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Ask HN: Did anyone leave Software Engineering as your profession? If yes, why?

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Ask HN: Did anyone leave Software Engineering as your profession? If yes, why?

#1

Post by notadoctor_ssh »

I am a Software engineer right now with over 4 years of experience. I have been having this feeling lately, that I feel the excitement I experience is not enough and I need more. So, I have been thinking about doing other things.

Has anyone else here felt the same? Or felt like being done with Software engineering? If so, I would like to know when did you figure this out and what are you doing right now, and how did you end up doing what you are doing?

Asking for Software Engineering in particular, because I have seen people from other professions find coding as a passion and wanted to know if there are people who went the other way.

Re: Ask HN: Did anyone leave Software Engineering as your profession? If yes, why?

#2

Post by caymanjim »

I've thought about it many times, but it's hard to walk away from the money. I'd have to start at zero in any other field, and to reach even half the salary in another standard professional career, I'd have to go to school for a few years. If I had any business ideas or an entrepreneurial spirit, I could try to set out on my own, but that's unlikely. In lieu of going insane from the tedium and politics of a software career (not that other careers are any better in this regard), I take a lot of time off; usually about a year every three years. I always go back to software, though, because it's easy. I'm tempted to do something completely different for a quarter of the salary, like become a dive instructor. Beats sitting behind a desk writing the same web app for the 50th time and dealing with sprint planning meetings.

Re: Ask HN: Did anyone leave Software Engineering as your profession? If yes, why?

#3

Post by tracer4201 »

I’ve gotten bored multiple times and changed companies, organizations, teams, or worked more on my promotion to change the nature of my work.

Try to see if you can find a more interesting domain to apply your skills in. For me, moving to a senior role offered a more interesting scope and facing more design work and advising mixed with some coding, mentoring, etc.

If you’re tired of the field entirely, maybe there are non technical roles where you can apply a set of your skills in something like management.

Re: Ask HN: Did anyone leave Software Engineering as your profession? If yes, why?

#4

Post by UglyToad »

I'm currently on my first break after 6 years with no job lined up and I'm not sure I want to go back to software.

Unfortunately I don't have any answers but as the other responses point out software is a gilded cage because it would be very hard to get anywhere near an equivalent salary doing anything else.

I had become increasingly disillusioned with software, mainly the maddening bureaucracy, problematic management and lack of teamwork over my previous two jobs. But I also had something of an existential crisis when I realised I think that so much of what we do is just rewriting or updating apps to use the new hot tech in order to have something to do. I feel like so much of what's exciting people at the moment are solutions in search of problems, if StackOverflow can run on a few servers to serve an incredibly high traffic site why do we need k8s and serverless and firebase and microservices and kafka and whatever else (granted I have no idea what most of these things are or do)? Why in the name of God do I need an entire build pipeline and SPA framework to deliver some static HTML to users? I feel like Rust is interesting and potentially worthwhile but I don't have much interest in the domain of problems Rust excels at. Granted all this is coloured by the burnout I'm recovering from.

I think I will probably end up going back to software, maybe as a contractor, but I'm tempted to try something new. My belief is that it would be easier to do something socially meaningful in another field but even in scientific research most work is pointless and the reward/funding system is entirely dysfunctional.

Re: Ask HN: Did anyone leave Software Engineering as your profession? If yes, why?

#5

Post by CyberFonic »

I was burnt out as a programmer a long time ago. Using my IT knowledge I moved into the field of business analysis and then on to project management. After a while I got tired of the politics so I switched to working as a network / operations engineer. More recently I went back to university to do post-grad research in model based software engineering and now freelancing as a consultant / project manager.

I have never felt that I had to stay stuck doing something that I no longer enjoyed. For me learning new material (and enterprise scale networks was a big challenge) and facing new challenges has always been more inspiring than merely picking up a fat wage. The biggest problem being that, for most people, their spending increases faster than their income. Exercising a small bit of restraint and having some savings opens up so many great opportunities and adventures.

