reason 1 above, and kind of makes me depressed. 4 - Working crazy hours for long periods of time. There's a lot of talk about 4-hour-days on HN recently. Well, if you're a fan of 4-hour-days you can probably understand how debilitating 12-, 14-, and 16-hour days are, especially when you have to work them for months if not years on end. 5 - Being forced to do boring, menial work you're way overqualified for because the company is too cheap to hire someone less skilled to do it. This leads to extreme boredom and frustration. 6 - Having no growth opportunities and feeling stuck in your position. 7 - Having spineless bosses that constantly kiss up to upper management and force the team do whatever they're told no matter how ridiculous or wrong they know it to be. 8 - Being underpaid and feeling unappreciated -- especially when you choose not to work crazy hours, which seems to be the only way some people can be impressed. 9 - Being treated with contempt by people who don't understand what you do. 10 - Feeling like your life is slipping away working on crap you really don't care about. 11 - Learning new technology -- something that got me excited a decade ago -- just seems like more of the same, and a drudge, full of irrelevant minutia. 12 - Having lots of interests outside of work that I'd much rather be spending my time on. 13 - Having to deal with mountains of bureaucracy and political bullshit. Having to hear endless cheerleading from upper management that everyone knows is a load of crap, yet having to smile and applaud. 14 - Feeling seriously depressed and burnt out, in large part due to much of the above. I wish I could say companies like the above are rare, but they're way too common.
notacoward 9y ago
This is a really good question. Yes, I'll get to an answer (skip to the bullets at the end if you want), but first I'll set the scene a little. Junior devs who chafe under others' direction/decisions/criticism often think everything will get better once they're senior themselves. I know I did. It reminds me a bit of kids/teenagers who think being out of school and/or head of a household is going to be a great liberating experience. Again, I did. But the reality in both cases is addressed by this cartoon - a copy of which lives on our fridge. http://www.fowllanguagecomics.com/homework-bonus-panel/ http://www.fowllanguagecomics.com/homework-bonus-panel/ So yes, being a senior dev often means spending way too much time doing all of the less-fun things on a project. Planning and scheduling, maintaining all of the infrastructure others depend on, interfacing with other groups, etc. Spending half of every day reviewing (and having to argue about) others' code is even more annoying than having your own code reviewed once in a while. Being the "debugger of last resort" is satisfying once you're done, but can be intensely frustrating while you're in it. This list of gripes suggests the solution: one must actively resist all of these extra roles. Relentlessly. Yes, you'll be dragged into doing all that stuff anyway, but if what you enjoy is designing and coding then you have to protect that time. With all that said, here are some of the keys for me: * Find fun projects and good people to work with. Always important, but ever more so as you become more senior. * Work from home (at least part of the time - for me it's practically always) * Explicitly block out time for the different activities. Set aside a morning for code reviews, an afternoon for your own coding, etc. For me, working in a time zone three hours ahead of most of my peers is a huge plus here. * Require meetings to be scheduled well in advance. Decline with prejudice when people get too casual about this. Make it clear every once in a while that you're doing this as a matter of policy/principle. To soften that, show interest in the content e.g. by providing offline feedback. * In general, say "no" a lot. Be polite, compromise or defer when you need to, but don't be a pushover and don't be passive-aggressive. * Accept that you might get dinged for all these things. You might get fewer promotions or smaller raises, maybe even a bad review. OTOH, the increased focus on what you're best at and most passionate about might improve your performance compared to being pulled in seven different directions.
- gwbas1c 9y ago
  Can't agree more! Most important, if you get dinged in a review, escalate. There's nothing like the company founder going to your boss and and saying that the thing you're getting dinged for is not your job.
gwbas1c 9y ago
I've learned to appreciate my job for what it is, and for the benefits that it provides in comparison to other jobs that I could easily obtain. It took me almost a decade of bouncing from a few different jobs, and failing miserably at trying to run my own company, before I found my current job. My job isn't perfect, but no job is. I'm board and eager to move to another opportunity, but that opportunity will be chosen very carefully. I've already made the mistake of moving too fast, and I'm perfectly happy to sit in my current job for another 2-3 years if I need to. Why? I interviewed at another company about a year ago; and for reasons that were hard to explain, it just didn't seem to be as good as my current job. A few months after they offered me a position, they were acquired and the team now has quite a bit of stress. Changing jobs wouldn't have improved much.
- le-mark 9y ago
  > I've learned to appreciate my job for what it is, and for the benefits that it provides in comparison to other jobs that I could easily obtain. This is what it boils down to, imo. Currently I'm working on a horrendous legacy code base with a very low performing team, in a very low performing organization. Over the years I've learned what matters to me, and this job has what I need: good pay, time off, and I can come and go as I please so long as I'm here for "core" hours (ie on location, not remote). The last part is another way to say my boss is cool. He's new too, although he's been here longer than I have. We're both dismayed at the do nothing culture, and terrible code here. That's about all anyone can ask for IME, find out what matters to you and optimize for that. When I go home I don't give a thought for work, I get to concentrate on my family 100%.
  - gwbas1c 9y ago
    > > I've learned to appreciate my job for what it is, and for the benefits that it provides in comparison to other jobs that I could easily obtain. Part of why it works out so well for me is that I have enough clout to avoid things I don't want to do. IE, I don't want to be a manager. When my manager, (who's titled a director,) decided that I was going to become a manager, it basically went like this: Me: "I don't want to be a manager." My boss, "You're not going to be a manager, you're just going to do [everything that a manager does]. You need to grow in your career." Me: "That sounds like you want me to be a manager." I saw right through that and made it pretty clear that I wasn't going to be a manager, and I wasn't going to be tricked into being a manager without the title of manager. If I was going to be forced to be a manager, I was going to take that job I mentioned in my original post. It helped that I missed a meeting with upper management because a job interview ran long. In part, it's not that I don't want to be a manager, I don't want to be a manager for the company I work for. I know too much of the code to be hands-off, and I'm remote. The culture is far too interrupt-driven in our office to be a remote manager.
kstrauser 9y ago
