20 ms·

I've walked away from software development

182 points by mrfusion 6y ago

Demonsult 6y ago
I went into tech sales as my exit. It feels like a highly paid vacation compared to SWE.
- swozey 6y ago
  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.
  - linuxftw 6y ago
    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.
    - swozey 6y ago
      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.
      - linuxftw 6y ago
        I find I can talk all day long in person, it's zoom meetings that drain my soul.
      - apohn 6y ago
        > 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.
    - TheCoelacanth 6y ago
      That would probably be nice once in a while, but doing it all the time sounds horrible.
- mrfusion 6y ago
  What exactly does that involve? How did you make that transition?
  - Demonsult 6y ago
    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.
- zippergz 6y ago
  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?
  - Demonsult 6y ago
    I made almost 50% more this year. Also, the bonuses flow in continuously instead of once per year.
    - oedoedxef 6y ago
      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.
      - Demonsult 6y ago
        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.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- apohn 6y ago
  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.
s1k3s 6y ago
One thing I still believe in: you don't burn out from code, you burn out from people.
- sz4kerto 6y ago
  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.
- obiwanpallav1 6y ago
  You can change the code but not the people
larrymyers 6y ago
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.
- erdos4d 6y ago
  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.
- fabio8085 6y ago
  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.
- derbOac 6y ago
  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).
lsiunsuex 6y ago
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.
- jays 6y ago
  That's great. That's not an easy life (speaking from experience), but certainly can be gratifying. I wish you much success, good luck!
  - lsiunsuex 6y ago
    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.
draw_down 6y ago
The writing of a deeply sane person. I’m ready to go now (spiritually/financially) but planning on leaving after another year. Too much money on the table to leave of my own accord now, though if they fired me I’d be alright either way.
efficax 6y ago
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
vfc1 6y ago
I think an alternative to the reddit OP, since he loves coding and has so much experience is to try and create his own product on some niche. He would get back the joy of coding and still be a programmer, without having to deal with any of the corporate system. I can fully understand where he is coming from, it's not the job itself, it's the whole system that makes it unbearable after a while. This is the reason also why there aren't many people over 40 in tech. They have usually by then accumulated enough money and found an exit strategy.
- Pandabob 6y ago
  Yup, I think the OP might enjoy the indie hacker/microconf ethos.
- jdbernard 6y ago
  > 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.
recursivedoubts 6y ago
"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. A good read on the real corporate dynamic: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
- wpietri 6y ago
  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.
  - giantg2 6y ago
    I would love to burn out with fat checks. It beats burning out on average (non SV) checks. At least one can retire earlier.
    - tartoran 6y ago
      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
      - giantg2 6y ago
        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.
prepend 6y ago
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.
- elcapitan 6y ago
  That's interesting, which field is that? I guess in finance there's a lot of "crypto coding" (no pun intended) going on.
  - prepend 6y ago
    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.
raxxorrax 6y ago
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.
- rmb177 6y ago
  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.
jpmattia 6y ago
In the middle of the rant on burnout, he says: > I'm sick of everyone being on Adderall. Is that really a thing? ie What proportion of software folks are using it?
- hasmolo 6y ago
  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.
  - the-dude 6y ago
    > the acknowledgment of a disability is much easier now. Are you saying a significant part of human kind has been disabled for the past couple of thousand years and we are only now acknowledging this? I am old enough to remember ADD/ADHD did not exist. We were outside a lot.
    - jacques_chester 6y ago
      > I am old enough to remember ADD/ADHD did not exist. It existed, but it was undiagnosed and untreated.
      - the-dude 6y ago
        I acknowledge that it existed : severe cases were known and described. But did it 'exist' at this scale? I don't think so.
offtop5 6y ago
My plan is to deal with it , every job is a another job. Trying to retire within the next decade. I don't want a boss period.
- vidanay 6y ago
  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.
johncena33 6y ago
> 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.
- rightbyte 6y ago
  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.
- moron4hire 6y ago
  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.
  - soco 6y ago
    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.
- 6y ago
yakshaving_jgt 6y ago
An alternative is to start your own company. Then you get to decide whether or not you adopt the stuff you hated from previous gigs.
2sk21 6y ago
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 https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Getting_started
- siberianbear 6y ago
  ^ Yeah, this. I socked away and invested everything I could during my career in Silicon Valley. I retired just a few months after my fortieth birthday. Why most of my colleagues didn't do the same and instead 'leveled up' their lifestyle to match their income is beyond my capacity to understand.
  - bestinterest 6y ago
    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.
    - bradlys 6y ago
      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.
