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Maybe, but don't give up your day job. Financial health and personal health are both important. I've been programming for 43 years (since I was kid) and worked

Maybe, but don't give up your day job. Financial health and personal health are both important. I've been programming for 43 years (since I was kid) and worked as a programmer for about 20 years. In the last 17 years, I've seen the switch from exploration, creativity, open-ended thinking to this new thing called "tech." I am not a "tech." I guess I've quit tech, and won't become a "tech." I miss working as a programmer - I had pretty good jobs. Beware as workplaces in other industries can be much more toxic. From what I gather, no one is hiring programmers: "the programming part is easy", "solo programmers need not apply", "scrum", buzzwords, horrible marketing, bad management, and worse. I have a day job not in "tech", and not as a programmer. On the side, I program for me. I read and post what's interesting to me on Hacker News and other programming sites.

watermelon59 6y ago
Oh wow, it's so great to read this because it validates that I'm not crazy. I've been programming professionally for 15 years, but started as a kid too. I feel like this pivot you're talking about happened somewhere in the beginning of my career. I never jumped on the bandwagon and I feel increasingly miserable as the years go by. You'd have heard 9 year old me saying he wanted to be a programmer. I went to university to study Computer Science because I love computing and computers and solving problems with them. I like writing programs that solve problems for people, and I like making existing programs better by fixing bugs, refactoring them to make them easier to work on, etc. That's what I signed up for when I started my career. The shift to the cloud sent everything to hell. Like I've said, I've been miserable for years now. I've spent the past week struggling to plumb shit on AWS and Kubernetes. Actual programming was maybe 10% of the task I'm working on, and it was just connecting library A to library B, basically.
the_only_law 6y ago
This is close to how I feel these days too, except for different terms. These days I generally consider myself a "hacker". Using that word, it makes perfect sense to me why I can't stand the industry and see no place for myself in it. Additionally it seems that that technology is getting much more difficult for hackers (mind you im not using the hacker in the colloquial malicious sense, but insuppose the definitions overlap at time) and so I find myself drawn towards "hacking" in other fields where it traditionally has been a lot more difficult to do so, but is becoming less so. I occasionally get around to hacking with neat things nowadays, but most of the time I'm too mentally exhausted.

watermelon59 6y ago

Oh wow, it's so great to read this because it validates that I'm not crazy. I've been programming professionally for 15 years, but started as a kid too. I feel like this pivot you're talking about happened somewhere in the beginning of my career. I never jumped on the bandwagon and I feel increasingly miserable as the years go by. You'd have heard 9 year old me saying he wanted to be a programmer. I went to university to study Computer Science because I love computing and computers and solving problems with them. I like writing programs that solve problems for people, and I like making existing programs better by fixing bugs, refactoring them to make them easier to work on, etc. That's what I signed up for when I started my career. The shift to the cloud sent everything to hell. Like I've said, I've been miserable for years now. I've spent the past week struggling to plumb shit on AWS and Kubernetes. Actual programming was maybe 10% of the task I'm working on, and it was just connecting library A to library B, basically.

the_only_law 6y ago

This is close to how I feel these days too, except for different terms. These days I generally consider myself a "hacker". Using that word, it makes perfect sense to me why I can't stand the industry and see no place for myself in it. Additionally it seems that that technology is getting much more difficult for hackers (mind you im not using the hacker in the colloquial malicious sense, but insuppose the definitions overlap at time) and so I find myself drawn towards "hacking" in other fields where it traditionally has been a lot more difficult to do so, but is becoming less so. I occasionally get around to hacking with neat things nowadays, but most of the time I'm too mentally exhausted.