31–40 of 549 posts
Also, programmers like to create things, and if you're just maintaining projects, you're probably less happy. So for me moving from employee to freelance (creating over maintaining) increased happiness.
Its been pounding on me for years now. I have no reason to complain yet I feel sad, empty, I reckon I'm useless at my job and yet my boss is way more than happy of what I'm accomplishing, I don't understand.
I wanted something great from my career, I thought I'd be surrounded by passionate people, but to this day it's been a huge joke, you just have to do what someone higher in the food chain tells you to do and use that bullsh*t bloatware because he's got some present from another bigcorp placing its product making you more entreprisey and more agile, to no avail. You just have to accept choices made by someone. You just have to contemplate others on the market using something exciting while you're stuck with Java 6 with no one around you wanting to move on.
I feel I have no reason to complain, because life could be so much more painful, I'm well paid and I could be working on an assembly line for way less or living in a country where fear for your life is the only thing in your mind all day long. But... It's just that it's not the big dream I was expecting, and I feel that for someone not working in the bay area but following HN all day long, I'm suffering from an immense sadness of not being part of it, it's like I'm just watching people succeed on my TV screen, eating junk food. I know this is a biased vision and a lot of people aren't happy there too, I just can't help feeling this.
I think its pretty much what I am doing. But the big question that pops up after a certain period of time: How long are you going to love something? 5 years, 2 years, 1 year or 6 months? That truly varies from the project i am working on. As long as its all fun, i continue the job. If not, i move to my next job or a next project. There are so many IT, programming jobs (for more or less money). I think what matters is that you are loving what you doing. So far, for last 9 years of professionally working at 8 different companies that has been my norm and I don't think it's that bad or worrisome.
I have also met some wonderful friends and intellectual peers through my programming jobs, and I'm even trying to write my own language now for laughs. I'm trying to encourage everyone with the aptitude to get into it because it is rewarding in many different ways.
6/10. I'm less than 3 years into my career, but I think I've worked for some of the best companies with great pay, benefits, environments, etc, including a tech giant and two startups. End of the day though, work is boring. Its always work. Your time and effort is going towards making someone else rich and their priorities are more important than your own. The only things I really look forward to are vacations and ev…
I feel exactly the same. I've been in the game for nearly 8 years now, and it doesn't get any better. At the end of the day, as you say work is work, I don't think I would feel any better working in another career. I like programming, I just don't really like working as a programmer :D
For the last two years I've been contracting which helps as I get to pick and choose projects a bit more, and if I get bored, contracts are only usually a couple months at a time so it's easy to get out ("I can't renew, I've already got another contract"). I'm focussing on saving to buy a small property outright with no mortgage, so once I am living there my living expenses will be greatly reduced and I'll have more freedom to explore my interests outside of work.
Can't complain. Great company. Constantly wondering if I'm good enough to keep my job, though. I'm trying to prepare for that day I'm told, "Let's talk. We like you a lot, but we've decided to let you go. If you need referrals, let us know." I mean, everyone says I'm doing well. I just don't feel it, so I work a lot more than I probably should, and I'm always ridiculously paranoid. I'd say I'm happy but I'm worried.…
I quit. 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 "goin…
I can relate to that feeling intimately.
The intellectual content of programming has definitely changed since the simpler times which were, for me, formative. There's a combinatoric explosion of proper nouns, frameworks and libraries, and doing anything seems to entail 95% of time spent pouring over 27 browser tabs of API references.
This wasn't what made me love programming when I did systems programming in C as a teenager, and it's a different skill set. I wrote things like highly asynchronous & modular MUDs, chat servers, etc. Sure, one had to consult man pages of system calls once in a while, but fundamentally, it was much more of a closed system with a straightforward standard library and few dependencies. Of course, some of that is because my tinkering wasn't subordinated to economic imperatives or Enterprise Business Rules, but I do think it was qualitatively different in a more objective way, too. Now, it's an overwhelming river of gewgaws that each have their own APIs, conventions, methodologies, life cycle, etc.
It doesn't help that a lot of these gewgaws are clearly conceived for the same reasons academic advisors conceive schools of thought and seed conferences with spam publications relating to them by their pet graduate students. Maybe I'm just old, but it seems to me a lot of fashionable frameworks and doodads are more about O'Reilly book royalties, speaking engagements, consulting projects and *Con registration fees.
Apple drops new frameworks and features every year, so there's always something new and interesting to learn. Not to mention Swift.
So yeah, I wouldn't really do anything else in this field.