Ask HN: How happy are you working as a programmer?

In summary we are treated like professionals and work professionally.

It's not pure commercial work at uniprot.org but it must deliver. The site is popular enough and constraints are interesting. All in all happy.

The job pays decent and allows me to be flexible with time. Which is important to me as a dad.

Someone in a regular job might need to ask for a promotion to management, but with your own company you become a manager as soon as you're willing to pay for someone else's time.

(I earn around $100/hr, but my life organisation skills are so miserable that I can't yet make the ends meet. And I have to travel around 50 times per year).

Scala/Java.

2. I've tried to transition out of consulting and into 100% product company, but have not so far been successful. There's a significant short-term revenue hit in that.

There's plenty of recurring product licencing and support revenue, but not enough to break me even, so it gets supplemented with consulting. And you know how lopsided that distribution is; 75% of the work for 45% of the revenue, or something like that.

Amidst that kind of schizophrenia, it's very hard to hire someone, both for financial reasons and because the hiring decisions that would need to be made are very different in those cases.

3. I've hired numerous people over the years, back when I was doing consulting/project work full time and not engaged in this productisation effort.

The people I could afford were mostly entry-level. In the niche vertical I'm in as well as the high-expertise business model I've created for myself, customers expectations are specifically for domain knowledge and multifarious skill sets. In other words, it doesn't scale out much beyond me and other folks exactly like me, so I couldn't find ways to bill my employees out.

Being a conscientious person who largely blamed himself and chose to view it as an entrepreneurial & management failure on my part rather than on theirs, I kept them on far longer than I could afford to, effectively working 2-3x as hard to keep the lights on and subsidise their salaries.

Clearly, the solution is to hire non entry-level people. But the folks with the expertise to be able to do the work are definitely a high-salary proposition, and I can't afford it.

4. Hiring is very much a question of cash flow. Learned that on hard mode. If someone took my $ANNUAL_GROSS, divided it by 12, and disbursed it to me on the 1st of every month, damn right I'd hire someone again. :-)

I had a nearly 20 year career in software, excellent references and well paid. I became completely burned out and hyper-cynical at the pointlessness and shallowness of it all. I can't get excited or even much beyond passing interest in an industry that is almost completely devoted to making the problem of too much stuff far worse.

So instead of getting excited at another pointless startup or tech that's "going to disrupt x" (it usually won't, and often it isn't even a sensible idea to), or "change the world" (nope, not that either), I gave it all up to work with my hands doing something. It's nice to actually feel like I am /doing/ something I can feel proud of, and is sustainable. Moving electrons around is just so unfulfilling.

I'm utterly jaded at the constant replacement, or latest shiny framework that's going to improve little, just change lots and sell more crap. The web has become an almost unusable mess where a single page loads 30 or 40 domains of ad, crap and tracking bringing us back to dial up speeds unless you block most of it.

I still follow tech, but my personal projects are dead as even when i have the time to (I have far more of that now and I feel so much better for it), I can't bring myself to code any more.

The money was nice, but I don't even really miss that. I do regret not being able to afford aerobatics as a hobby any more though!

Many of my peers have quit tech too, and of those who remain some would like to do something, anything else, but mortgage or other commitments keeps them tied to the money.

After three years I'm happier, healthier and don't miss it in the slightest.