I can understand the fear of starting from zero. But that doesn't need to be the case. What I have always done is to focus more on domain knowledge and then segueing from one area to a adjoining one. Technical knowledge, alone, quickly becomes outdated. But domain knowledge continues across multiple generations of technology.

Re: Ask HN: Did anyone leave Software Engineering as your profession? If yes, why?

#6

Post by StavrosK »

UglyToad wrote: post #4

I'm currently on my first break after 6 years with no job lined up and I'm not sure I want to go back to software. Unfortunately I don't have any answers but as the other responses point out software is a gilded cage because it would be very hard to get anywhere near an equivalent salary doing anything else. I had become increasingly disillusioned with software, mainly the maddening bureaucracy, problematic managemen…

I'm the same way. The software development I do as a job stopped being a way to make cool things and has turned into a bunch of CRUD chores. Nowadays I vent my creative urges in various ways, one of which is writing software, but there's a clear motivating purpose or a hard problem that needs solving towards a specific goal.

Re: Ask HN: Did anyone leave Software Engineering as your profession? If yes, why?

#7

Post by speedplane »

This isn't for everyone, but after working as a software dev for 3 years I went to law school. Because I had a technical background, I was immediately pegged to be a patent attorney. I know, most software developers hate patents, but most of the work is not as evil as it seems in the press.

There are often real disputes, between real companies, on patented ideas that are incredibly similar. Having a solid technical foundation is necessary to fully understand what's going on. As a patent litigator, you generally get to work on 2 or 3 cases at a time, often involving different technology, and you get to become the expert in them. I personally worked on Bluetooth, H.264, and crazy image processing algorithms, among many others. The downside of course, is that while you deal with tech and learn about it, you're now on the outside. You don't make anything, and the job is stressful, but for the right person, it can be a good fit.

Re: Ask HN: Did anyone leave Software Engineering as your profession? If yes, why?

#8

Post by Aeolun »

UglyToad wrote: post #4

I'm currently on my first break after 6 years with no job lined up and I'm not sure I want to go back to software. Unfortunately I don't have any answers but as the other responses point out software is a gilded cage because it would be very hard to get anywhere near an equivalent salary doing anything else. I had become increasingly disillusioned with software, mainly the maddening bureaucracy, problematic managemen…

I never really understood how insane it can get until my current job. We literally have a system diagram with like 30-40 different components (proxies, lambdas, pretty much all aws services), for a system that would work just as well with 3 (front/back/database).

At this point it’s become a kind of joke for me because anything else would be too depressing.

Re: Ask HN: Did anyone leave Software Engineering as your profession? If yes, why?

#9

Post by NicoJuicy »

Aeolun wrote: post #8
UglyToad wrote: post #4

I'm currently on my first break after 6 years with no job lined up and I'm not sure I want to go back to software. Unfortunately I don't have any answers but as the other responses point out software is a gilded cage because it would be very hard to get anywhere near an equivalent salary doing anything else. I had become increasingly disillusioned with software, mainly the maddening bureaucracy, problematic managemen…

I never really understood how insane it can get until my current job. We literally have a system diagram with like 30-40 different components (proxies, lambdas, pretty much all aws services), for a system that would work just as well with 3 (front/back/database). At this point it’s become a kind of joke for me because anything else would be too depressing.

It's called over engineering or premature optimalisation.

It's insane how many companies scale for growth that they will never achieve. Even if they are successfull.

It's not that you can, that you should do it is my living mantra.

Re: Ask HN: Did anyone leave Software Engineering as your profession? If yes, why?

#10

Post by eanthy »

UglyToad wrote: post #4

I'm currently on my first break after 6 years with no job lined up and I'm not sure I want to go back to software. Unfortunately I don't have any answers but as the other responses point out software is a gilded cage because it would be very hard to get anywhere near an equivalent salary doing anything else. I had become increasingly disillusioned with software, mainly the maddening bureaucracy, problematic managemen…

It's good to see so many of us are in this boat and people notice it. Every company I've been in is always over engineering and overly complicating simple things. I think the solution is switch fields into something you like and move into a smaller start-up where people are more realistic and can't afford stupid over engineering.
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