I love mine. I've been here for two years and I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop; it continues not to. I'm a senior backend engineer in a healthcare startup, but I think the single biggest determining factor to why this place is so awesome is that my coworkers genuinely, complete respect each other. That manifests in lots of ways: - Arguing and infighting is nonexistent. When Joe proposes something and Jane disagrees, it's on a professional, technical level. Joe knows this and responds in kind. Agreements are made and consensus reached. - Sometimes we make mistakes, but we all know that it's because a smart person acted on perhaps incomplete information, not because they're incompetent or untrustworthy. We have actual blameless post-mortems to figure out what happened and how to prevent it, and then we move on. - If you want vacation, you take vacation. We know you're not a slacker who's trying to get away with working as little as possible. - If I have a question about a management decision, I ask the CEO to explain it. He makes time to meet with me and we discuss it. There's never any "because I said so". There've been times when I think I might have made a different decision (or maybe not; he has more information about it than I do), but I've always been 100% convinced that the decision was reasonable and justifiable. There are literally no hiring requirements more important than "treats others with respect". If you're an asshole genius, don't bother applying because you won't fit in at all here. Those people would wreck our corporate culture so we avoid them like the plague. No one is so much better than my awesome coworkers that it'd be worthwhile.
- whitepoplar 9y ago
  Can I ask what the name of the company is?
  - kstrauser 9y ago
    I work at Amino. Here's a blog post from our hiring team that expounds on this a bit: https://amino.com/blog/a-letter-to-amino-candidates/ https://amino.com/blog/a-letter-to-amino-candidates/
- ataki12 9y ago
  that sounds awesome! We're striving to have a similar culture - care to share where you work?
braveheart1723 9y ago
Interesting question. About 5 years into my career I was asking myself the same thing. At the time I must have gone through 10 - 15 full time gigs, either quitting or getting fired so I knew something was not right. I could do the work but definitely never saw myself in there for the long run so quickly lost the passion for it. Co workers were always friendly and sociable, but with very different interests, I'd also never imagine myself as them in 5 to 10 years. Sounds judgmental but it's important to sometimes look at who's around you as you more often than not end becoming them. Looking back, it was a lot to do with me not being that confident in what I wanted to do or become and a little lost. I started working remotely which gave me so much more freedom as far as traveling and training in other things that I've really enjoyed the last 3 years. To the point where if I'm not coding for a couple of weeks - I really miss it. I'm grateful everyday for the amount of freedom and money you can make programming when you compare it to SOOO many dead end careers out there. TLDR; Keep asking questions, keep trying different roles, hang out with people doing jobs in completely different industries: service industry, sales... keep at it, something will click :D
- anm89 9y ago
  I could have written this same post almost word for word...
bontaq 9y ago
Yep, I like my job. I work at a healthcare startup and have been here since near the beginning. Working conditions are nice, I'm on one of many small-ish teams (usually 5-10 people including management), 9-5 work doesn't raise eyebrows, I get to work with decent technology (clojure/scala/typescript), my colleagues are clever, and I've gotten much better at programming. One of the best parts is that though it may be a bit circuitous, I can usually see exactly who I'm helping and how.
wolco 9y ago
Of course writing code is always fun. Meetings can be fun when you ignore the meeting and keep working.
hangonhn 9y ago
I love my job even though it's the hardest job I've ever had in terms of hours worked and learning curve. I worked 8 years at a big corporation where I was fairly high up and was paid a really nice salary along with RSUs but the last 3 to 4 years there was just miserable for me. Based on my current happiness and contrasted with my previous unhappiness, I think the reasons are: 1. My work see the light of day. My efforts matter. I don't mind working hard as long as it is not wasted. At large corporations, projects, even big ones, are often scrapped for reasons that aren't anything related to the the technical work. I get it but it still sucks and it really makes me not want to try hard. Having effort and outcome being correlated with each other is a huge motivator. 2. I know what's going on but am never the smartest person in the room. Working with people at least as smart and skilled as I am is amazing. I don't have to worry about other people and their work. We can just divide up the work and be reasonably sure things will get done in a reasonable way. If not, talk it over and fix it. 3. I have a lot of responsibility and independence and we attack the problem. I've had the opportunity to learn and experiment with so much in just two years and those experiments are actually getting deployed. Having a hand in pushing things like Docker, Clojure, etc. at my company is amazing. I remember all the silly meetings at my old job over the choice of language for QA that ended up exactly where we started versus now when we decided to try out a new tool written in Clojure even though none of us ever used Clojure. We are all smart enough engineers, why should a new language stop us from solving the problem.
d--b 9y ago
Very happy. I was working at a firm full time for about 7 years. I told them I wanted more time to be with my family, develop personal projects and live abroad, and that I would really love to continue working part time and remotely. So now I consult part time for them from abroad. I took a pay cut, but I'm still very decently paid.
- kenbolton 9y ago
  This! Be honest and open about your needs, goals, and desires.
symmitchry 9y ago
I was a mechanical engineer for many years... And hated every job I had. I woke up every day dreading my work. I honestly believed that I would hate work forever. Now I'm a coder (actually now I'm a manager, so less coding, but still a bit) and I really love my job. I wish I could work more. I love coming to work, I love my team, and we really have a ton of fun. Our office is really chill but I have my own desire to be productive and write high-quality code. My teammates are great. So my advice is: Don't give up. Like relationships, you can't stop searching for the right now, but because all the others have been terrible so far. Good jobs are out there!
bherms 9y ago
Yep! Love my job. It can be annoying sometimes but in general I work with amazing people, which is probably the most important piece of the puzzle.
snambi 9y ago
Who is a senior dev?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- taway_1212 9y ago
  I had in mind someone who's been in at least a couple companies (megacorps, startups, something in between in terms of size, tech companies but also regular "boring" businesses like a bank), has some tech lead experience (or is at least very influential in his team). In other words, someone who had enough opportunity to see what flavors of the job are available and what it really entails. As for the purpose, I mostly included it in my question to specifically not get answers from less experienced people, who may still be in their honeymoon period. The background here is that I am in a job that will allow me to retire in 5 years (and nothing else pays even close in my country) but is so mind-bogglingly nonsensical that I wonder if it would make sense to change it to something satisfying even if it having to work much longer.
