Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I've walked away from software development

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 237 posts

Re: I've walked away from software development

#131

Post by StavrosK »

I've had a very similar but very different experience.

I've dealt with basically exactly what the OP described, but have had a very different takeaway from it. I don't let it affect me at all, it's something I do for 8 hours a day (extremely rarely more than that) and then don't ever think about it or talk about it.

I develop software in my spare time because I love software, hardware, and building things, but in my day job I might as well be a janitor for all the similarity it has to making things.

It sounds like OP puts too much stock in being fulfilled at work (which is great if you can find it), but I have a more pragmatic "I give them 8 hours of my day in return for money (and some growth) and that's it" attitude, which I find helps my mental health much more.

If my job gets to a point where I think that spending 8 hours a day isn't worth the money or that I'm not learning enough, I quit.

Re: I've walked away from software development

#132

Post by recursivedoubts »

caeril wrote: post #113
recursivedoubts wrote: post #14

"Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called everybody, and they meet at the bar." --Drew Carey That said, there are some good (if conflicting) points in there. Large tech companies are worse than startups, usually. Startups become large companies over time, if they don't fail. A good read on the real corporate dynamic: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

> Startups become large companies over time, if they don't fail. Picking nits, here, but this isn't true. My personal (multiple) anecdata is that a very good number of startups neither fail nor become large - rather, they become stable small businesses.

That's true. In fact, that's my situation currently, although I've seen the startup -> big company transformation twice as well.

A small, stable startup is probably the ideal place to hide these days, but it's a trick to get there.

Re: I've walked away from software development

#133

Post by Infinitesimus »

giantg2 wrote: post #112
ransom1538 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is by design. You are supposed to pay those county property taxes and stay put [renters: are a tax payment proxy for landlords].

What do county taxes have to do with anything?

They were probably talking about the places where some counties have their own tax imposed ( like SF ) so you pay a lot of money for the privilege of living there so taking a lower paying job gets hard unless you leave. I could be wrong tho.

Re: I've walked away from software development

#134

Post by sumtechguy »

dragonwriter wrote: post #74
burntoutfire wrote: post #41

I used to think that the current setup of writing software, with prevalent scrum, talking-head managers, resume-driven development, byzantine tech stacks, draining practices such as heavy CI/CD and code reviews etc. is what makes the jobs unpleasant. But then I watched the documentary about the creation of the first Netscape web browser around 1995 or so, when they presumably didn't have any of the above. And yet, th…

> But then I watched the documentary about the creation of the first Netscape web browser around 1995 or so, when they presumably didn't have any of the above. Maybe not scrum and CI/CD stacks. Talking-head managers and various byzantine process decisions stemming from that and from management-resumé-driven decisions they did have; in fact, the agile movement was a reaction against that. CI/CD was a reaction against…

Scrum and CI/CD helped with some of the issues. But created its own storm of them. However, we backfilled the time that stuff freed up with other things.

Usually if scrum is failing is because of a lack of trust. Someone wants to know every detail of what is going on and will use the only process they have, scrum, to bash it out of you. They end up backing waterfall into scrum and thinking they are 'agile'. I am currently watching a perfectly functioning set of scrum teams being torn down due to a rethinking of what scrum is. Adding in 20-30 mins more work per story. Just to get the 'paperwork' right plus 4 different review processes before a story can be worked on. That does not sound bad until you realize the org is popping hundreds of stories every 2 weeks.

Then toss in 'devops' where you have no responsibility to change anything but get all of the 'responsibility' of being yelled at because it is broken. Hanging out with a pager just incase something breaks. And it will, usually at 3am on a sunday and the tech support guys just call you without even opening the logs because that is what it says to do in their RTS guide. But it turns out you need the guys who wrote the code to look at it because they just checked in something 2 weeks ago and the whole thing just went O(N^N^N), and his phone is on mute. But you have no auth to check anything in or change the machines but the dev does.

Re: I've walked away from software development

#136

Post by bradlys »

giantg2 wrote: post #47
wpietri wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for the record, I don't hate my job. I suspect many others don't. There's a saying that I recommend: either change your organization or change your organization. I'm sad for this guy that he let the fat checks keep him in misery until he burnt out on the work. I get how it happens, but I don't think it's a good trade. I hope he finds his way back to health.

I would love to burn out with fat checks. It beats burning out on average (non SV) checks. At least one can retire earlier.

You usually only get the fat checks in SV though, where homes are frequently 6-10x national average. So unless you plan to move away (why would you when you spent your entire career there and all your friends are there), you won’t retire any earlier.

Re: I've walked away from software development

#137

Post by itronitron »

MattGaiser wrote: post #65
ryandvm wrote: post #48

I think all of us 40+ folks are in the same place. When we first started we didn't mind the bullshit so much because we were too dumb to realize how much there was. Then we got older and, yeah, it's ridiculous, but we were pretty decent at surfing the bullshit waves so we still didn't mind so much. Now you're in your 40s and the real obligations of life have started piling up. You've gone from 7 hours of free time a…

> Oh, by the way, it's December, so we need you to watch that 45 minute security training video again so you don't accept USB flash drives from strangers in the parking lot. The ability to mute a tab and have it run in the background is at times a beautiful thing.

If you can turn your monitor sideways (portrait mode) and then full-screen the security video it will be a lot more entertaining.

Re: I've walked away from software development

#138

Post by Dirlewanger »

emteycz wrote: post #30
jpmattia wrote: post #18

In the middle of the rant on burnout, he says: > I'm sick of everyone being on Adderall. Is that really a thing? ie What proportion of software folks are using it?

If only. Also cocaine and marijuana, and of course all the excess coffee. I'd say almost half of people in the industry use something.

Using cocaine to do programming is a waste of cocaine, in my opinion

Re: I've walked away from software development

#139

Post by acjohnson55 »

This is what burnout looks like. My advice to folks is to make moves well before you get into a headspace where quitting an entire industry is your last option. Once you've burnt out, you might not be able to stomach even the best possible job for you.

I've been there before. I burnt out as a teacher and almost burnt out on software development, too. What has worked for me is to spend a lot of time introspecting my own motivations and needs, and then working hard to identify places that are good candidates. This took longer than it sounds like it should. But it's hard to break out of the impressions I built from my lived experience of what it seemed like work had to be like.

I'm really happy with work now. I don't have the Thank God It's Friday or the Sunday Scaries, which characterize a job I have to endure, rather than one I mostly enjoy.

Re: I've walked away from software development

#140

Post by gruez »

burntoutfire wrote: post #109
eyjafjallajokul wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you work at Amazon where the training pauses if the tab isn’t actively focused. I’m convinced that it’s a form of torture.

Just put it on a second monitor and mute it?

You don't even need to do that. I found a demo for the page visibility api[1] (presumably what they use to detect whether the tab is focused), and found that having the window not minimized is sufficient to make the tab think it's focused. That is, all you have to do is move the tab to a new window, and click your main window. Now your training video is in the background and not taking up any screen space (you can mute the tab if you want), but the page doesn't realized it's not focused/visible.

[1] https://jsfiddle.net/0GiS0/cAG5N/

Post reply on HN