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Ask HN: Career paths when you've been disillusioned by the software dev process?
I'm 10 years into my career, and I'm very tired of team based software development. I still enjoy programming but I've come to dread almost everything surrounding it.
My work / life balance is decent, I work for a pretty good company on a cool product, and my co-workers are good people. I have suffered from mild to moderate depression most of my life, but I'm doing my best to take care of the basics there, and I'm seeing a therapist. I'm beginning to see some of the classic signs of burnout, but I don't think this is strictly a burnout question.
I work well on teams, my teammates like me, but I've always preferred solo work. I think this is a stable personality trait, as I remember feeling like this as early as kindergarten. Other factors include the already incredibly complex social problems that come from developing software with a team of humans, the monster that Agile / Scrum have become, bizarre and poorly thought out technical decisions, failed projects, endless meetings, and being told what to do by people who have never written any code.
Anywhere, here are some of the possible ideas I've come up with, and my thoughts on them.
Make the most of what I already have - I'm fully willing to admit that I may be in the best possible scenario already. The Hedonic Treadmill is real, and the grass is often not greener. I might just need to reframe how I think about it.
Find the perfect team - Maybe if I job hop enough, I'll land on the perfect team that actually fits my work style.
Consulting / freelance - I'm not sure if this is any better, because you have the constant pressure of needing to find and work with clients. There's something to be said for having the freedom to only take on the projects that interest you (or pay the best), and to not be shackled to them forever. The freelancers I've talked with all seem to agree that your happiness in this path is largely contingent on your ability to find good clients.
Solo Founder / Indie Hacker - It sounds like a dream to have a small product that you build entirely yourself, that makes $100k-$200k/year. There's a lot of cool stories in that space, but I've also read a lot of stories of people working tirelessly for years on a project that never makes over $1k MRR. The thought of putting that much work into building something while also working full time just feels like too much to me.
One idea is to combine freelancing with being a solo founder: do enough freelancing to cover living expenses, then use the rest of the time to build your own things (with the hope to sell them).
Optimize for salary, and FIRE as quickly as possible - I could just grind to get a job with the highest total compensation possible, work it for enough years to be able to FIRE, and then just code on my own terms. It mentally exhausts me just to think about doing this, though. I don't want to go through the interview hazing followed by months of learning a company's internal politics.
Get out of writing software as a career entirely, do it as a hobby only - Maybe, but at the moment I don't have anything else that I'm either skilled enough at to get a job for now, or interested enough to put the work into. But it's something I can keep in the back of my mind.
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The "freelancing part time while working on my own product(s)" seems like an interesting path to pursue. I'm being cautious though, and I don't plan to make any big changes for 1 or 2 more years at least. I may find that I'm already in the best possible spot, and that this is just the Hedonic Treadmill at work.
Has anyone else here been going through a similar thought process? Or decided to take one of these paths (or another I haven't thought of) already for similar reasons?
- burntoutfire 5y agoIt's interesting how this question resurfaces on many (most?) weekends, but is rarely posted on weekdays. It shows that we pretty much only have time for some introspection in the two free days in a week allotted to us - the remaining five are just a grind.
- kentrado 5y ago" It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock. If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn." - The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus.
- roeles 5y agoHave you looked into working at a non-agile company? I thought working in waterfall projects would suck, but I think it is a large part of why my current job doesn't require much interaction and why most of my colleagues have a calm air around them.
- Trasmatta 5y agoThe funny thing is that my current company technically doesn't practice agile. They love to advertise that to interviewees, but the problem is they haven't really replaced it with anything. There's still a lot of process involved, but it's almost all communicated ad-hoc, so there's massive confusion about how stuff should get done, or who should do what. Requirements gathering is a mess, and yet we're still asked for estimates, even though we don't even have a rough list of requirements. People have begun pushing back against that (including me), but in response I'm beginning to see the tendrils of Agile sneak their way in, which has me uneasy. But I don't know what a good alternative is...that's kind of why I think the social problems surrounding team based software development are often way harder than the code itself, and why I've got this interest in shifting to solo work somehow.