chrisbennet 9y ago
Super happy senior developer/consultant. Now I work for myself in an office out in the country but I've had lots of normal dev jobs. Lots of work variety, this year I've worked on; WPF/C# app for laser welding, C++/OpenGL/graphics for radar, and C++/OpenCV/computer vision for tracking the spin of golf balls. I'm going kayaking this afternoon after I check in some changes. It wasn't always this good but I've always been happy to go in to work at the companies I worked for. [1] Life it too short to work someplace that makes you unhappy when you could be working someplace where you actually enjoy going in to work every day. [2] By your question I suspect what you really want to know is how to be a happy senior developer. I'm not in the "web world" so it might not be applicable but here is an approach that has worked for me: 1) Work for small or tiny companies. A tiny company doesn't have many "dark surfaces" for incompetent/lazy/"political climber" types to grow in. When there are only 4 people rowing the boat you can tell pretty quick if someone isn't pulling their oar. Large enough to have an HR department? Probably too big. 2) Work on new code. I've almost never worked on code older than a year that I didn't write. You know who needs developers to write green field code? New, tiny companies, that's who. Startups are small but you they aren't the only small companies. 3) Work with nice people that are smarter than you. Working with people smarter than I am has always been a given for me... 4) Try contracting, direct if possible. [1] I've been doing this for 30+ years. [2] Not sure if this applies to women. :-( My wife is also a developer and it kills me how much harder working life is for her simply because she's female.
- gwbas1c 9y ago
  > I'm not in the "web world" so it might not be applicable but here is an approach that has worked for me I've found that anything interesting is more than just writing a generic website or a generic web service.
maxxxxx 9y ago
I have been doing this for more than 20 years and I am kind of tired of it. Maybe I am glorifying the past but when I started there was much less bureaucracy and management overhead. I/we got presented with a problem and then went off to figure it out. Now there are so many non-technical people micromanaging, evaluating, reporting, withholding information, counting story points and other stuff. Maybe SW dev just has become too much mainstream. I think I long for the wild-west days of SW dev :-)
- zimpenfish 9y ago
  > Now there are so many non-technical people micromanaging, evaluating, reporting, withholding information, counting story points and other stuff. Ah, the Scourge Of Agile. I yearn for the day people see it as the micromanaging abomination it is and we can get back to treating developers like adults, not naughty children.
deleted 9y ago
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thehardsphere 9y ago
I'm reasonably happy. I don't know if I meet your definition of "senior dev" but the word "Senior" appears in my job title. I work for a biometrics software company. We all work about 40 hours a week under normal conditions, more if and when circumstances warrant it. Our boss was previously on the team and promoted from within; he is also excellent at shielding us from distractions from above if we do not need to know about them. I am paid slightly less than the median for a person of my relative experience, but that is mainly because of the drift that happens when you work at the same company for a number of years, and I don't mind much because the environment is quite nice. Everyone is polite, professional, and is a valuable part of achieving our company's objectives (we employ less than 100 people). Despite working primarily on a product that has been around a long time, I am always doing something where I am learning something new. I get 3 weeks of vacation every year (but rarely use all of it) that I can use pretty much whenever. If you are actually somewhat decent at writing software and live in or near a competitive market, I would encourage your to be as selective as possible when it comes to "working conditions", but watch out for gimmicks that are designed to keep you in the office, like free meals. I'd also stay away from any companies where excessive overtime is commonplace (it's a sign of poor management), or where there are lots of attempts to portray the company as more than just a company (it can be a sign that they will not respect boundaries between their desired identity for you and your individual will).
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analog31 9y ago
I'm a senior level systems engineer and architect at an F500. I'm happy. We're not a pure software company, but make equipment that's supported by software. We're in the midwest, so the pace of life isn't quite as hectic -- I'm not getting rich, but I have great work-life balance and live in a town with good schools, etc. I love programming, and do quite a lot of it. But watching what the software devs do all day, I'm not sure I'd enjoy the drudgery. What keeps me out of the drudge zone is the fact that my work is not predictable -- I get the weird problems that are not fully within any particular skill set. So it can't be planned or managed.
nhtoaenstnsoae 9y ago
I'm fairly happy as a senior dev. This particular week is stressful because we're nearing a release. But outside of the extra hours I'm working for the next 2 weeks, I don't usually have to work more than 40/wk. I work on very interesting problems with very smart and interesting people. I make a lot of money and have great benefits. I live in a nice place and am close to my work, which is only possible because they compensate me well. I definitely want to change some things about my current situation, so I'm working on that. I've been at my current job for 12 years. 6 years ago I was really annoyed with work. It seemed like we were in permanent maintenance mode, so there wasn't much fun stuff to work on, and I didn't have a lot of say in what I was doing or where it was going. I went and interviewed with competitors and a few startups. I was offered a job at a startup, but when I looked at the work, it was hardly any better than what we were doing, the product was doomed to fail (and it did), and I would have been doing longer hours for fewer benefits and working with people who were far less senior than me but who had very large egos. I ended up turning it down and instead talking to my manager about why I was unhappy. As new projects came along, I got to do newer things that were more interesting and came to love it again. It's not all good. We currently have one or two people in our upper management who are not good at their jobs and who don't seem to care about their employees' well-being. But we're working on fixing that and the downsides are not nearly bad enough to consider leaving again. If they get worse, I may decide it's time to jump ship, but there's a good chance they'll get better and I'm actively working on making that happen.
megamindbrian 9y ago
Please first define "happy"? Is it bursting with joy to step foot in the door everyday? Yes, I step feet in an out various times throughout the doors in the office and I am happy to peel my eyes off of the computer screen.
SoCool 9y ago
I am a senior dev and work in a fortune 10 company. I only do it for money. I used to very excited about software, but after 10 years of development have realized, only few get to have fun at software and also get paid for it.
zimpenfish 9y ago
No but that's why I'm a contractor because the £££ offset the misery.