notacoward 6y ago
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.
- giantg2 6y ago
  "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.
  - notacoward 6y ago
    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.
jays 6y ago
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.
sys_64738 6y ago
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).
- rightbyte 6y ago
  Are there any proof of Scrum and Agile increasing successrate?
- ageofwant 6y ago
  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.
TravHatesMe 6y ago
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.
- b0rsuk 6y ago
  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. Is Your Boss Narcissistic? [Signs of Narcissism at Work] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P-5q0C31m4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P-5q0C31m4 (the video also talks a bit about coworkers) 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. Signs of gaslighting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FISZshe9L3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FISZshe9L3s (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.)
  - jokethrowaway 6y ago
    Narcissism is the mental illness of this century! It's very common in varying degrees. That said, I agree with you that large companies are worse because there's a higher chance of a manipulative person being hired and acquiring company. I also think that the more money to be made, the higher the likelihood such people will show up. That's also why governments don't work, they're just the largest companies we have in society + monopoly on legal violence.
burntoutfire 6y ago
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.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > 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...
  - sumtechguy 6y ago
    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.
adamzapasnik 6y ago
The things I've been missing in software development are: - some kind of manual labour or any kind of movement, sitting at a desk all time is boring and unhealthy - some kind of social interactions, I don't count tech-talking as one
giantg2 6y ago
Well said. I'm rotting from the inside out. 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.
- cjonas 6y ago
  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
  - giantg2 6y ago
    No, I'm saying the poster was likely making 5x. I earn an average (maybe even lower) non-SV wage. I live a modest life, but have a family to support.
    - cjonas 6y ago
      oh, sorry I misunderstood.
- ravenstine 6y ago
  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.
  - giantg2 6y ago
    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.
ryandvm 6y ago
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?
- xfitm3 6y ago
  Identity politics have made it even more miserable.
  - kminehart 6y ago
    what does that even mean?
    - vsareto 6y ago
      People will start drama if you use the wrong words. Either the drama itself or trying to avoid it is an additional source of stress.
      - soco 6y ago
        Lucky for me I'm in a country developed enough by all standards yet largely not affected by this circus.
moron4hire 6y ago
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".
nickjj 6y ago
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.
Ozzie_osman 6y ago
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.
FriedrichN 6y ago
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.
- tolbish 6y ago
  One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
  - FriedrichN 6y ago
    Is that you, Camus?
    - tolbish 6y ago
      I'm just saying perhaps there is a way to approach "the incompetents" in a way that will bring you more peace.
nomy99 6y ago
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.
hvs 6y ago
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.
bpyne 6y ago
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.
ilaksh 6y ago
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.
mrandish 6y ago
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.
cyberpanther 6y ago
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.
rotub 6y ago
I quit my job in web development for the same reasons a few years ago and have been much happier for it. Good luck!
specialist 6y ago
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. -- 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.
- afpx 6y ago
  Graeber was one of my favorite modern writers. RIP. I hope someone picks up his torch.
julee04 6y ago
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
cryptica 6y ago
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.
irateswami 6y ago
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.
micheal_rotana 6y ago
software development is not for everyone, who has interested only those stay connected with it.
MrPowers 6y ago
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.
prohobo 6y ago
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.
luord 6y ago
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.
ghoward 6y ago
I may not be in my 40's, but I walked away as well.[1] [1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2020/08/the-software-industry-is-broken/ https://gavinhoward.com/2020/08/the-software-industry-is-bro...
kingnothing 6y ago
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.
StavrosK 6y ago
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.
nph5667 6y ago
While I totally relate to the frustration, it's still like stating "I walked away from cooking" after describing work hurdles at McDonald's.
acjohnson55 6y ago
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.
tacheiordache 6y ago
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?
- burntoutfire 6y ago
  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.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
psyc 6y ago
I had to check my memory to be sure I didn't write this.
GoodJokes 6y ago
Makes one really wonder why there are so many self-important people on Hacker News. From reading the comments on that reddit post it sure seems that you all think your jobs are bs and don't work hard at all. Really just seems like you all just like money over building things that are important. I know broad strokes, but I really have a hard time "chuckling" at all the well-paid slackers. Does one really think you are any different than a bs manager/executive?

