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I'm in it as a self-taught engineer mostly for the easy money, but honestly I am finding that I don't really thrive any more. I managed to get myself into this
by talmr 6y ago
I'm in it as a self-taught engineer mostly for the easy money, but honestly I am finding that I don't really thrive any more. I managed to get myself into this industry and four years later I'm a senior software engineer making decent buck. However, it really isn't satisfying at all. I feel like I'm only in it because this is the easiest six figure job in the world and I'm just in it for the health insurance.
I used to be a business consultant and made a career pivot because I got burned out from working 60-80 hours a week and flying 100k+ miles each year. I loved all the projects I worked on, and many of them were very large scope (50m to 300m+ USD) with tremendous impact. I got to work with people in the senior leadership positions at multi billion dollar multinational corporations, and we were understanding their problems and coming up with solutions. It was so much freaking fun.
I barely feel that at my current work, where I'm just working on a CRUD app lol. It is so boring. I don't really care anymore about code juggling, because anyone can figure it out if they have a little dose of motivation. At first it was fun to be a "problem solver", but not like this.
I'm not really that interested in becoming a specialist. I look around at work at some of my colleagues who have years of experience in their specific subset of work, and they only know and care about that thing. These are highly qualified experienced people, but I really don't want to be like that. I like to get a low-level understanding of things I am personally passionate about, and I love learning so I try to get a high to mid level understanding of everything else. I'll fuck with dev ops, database performance, product strategy, marketing, sales, mobile app dev, whatever else that I find interesting.
Being a software engineer at a larger company does not satisfy me one bit, and it really sucks when you realize you're only in it because it is easy money.
I'm working on my own ideas now, and I'm learning as much as I can during this COVID remote time to make it on my own.