94 points by taway_1212 9y ago

Is any senior dev reasonably happy with their job (as opposed to it being a tedious grind for money)? If so, what do you do and what are your working conditions?

alexnewman 9y ago

I am a contractor who has a few startup exits under my belt. I hack and work to help and further man. I don't need the cash and don't have a family.

madamelic 9y ago
So you're a contractor who just jumps between startups? How do you get started with this? Just a network with lots of entrepreneurs I presume? :)

scarecrowbob 9y ago

Well, I dunno what "senior" is, but we do agency-style work for clients and my boss bills me that way. I'm on a very small team where I'm the technical lead and I code every day. I make whatever tech decisions I want. I have a salary that's not large, but I also work a 30 hour week. 100% remote and nobody cares when those 30-ish hours are as long as I get stuff done and make some rare client meetings. I trust my boss, who does the sales for the company, and generally she sells these really great projects with a lot of padding so there is always plenty of slack (praise bob). Sometimes the projects are kind of dumb, but I'm still learning new things and they are large enough in scope that I can dive into some fun stuff. So with all that, working is not a bad deal for me at all... it's something that I spend a whole lot of time doing, but it's also fun and pays well and I still have time for my 16-year-old, a girlfriend, and playing some music with friends.

bradgnar 9y ago
want to work there

swalsh 9y ago

If you're not happy, and your job feels like a grind... it's probably time to get out. Life's too short to hate what you do for 8 hours a day. You should identify what motivates you, and try to pursue that. For example, I found I was not really motivated by technical challenges anymore. I found I was more interested in the business. I cared about the problem my code solved, why the code was needed, and who it helped. At the time I was a "Lead", but the path I was on only lead to me being pigeoned holed into more "technical" positions. They let me pick how to build it, but I was never exposed to the why we're building it (more than the context required to build it). I found consulting as a way to expose myself more to the business. Fortunately, I had built a great network, and that gave me a start. I've only been doing it for about 8 months, but I'm far happier with this than when I was just another "senior engineer".

hartator 9y ago
Isn't consulting still working on the how and not the why, just a different way to be paid?
- ryandrake 9y ago
  Yea. Instead of a boss, you have a client. Different side of the same coin. For every true "why" job out there, there are 100 "how" jobs.
- reboog711 9y ago
  I've been consulting for 17 years... Even though the company is just me, I approach it as a business and do a mix of hourly projects and fixed fee projects. At any given time I have 1-3 projects going on at once. What I work on depends primarily on the client. With some clients it is all about the 'why' and we do real business analysis. These are massively rewarding. Other clients treat me like someone who "Shovels poop for money" and just want me to do whatever they say. These are not as rewarding--but are often profitable.

GuiA 9y ago

All the senior devs I've worked with who seemed truly happy at work were that way because they spent plenty of time with their family, volunteering, and just doing stuff outside of work that was meaningful to them. None of them poured everything they had in their job, tying it with their identity. People in that latter category tended to be more brilliant in general (for example a problem comes up and they immediately know of 3 different ways to solve it, half a day later they tested all 3 for that particular problem, half a day later a first implementation is up and running, while it'd take most other people a full week to reach the first step), but they seemed to have way more up and downs with their mood and happiness and general. Obviously this is a generalization from my ~10 years or so in professional dev environments. As a senior dev who tends to identify more with the second category in terms of happiness fluctuations, I've been trying to be more like people I've known in the first category.

jshaqaw 9y ago
This is not confined to tech. When I look at senior people in all the fields my friends and family work in, you have a small core group who - bless them - live for the work and thrive on it, a good chunk of very successful people who like it enough and realize the fullness of life is not entirely in the job.

mattnewport 9y ago

Yes, but mostly because I co-founded a company working in an area I was interested in and enthusiastic about (VR). I work remote from home (the company is currently fully remote) and we all have pretty flexible working conditions.

jcadam 9y ago

Not really. Not enough challenging/interesting work to go around it seems. My current job doesn't even really involve 'developing' anything. Mostly going to meetings and writing documentation. I've tried hunting for a new job, but there's definitely a glut of senior software engineers these days. This current job, whilst boring as hell, pays well and doesn't demand overly long hours from me. And since I have my side project(s) to serve as a creative outlet to satisfy my 'coding' urges, I've stopped caring about finding other work for the time being.

mej10 9y ago

I don't find my job to be a tedious grind at all. I enjoy working as part of a team (specifically my current one) and helping to make everyone around me and the business successful. I have had to shift around the day-to-day tasks I work on occasionally, but finding and working on high leverage parts of our technology and business is pretty rewarding.

nuclearghost 9y ago

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by senior, but my title says I'm senior (6 years exp, 3 in this job). I would say I'm beyond reasonably happy. I found a good company with senior management I can believe in and co-workers who are strong technically and easy to work with. Although the industry, advertising, is no one's favorite, our mission is to make it suck less while supporting people who create real journalistic value which I can get behind.

kenbolton 9y ago

I work from home for a profitable business-to-business startup servicing the payments underwriting industry. I did not know such an industry existed before working on this project, and the job came through my alumni network on LinkedIn. I just started my fifth year with this organization. My responsibilities include everything engineering; everyone else focuses sales. I've met one of the three co-founders twice, first for an interview and second for a weekend with his family. All three co-founders join me five days a week for a brief standup/scrum and one day each week we include a sales and strategy update. They pay in the range of my market value and have steadily increased my equity share of the enterprise. I supplement that income by teaching sea kayak technique and rescue year-round and snowboard instruction in the winter. I try to put in at least four hours of work every day, including weekends, and balance that with four hours of year-round kayaking, hiking, house-work, seasonal snow-sports, or some other physical activity. I do this "job" to keep my brain sharp and hope to continue well past the point of typical retirement. The same applies for my non-"job" activities. If I did not need to worry about saving for retirement, I would probably still do this. The joy comes from solving problems, not from stacking cash. Become the low-key hero your co-workers need. p.s. I started kayaking seriously twelve years ago because I would see these people in their 70s surfing big waves in 16' boats. "That's what I want to be when I grow up, that or retired!"

gorpomon 9y ago
You are living my best life, kudos to you good sir.
chuck32 9y ago
"I try to put in at least four hours of work every day, including weekends, and balance that with four hours of year-round kayaking, hiking, house-work, seasonal snow-sports, or some other physical activity." Well done for achieving work-life balance.
- kenbolton 9y ago
  Appreciate the sentiment, but gotta admit that I feel like I am still pretty far from this achievement. I suspect that balance is a goal that will remain perpetually just out of reach, and I am fine with continuing to work on it! To that point, I started skateboarding last week in an effort to improve balance. Rodney Mullen is my new hero.

