Ask HN: I don't want to code anymore. What else can I do?

I got sick of programming, so I switched to management and then technical writing, but soon realized that it is bureaucratic corporate America and its focus on process over achievement that I dislike.

I then discovered that I do like programming. I just don’t want to do it with anyone else.

First, you need to identify and quantify your skills and strengths.

I’ve been a developer for 30 years and haven’t ever grown tired of it. I attribute that to trying to have a lot of variety over the years.

My first job was doing mainframe development for a few years until Y2K was done. Starting at ground zero with Assembler then on to COBOL.

From there I moved to being a consultant doing Java and .Net. This was J2EE and .Net alpha and beyond.

From there I was the team lead at a web hosting company leading the rewrite of the VBScript, PHP and Perl sites over to .Net to modernize.

Then I moved to my current company, where I’ve been for 20 years. Started doing .Net web dev, then moved to .Net Win Form apps. Then to Silverlight, then Knockout, Backbone, Angular 1. Then to a DevOps role leading a team where I helped out with Powershell automation. From there to a team that built POCs for the Machine Learning/Data Engineering team. I was always a team of one building whatever was needed. Then onto a Senior Staff Engineer role architecting and developing a large multi-region LATAM web application.

I’ve had so much variety and played so many roles that I’ve never hated work. Anytime something came up that may interest me I would show initiative and volunteer. Never just settled for grunt work.

Moving into management[0] to get away from burnout is quite possibly the dumbest thing you could do, short of setting yourself on fire or trying to launch yourself out of a cannon into the sun.

Do you like dealing with people? Do you like dealing with people's problems? People who get promoted into management tend to be fairly adept at managing themselves, and it is easy for such people to develop the misapprehension that everyone is like them. Nothing could be further from the truth. At any given point in time, there will be someone on your team with a personal crisis effecting their work, or someone just not performing up to standard, or someone who is performing up to standard that your boss thinks is not, or some other interminable inter-personal drama.

All of that will explicitly be your problem and your problem to solve, one way or another. Management is a burnout multiplier, not a refuge.

If you really have a passion for leading people, by all means, develop yourself in that area and try it out when the time is right. I did it for five years, and generally enjoyed it. But don't think it will lower your stress or cure your burnout.

0 - I'm going to call it management, because that's what your first "leadership" job will be. You aren't going to be "leading" much of anything or anyone for a while

I progressed from coding to sysops - probably differs from company to company, but as a software dev I was pretty much locked into doing the same thing day-in and day-out (ie coding, and probably only in a small number of different languages).

I find a lot more variety / interest in operations - there's a lot of scope to play with infrastructure, security, performance tracking, sysadmin stuff etc, and even to get a small amount of coding done on company time - though not on product, more on ancillary support services/infrastructure.

It's still IT, so a lot of industry knowledge and skill transfer is still relevant.