182 points by mrfusion 6y ago

Demonsult 6y ago

I went into tech sales as my exit. It feels like a highly paid vacation compared to SWE.

swozey 6y ago
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.
- linuxftw 6y ago
  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.
  - swozey 6y ago
    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.
    - linuxftw 6y ago
      I find I can talk all day long in person, it's zoom meetings that drain my soul.
    - apohn 6y ago
      > 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.
  - TheCoelacanth 6y ago
    That would probably be nice once in a while, but doing it all the time sounds horrible.
mrfusion 6y ago
What exactly does that involve? How did you make that transition?
- Demonsult 6y ago
  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.
zippergz 6y ago
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?
- Demonsult 6y ago
  I made almost 50% more this year. Also, the bonuses flow in continuously instead of once per year.
  - oedoedxef 6y ago
    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.
    - Demonsult 6y ago
      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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
apohn 6y ago
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.

s1k3s 6y ago

One thing I still believe in: you don't burn out from code, you burn out from people.

sz4kerto 6y ago
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.
obiwanpallav1 6y ago
You can change the code but not the people

larrymyers 6y ago

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.

erdos4d 6y ago
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.
fabio8085 6y ago
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.
derbOac 6y ago
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).

lsiunsuex 6y ago

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.

jays 6y ago
That's great. That's not an easy life (speaking from experience), but certainly can be gratifying. I wish you much success, good luck!
- lsiunsuex 6y ago
  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.

draw_down 6y ago

The writing of a deeply sane person. I’m ready to go now (spiritually/financially) but planning on leaving after another year. Too much money on the table to leave of my own accord now, though if they fired me I’d be alright either way.

efficax 6y ago

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

vfc1 6y ago

I think an alternative to the reddit OP, since he loves coding and has so much experience is to try and create his own product on some niche. He would get back the joy of coding and still be a programmer, without having to deal with any of the corporate system. I can fully understand where he is coming from, it's not the job itself, it's the whole system that makes it unbearable after a while. This is the reason also why there aren't many people over 40 in tech. They have usually by then accumulated enough money and found an exit strategy.

Pandabob 6y ago
Yup, I think the OP might enjoy the indie hacker/microconf ethos.
jdbernard 6y ago
> 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.

recursivedoubts 6y ago

"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. A good read on the real corporate dynamic: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

wpietri 6y ago
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.
- giantg2 6y ago
  I would love to burn out with fat checks. It beats burning out on average (non SV) checks. At least one can retire earlier.
  - tartoran 6y ago
    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
    - giantg2 6y ago
      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.

prepend 6y ago

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.

elcapitan 6y ago
That's interesting, which field is that? I guess in finance there's a lot of "crypto coding" (no pun intended) going on.
- prepend 6y ago
  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.

raxxorrax 6y ago

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.

rmb177 6y ago
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.

jpmattia 6y ago

In the middle of the rant on burnout, he says: > I'm sick of everyone being on Adderall. Is that really a thing? ie What proportion of software folks are using it?

hasmolo 6y ago
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.
- the-dude 6y ago
  > the acknowledgment of a disability is much easier now. Are you saying a significant part of human kind has been disabled for the past couple of thousand years and we are only now acknowledging this? I am old enough to remember ADD/ADHD did not exist. We were outside a lot.
  - jacques_chester 6y ago
    > I am old enough to remember ADD/ADHD did not exist. It existed, but it was undiagnosed and untreated.
    - the-dude 6y ago
      I acknowledge that it existed : severe cases were known and described. But did it 'exist' at this scale? I don't think so.

offtop5 6y ago

My plan is to deal with it , every job is a another job. Trying to retire within the next decade. I don't want a boss period.

vidanay 6y ago
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.

johncena33 6y ago

> 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.

rightbyte 6y ago
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.
moron4hire 6y ago
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.
- soco 6y ago
  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.
6y ago

yakshaving_jgt 6y ago

An alternative is to start your own company. Then you get to decide whether or not you adopt the stuff you hated from previous gigs.