SFJulie 9y ago

I have 19 managers, none of them understanding the job at hand and a family I can't see because of 3h/day commutation. Else the job is fine. Ho! And I inherited a fork of 500k slocc using 5 languages and so much frameworks I can't count them anymore. I am the janitor of a huge codebase with a management under acid, but it pays enough for me to not sleep under the bridge, so I guess I am happy.

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autotune 9y ago
That sounds... pretty bad. If you are really in SF there are plenty of jobs around the Bay that offer a good life balance and prevent you from having to sleep under the bridge, just have to look for them.
gwbas1c 9y ago
You're probably on a sinking ship and don't even realize it. If it's really that bad, I suggest quitting in with the smallest amount of notice you can give and hopping on the job market tomorrow. Remember to thoroughly vhet your future employer. Job interviews are a two-way street. There's nothing wrong with finishing an interview and then telling the employment agency that you don't want to continue the interview. I did that a few times while looking.

dacracot 9y ago

34 years of experience... I am reasonably happy with my compensation and work/life balance. I am not reasonably happy with what I do 40 hours a week, primarily because I do not control the high level objectives, nor the resources to make it happen. This is why they pay me, to do their bidding. I'm ok with it because it allows me to make my time outside of work, fulfilling and meaningful.

scarlac 9y ago

Yes. Senior Freelance Full Stack Engineer at the moment. ~18 years of coding, ~15 years of professional work. Been in startups, both my own and as an employee.

unpythonic 9y ago

I've been a programmer for 30 years, and I could reasonably be considered to be a senior dev. Yes, I'm very happy with my job. I work at a company which cares deeply about solving hard problems well, and that care translates into good working conditions, great work/life balance, support from management for engineering concerns, and a very nice benefits package. There is also a focus on having separate promotion tracks for managers vs. more technically inclined people. There have been jobs where I have either tired of the novelty of the problems, changes in management, changes in company policy, etc., but at that point I find a new job in a better company and continue to find happiness. If you're not happy where you are, and you are considered a senior dev, then take responsibility for yourself and find a position that you enjoy. If you're locked into a company because of golden handcuffs, lack of local resources, or family obligations, then find activities outside of work that provide what you're missing.

spike021 9y ago
If you don't mind me asking some questions: How do you feel about working in this industry? Have you moved jobs a lot? The reason I ask is my parents have been "working" or in their adulthood as parents/slightly before having children for roughly 30 years and for the most part have kept the same jobs. So as a new software engineer fresh out of school, they find the idea of needing to switch jobs for higher pay, new challenges, etc. to be a bit unbelievable and disagree that I should eventually do that.
- cableshaft 9y ago
  It's a different world nowadays. Switching jobs every 1-3 years is more the norm now than being a lifer (for most industries, not just software dev). They're probably coming from the perspective of the time they lived in, and don't realize that the world has changed quickly around them over the decades. And the younger you are, the more expected it is. My parents are the same way.
- TomMarius 9y ago
  Yes, switching jobs is necessary in IT most of the time. Some HR people will even see staying at one job for too long as weird.

donatj 9y ago

I was for about four years. Then something changed, the tone of the office changed. There's a drive to get poor quality work out the door fast rather than high quality work when it's ready (which is why I took this job to begin with).

AnimalMuppet 9y ago
Yeah. Jobs and teams are good... until they're not. No good situation is forever. But if you've got management sanity, good coworkers, and interesting work, don't casually walk away - until it changes.

shortoncash 9y ago

The best job I've ever had is about 10% interesting and 90% horrible grind. I've come to believe the secret to getting something out of a career is learning to love the grind. Incidentally, that 10/90 ratio happens to dominate everything else worth pursuing also. Sports in particular. You get that initial ramp up high and then when you hit the part with smaller and smaller gains, that's where "learning to love the grind" kicks in. It's much harder than it sounds, too!

vlunkr 9y ago
I think this is about right. I really enjoy starting new projects and tackling new types of challenges, but I always end up spending more time on maddening bugs or re-implementing some variation of a feature you've already built 10 other times. Staying focused and excited for that stuff is the hard part.
ChemicalWarfare 9y ago
right on. one of the reasons folks who jump ship too often look suspect resume-wise. not always the case but those frequent short gigs look like the person is prone to bailing after the ramp-up honeymoon is over and it's time to get sh1t done.
- pmoriarty 9y ago
  "one of the reasons folks who jump ship too often look suspect resume-wise. not always the case but those frequent short gigs look like the person is prone to bailing after the ramp-up honeymoon is over and it's time to get sh1t done." Reasons I've quit jobs after a year that had nothing to do with lazyness (in fact, I'm often one of the people who puts in the most hours in my teams, and praised for it so as long as I keep putting in the hours): 1 - There's no connection between my boss/team-mates apart from the work. We have nothing in common. We see the world differently. We like different things. Interactions not related to work are strained. We probably wouldn't choose to spend time with one another if work didn't force us to. This is actually kind of a big deal, since I wind up spending most of my waking time with my coworkers, who it'd be nice to actually like and enjoy spending time with. There's only superficial due dillegence you can do for this during the hiring process. Most people seem at least decent during the interviews. It may take time to find out they're really not your type of people, and you're not theirs. 2 - Getting blamed for something out of my control, and having no power to change it. You can't fix it because the boss says no, but you're the one who gets blamed when things go wrong. 3 - Being surrounded by a company full of money-chasers, whose sole reason for existence seems to be to make more money. This is related to reason 1 above, and kind of makes me depressed. 4 - Working crazy hours for long periods of time. There's a lot of talk about 4-hour-days on HN recently. Well, if you're a fan of 4-hour-days you can probably understand how debilitating 12-, 14-, and 16-hour days are, especially when you have to work them for months if not years on end. 5 - Being forced to do boring, menial work you're way overqualified for because the company is too cheap to hire someone less skilled to do it. This leads to extreme boredom and frustration. 6 - Having no growth opportunities and feeling stuck in your position. 7 - Having spineless bosses that constantly kiss up to upper management and force the team do whatever they're told no matter how ridiculous or wrong they know it to be. 8 - Being underpaid and feeling unappreciated -- especially when you choose not to work crazy hours, which seems to be the only way some people can be impressed. 9 - Being treated with contempt by people who don't understand what you do. 10 - Feeling like your life is slipping away working on crap you really don't care about. 11 - Learning new technology -- something that got me excited a decade ago -- just seems like more of the same, and a drudge, full of irrelevant minutia. 12 - Having lots of interests outside of work that I'd much rather be spending my time on. 13 - Having to deal with mountains of bureaucracy and political bullshit. Having to hear endless cheerleading from upper management that everyone knows is a load of crap, yet having to smile and applaud. 14 - Feeling seriously depressed and burnt out, in large part due to much of the above. I wish I could say companies like the above are rare, but they're way too common.

notacoward 9y ago

This is a really good question. Yes, I'll get to an answer (skip to the bullets at the end if you want), but first I'll set the scene a little. Junior devs who chafe under others' direction/decisions/criticism often think everything will get better once they're senior themselves. I know I did. It reminds me a bit of kids/teenagers who think being out of school and/or head of a household is going to be a great liberating experience. Again, I did. But the reality in both cases is addressed by this cartoon - a copy of which lives on our fridge. http://www.fowllanguagecomics.com/homework-bonus-panel/ http://www.fowllanguagecomics.com/homework-bonus-panel/ So yes, being a senior dev often means spending way too much time doing all of the less-fun things on a project. Planning and scheduling, maintaining all of the infrastructure others depend on, interfacing with other groups, etc. Spending half of every day reviewing (and having to argue about) others' code is even more annoying than having your own code reviewed once in a while. Being the "debugger of last resort" is satisfying once you're done, but can be intensely frustrating while you're in it. This list of gripes suggests the solution: one must actively resist all of these extra roles. Relentlessly. Yes, you'll be dragged into doing all that stuff anyway, but if what you enjoy is designing and coding then you have to protect that time. With all that said, here are some of the keys for me: * Find fun projects and good people to work with. Always important, but ever more so as you become more senior. * Work from home (at least part of the time - for me it's practically always) * Explicitly block out time for the different activities. Set aside a morning for code reviews, an afternoon for your own coding, etc. For me, working in a time zone three hours ahead of most of my peers is a huge plus here. * Require meetings to be scheduled well in advance. Decline with prejudice when people get too casual about this. Make it clear every once in a while that you're doing this as a matter of policy/principle. To soften that, show interest in the content e.g. by providing offline feedback. * In general, say "no" a lot. Be polite, compromise or defer when you need to, but don't be a pushover and don't be passive-aggressive. * Accept that you might get dinged for all these things. You might get fewer promotions or smaller raises, maybe even a bad review. OTOH, the increased focus on what you're best at and most passionate about might improve your performance compared to being pulled in seven different directions.

gwbas1c 9y ago
Can't agree more! Most important, if you get dinged in a review, escalate. There's nothing like the company founder going to your boss and and saying that the thing you're getting dinged for is not your job.

gwbas1c 9y ago

I've learned to appreciate my job for what it is, and for the benefits that it provides in comparison to other jobs that I could easily obtain. It took me almost a decade of bouncing from a few different jobs, and failing miserably at trying to run my own company, before I found my current job. My job isn't perfect, but no job is. I'm board and eager to move to another opportunity, but that opportunity will be chosen very carefully. I've already made the mistake of moving too fast, and I'm perfectly happy to sit in my current job for another 2-3 years if I need to. Why? I interviewed at another company about a year ago; and for reasons that were hard to explain, it just didn't seem to be as good as my current job. A few months after they offered me a position, they were acquired and the team now has quite a bit of stress. Changing jobs wouldn't have improved much.

le-mark 9y ago
> I've learned to appreciate my job for what it is, and for the benefits that it provides in comparison to other jobs that I could easily obtain. This is what it boils down to, imo. Currently I'm working on a horrendous legacy code base with a very low performing team, in a very low performing organization. Over the years I've learned what matters to me, and this job has what I need: good pay, time off, and I can come and go as I please so long as I'm here for "core" hours (ie on location, not remote). The last part is another way to say my boss is cool. He's new too, although he's been here longer than I have. We're both dismayed at the do nothing culture, and terrible code here. That's about all anyone can ask for IME, find out what matters to you and optimize for that. When I go home I don't give a thought for work, I get to concentrate on my family 100%.
- gwbas1c 9y ago
  > > I've learned to appreciate my job for what it is, and for the benefits that it provides in comparison to other jobs that I could easily obtain. Part of why it works out so well for me is that I have enough clout to avoid things I don't want to do. IE, I don't want to be a manager. When my manager, (who's titled a director,) decided that I was going to become a manager, it basically went like this: Me: "I don't want to be a manager." My boss, "You're not going to be a manager, you're just going to do [everything that a manager does]. You need to grow in your career." Me: "That sounds like you want me to be a manager." I saw right through that and made it pretty clear that I wasn't going to be a manager, and I wasn't going to be tricked into being a manager without the title of manager. If I was going to be forced to be a manager, I was going to take that job I mentioned in my original post. It helped that I missed a meeting with upper management because a job interview ran long. In part, it's not that I don't want to be a manager, I don't want to be a manager for the company I work for. I know too much of the code to be hands-off, and I'm remote. The culture is far too interrupt-driven in our office to be a remote manager.