2sk21 6y ago

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 https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Getting_started

siberianbear 6y ago
^ Yeah, this. I socked away and invested everything I could during my career in Silicon Valley. I retired just a few months after my fortieth birthday. Why most of my colleagues didn't do the same and instead 'leveled up' their lifestyle to match their income is beyond my capacity to understand.
- bestinterest 6y ago
  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.
  - bradlys 6y ago
    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.

notacoward 6y ago

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.

giantg2 6y ago
"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.
- notacoward 6y ago
  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.

jays 6y ago

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.

sys_64738 6y ago

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).

rightbyte 6y ago
Are there any proof of Scrum and Agile increasing successrate?
ageofwant 6y ago
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.

TravHatesMe 6y ago

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.

b0rsuk 6y ago
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. Is Your Boss Narcissistic? [Signs of Narcissism at Work] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P-5q0C31m4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P-5q0C31m4 (the video also talks a bit about coworkers) 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. Signs of gaslighting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FISZshe9L3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FISZshe9L3s (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.)
- jokethrowaway 6y ago
  Narcissism is the mental illness of this century! It's very common in varying degrees. That said, I agree with you that large companies are worse because there's a higher chance of a manipulative person being hired and acquiring company. I also think that the more money to be made, the higher the likelihood such people will show up. That's also why governments don't work, they're just the largest companies we have in society + monopoly on legal violence.

burntoutfire 6y ago

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.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> 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...
- sumtechguy 6y ago
  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.

adamzapasnik 6y ago

The things I've been missing in software development are: - some kind of manual labour or any kind of movement, sitting at a desk all time is boring and unhealthy - some kind of social interactions, I don't count tech-talking as one

giantg2 6y ago

Well said. I'm rotting from the inside out. 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.

cjonas 6y ago
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
- giantg2 6y ago
  No, I'm saying the poster was likely making 5x. I earn an average (maybe even lower) non-SV wage. I live a modest life, but have a family to support.
  - cjonas 6y ago
    oh, sorry I misunderstood.
ravenstine 6y ago
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.
- giantg2 6y ago
  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.

ryandvm 6y ago

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?

xfitm3 6y ago
Identity politics have made it even more miserable.
- kminehart 6y ago
  what does that even mean?
  - vsareto 6y ago
    People will start drama if you use the wrong words. Either the drama itself or trying to avoid it is an additional source of stress.
    - soco 6y ago
      Lucky for me I'm in a country developed enough by all standards yet largely not affected by this circus.

moron4hire 6y ago

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".

nickjj 6y ago

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.

Ozzie_osman 6y ago

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.

FriedrichN 6y ago

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.

tolbish 6y ago
One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
- FriedrichN 6y ago
  Is that you, Camus?
  - tolbish 6y ago
    I'm just saying perhaps there is a way to approach "the incompetents" in a way that will bring you more peace.

nomy99 6y ago

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.

hvs 6y ago

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.

bpyne 6y ago

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.

ilaksh 6y ago

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.

mrandish 6y ago

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.

cyberpanther 6y ago

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.

rotub 6y ago

I quit my job in web development for the same reasons a few years ago and have been much happier for it. Good luck!

specialist 6y ago

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. -- 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.

afpx 6y ago
Graeber was one of my favorite modern writers. RIP. I hope someone picks up his torch.

julee04 6y ago

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

cryptica 6y ago

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.

irateswami 6y ago

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.

micheal_rotana 6y ago

software development is not for everyone, who has interested only those stay connected with it.

MrPowers 6y ago

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.

prohobo 6y ago

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.

luord 6y ago

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.

ghoward 6y ago

I may not be in my 40's, but I walked away as well.[1] [1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2020/08/the-software-industry-is-broken/ https://gavinhoward.com/2020/08/the-software-industry-is-bro...

kingnothing 6y ago

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.

StavrosK 6y ago

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.

nph5667 6y ago

While I totally relate to the frustration, it's still like stating "I walked away from cooking" after describing work hurdles at McDonald's.

acjohnson55 6y ago

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.

tacheiordache 6y ago

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?

burntoutfire 6y ago
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.
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psyc 6y ago

I had to check my memory to be sure I didn't write this.

GoodJokes 6y ago

Makes one really wonder why there are so many self-important people on Hacker News. From reading the comments on that reddit post it sure seems that you all think your jobs are bs and don't work hard at all. Really just seems like you all just like money over building things that are important. I know broad strokes, but I really have a hard time "chuckling" at all the well-paid slackers. Does one really think you are any different than a bs manager/executive?