kstrauser 9y ago

I love mine. I've been here for two years and I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop; it continues not to. I'm a senior backend engineer in a healthcare startup, but I think the single biggest determining factor to why this place is so awesome is that my coworkers genuinely, complete respect each other. That manifests in lots of ways: - Arguing and infighting is nonexistent. When Joe proposes something and Jane disagrees, it's on a professional, technical level. Joe knows this and responds in kind. Agreements are made and consensus reached. - Sometimes we make mistakes, but we all know that it's because a smart person acted on perhaps incomplete information, not because they're incompetent or untrustworthy. We have actual blameless post-mortems to figure out what happened and how to prevent it, and then we move on. - If you want vacation, you take vacation. We know you're not a slacker who's trying to get away with working as little as possible. - If I have a question about a management decision, I ask the CEO to explain it. He makes time to meet with me and we discuss it. There's never any "because I said so". There've been times when I think I might have made a different decision (or maybe not; he has more information about it than I do), but I've always been 100% convinced that the decision was reasonable and justifiable. There are literally no hiring requirements more important than "treats others with respect". If you're an asshole genius, don't bother applying because you won't fit in at all here. Those people would wreck our corporate culture so we avoid them like the plague. No one is so much better than my awesome coworkers that it'd be worthwhile.

whitepoplar 9y ago
Can I ask what the name of the company is?
- kstrauser 9y ago
  I work at Amino. Here's a blog post from our hiring team that expounds on this a bit: https://amino.com/blog/a-letter-to-amino-candidates/ https://amino.com/blog/a-letter-to-amino-candidates/
ataki12 9y ago
that sounds awesome! We're striving to have a similar culture - care to share where you work?

braveheart1723 9y ago

Interesting question. About 5 years into my career I was asking myself the same thing. At the time I must have gone through 10 - 15 full time gigs, either quitting or getting fired so I knew something was not right. I could do the work but definitely never saw myself in there for the long run so quickly lost the passion for it. Co workers were always friendly and sociable, but with very different interests, I'd also never imagine myself as them in 5 to 10 years. Sounds judgmental but it's important to sometimes look at who's around you as you more often than not end becoming them. Looking back, it was a lot to do with me not being that confident in what I wanted to do or become and a little lost. I started working remotely which gave me so much more freedom as far as traveling and training in other things that I've really enjoyed the last 3 years. To the point where if I'm not coding for a couple of weeks - I really miss it. I'm grateful everyday for the amount of freedom and money you can make programming when you compare it to SOOO many dead end careers out there. TLDR; Keep asking questions, keep trying different roles, hang out with people doing jobs in completely different industries: service industry, sales... keep at it, something will click :D

anm89 9y ago
I could have written this same post almost word for word...

bontaq 9y ago

Yep, I like my job. I work at a healthcare startup and have been here since near the beginning. Working conditions are nice, I'm on one of many small-ish teams (usually 5-10 people including management), 9-5 work doesn't raise eyebrows, I get to work with decent technology (clojure/scala/typescript), my colleagues are clever, and I've gotten much better at programming. One of the best parts is that though it may be a bit circuitous, I can usually see exactly who I'm helping and how.

wolco 9y ago

Of course writing code is always fun. Meetings can be fun when you ignore the meeting and keep working.

hangonhn 9y ago

I love my job even though it's the hardest job I've ever had in terms of hours worked and learning curve. I worked 8 years at a big corporation where I was fairly high up and was paid a really nice salary along with RSUs but the last 3 to 4 years there was just miserable for me. Based on my current happiness and contrasted with my previous unhappiness, I think the reasons are: 1. My work see the light of day. My efforts matter. I don't mind working hard as long as it is not wasted. At large corporations, projects, even big ones, are often scrapped for reasons that aren't anything related to the the technical work. I get it but it still sucks and it really makes me not want to try hard. Having effort and outcome being correlated with each other is a huge motivator. 2. I know what's going on but am never the smartest person in the room. Working with people at least as smart and skilled as I am is amazing. I don't have to worry about other people and their work. We can just divide up the work and be reasonably sure things will get done in a reasonable way. If not, talk it over and fix it. 3. I have a lot of responsibility and independence and we attack the problem. I've had the opportunity to learn and experiment with so much in just two years and those experiments are actually getting deployed. Having a hand in pushing things like Docker, Clojure, etc. at my company is amazing. I remember all the silly meetings at my old job over the choice of language for QA that ended up exactly where we started versus now when we decided to try out a new tool written in Clojure even though none of us ever used Clojure. We are all smart enough engineers, why should a new language stop us from solving the problem.

d--b 9y ago

Very happy. I was working at a firm full time for about 7 years. I told them I wanted more time to be with my family, develop personal projects and live abroad, and that I would really love to continue working part time and remotely. So now I consult part time for them from abroad. I took a pay cut, but I'm still very decently paid.

kenbolton 9y ago
This! Be honest and open about your needs, goals, and desires.

symmitchry 9y ago

I was a mechanical engineer for many years... And hated every job I had. I woke up every day dreading my work. I honestly believed that I would hate work forever. Now I'm a coder (actually now I'm a manager, so less coding, but still a bit) and I really love my job. I wish I could work more. I love coming to work, I love my team, and we really have a ton of fun. Our office is really chill but I have my own desire to be productive and write high-quality code. My teammates are great. So my advice is: Don't give up. Like relationships, you can't stop searching for the right now, but because all the others have been terrible so far. Good jobs are out there!

bherms 9y ago

Yep! Love my job. It can be annoying sometimes but in general I work with amazing people, which is probably the most important piece of the puzzle.

snambi 9y ago

Who is a senior dev?

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taway_1212 9y ago
I had in mind someone who's been in at least a couple companies (megacorps, startups, something in between in terms of size, tech companies but also regular "boring" businesses like a bank), has some tech lead experience (or is at least very influential in his team). In other words, someone who had enough opportunity to see what flavors of the job are available and what it really entails. As for the purpose, I mostly included it in my question to specifically not get answers from less experienced people, who may still be in their honeymoon period. The background here is that I am in a job that will allow me to retire in 5 years (and nothing else pays even close in my country) but is so mind-bogglingly nonsensical that I wonder if it would make sense to change it to something satisfying even if it having to work much longer.

chrisbennet 9y ago

Super happy senior developer/consultant. Now I work for myself in an office out in the country but I've had lots of normal dev jobs. Lots of work variety, this year I've worked on; WPF/C# app for laser welding, C++/OpenGL/graphics for radar, and C++/OpenCV/computer vision for tracking the spin of golf balls. I'm going kayaking this afternoon after I check in some changes. It wasn't always this good but I've always been happy to go in to work at the companies I worked for. [1] Life it too short to work someplace that makes you unhappy when you could be working someplace where you actually enjoy going in to work every day. [2] By your question I suspect what you really want to know is how to be a happy senior developer. I'm not in the "web world" so it might not be applicable but here is an approach that has worked for me: 1) Work for small or tiny companies. A tiny company doesn't have many "dark surfaces" for incompetent/lazy/"political climber" types to grow in. When there are only 4 people rowing the boat you can tell pretty quick if someone isn't pulling their oar. Large enough to have an HR department? Probably too big. 2) Work on new code. I've almost never worked on code older than a year that I didn't write. You know who needs developers to write green field code? New, tiny companies, that's who. Startups are small but you they aren't the only small companies. 3) Work with nice people that are smarter than you. Working with people smarter than I am has always been a given for me... 4) Try contracting, direct if possible. [1] I've been doing this for 30+ years. [2] Not sure if this applies to women. :-( My wife is also a developer and it kills me how much harder working life is for her simply because she's female.

gwbas1c 9y ago
> I'm not in the "web world" so it might not be applicable but here is an approach that has worked for me I've found that anything interesting is more than just writing a generic website or a generic web service.

maxxxxx 9y ago

I have been doing this for more than 20 years and I am kind of tired of it. Maybe I am glorifying the past but when I started there was much less bureaucracy and management overhead. I/we got presented with a problem and then went off to figure it out. Now there are so many non-technical people micromanaging, evaluating, reporting, withholding information, counting story points and other stuff. Maybe SW dev just has become too much mainstream. I think I long for the wild-west days of SW dev :-)

zimpenfish 9y ago
> Now there are so many non-technical people micromanaging, evaluating, reporting, withholding information, counting story points and other stuff. Ah, the Scourge Of Agile. I yearn for the day people see it as the micromanaging abomination it is and we can get back to treating developers like adults, not naughty children.

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thehardsphere 9y ago

I'm reasonably happy. I don't know if I meet your definition of "senior dev" but the word "Senior" appears in my job title. I work for a biometrics software company. We all work about 40 hours a week under normal conditions, more if and when circumstances warrant it. Our boss was previously on the team and promoted from within; he is also excellent at shielding us from distractions from above if we do not need to know about them. I am paid slightly less than the median for a person of my relative experience, but that is mainly because of the drift that happens when you work at the same company for a number of years, and I don't mind much because the environment is quite nice. Everyone is polite, professional, and is a valuable part of achieving our company's objectives (we employ less than 100 people). Despite working primarily on a product that has been around a long time, I am always doing something where I am learning something new. I get 3 weeks of vacation every year (but rarely use all of it) that I can use pretty much whenever. If you are actually somewhat decent at writing software and live in or near a competitive market, I would encourage your to be as selective as possible when it comes to "working conditions", but watch out for gimmicks that are designed to keep you in the office, like free meals. I'd also stay away from any companies where excessive overtime is commonplace (it's a sign of poor management), or where there are lots of attempts to portray the company as more than just a company (it can be a sign that they will not respect boundaries between their desired identity for you and your individual will).

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analog31 9y ago

I'm a senior level systems engineer and architect at an F500. I'm happy. We're not a pure software company, but make equipment that's supported by software. We're in the midwest, so the pace of life isn't quite as hectic -- I'm not getting rich, but I have great work-life balance and live in a town with good schools, etc. I love programming, and do quite a lot of it. But watching what the software devs do all day, I'm not sure I'd enjoy the drudgery. What keeps me out of the drudge zone is the fact that my work is not predictable -- I get the weird problems that are not fully within any particular skill set. So it can't be planned or managed.

nhtoaenstnsoae 9y ago

I'm fairly happy as a senior dev. This particular week is stressful because we're nearing a release. But outside of the extra hours I'm working for the next 2 weeks, I don't usually have to work more than 40/wk. I work on very interesting problems with very smart and interesting people. I make a lot of money and have great benefits. I live in a nice place and am close to my work, which is only possible because they compensate me well. I definitely want to change some things about my current situation, so I'm working on that. I've been at my current job for 12 years. 6 years ago I was really annoyed with work. It seemed like we were in permanent maintenance mode, so there wasn't much fun stuff to work on, and I didn't have a lot of say in what I was doing or where it was going. I went and interviewed with competitors and a few startups. I was offered a job at a startup, but when I looked at the work, it was hardly any better than what we were doing, the product was doomed to fail (and it did), and I would have been doing longer hours for fewer benefits and working with people who were far less senior than me but who had very large egos. I ended up turning it down and instead talking to my manager about why I was unhappy. As new projects came along, I got to do newer things that were more interesting and came to love it again. It's not all good. We currently have one or two people in our upper management who are not good at their jobs and who don't seem to care about their employees' well-being. But we're working on fixing that and the downsides are not nearly bad enough to consider leaving again. If they get worse, I may decide it's time to jump ship, but there's a good chance they'll get better and I'm actively working on making that happen.

megamindbrian 9y ago

Please first define "happy"? Is it bursting with joy to step foot in the door everyday? Yes, I step feet in an out various times throughout the doors in the office and I am happy to peel my eyes off of the computer screen.

SoCool 9y ago

I am a senior dev and work in a fortune 10 company. I only do it for money. I used to very excited about software, but after 10 years of development have realized, only few get to have fun at software and also get paid for it.

zimpenfish 9y ago

No but that's why I'm a contractor because the £££ offset the misery.