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Ask HN: Depressed, need to leave web development, what can I do?

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Re: Ask HN: Depressed, need to leave web development, what can I do?

#111

Post by Aeolun »

xupybd wrote: post #81
GregHolmes wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're suffering from some form of burn-out or are in a bad way mentally right now, going to a smaller company can make it a lot worse. Smaller companies tend to expect you to wear multiple hats, lots of context switching. It can worsen the situation for them.

Yeah I'm in a small company. I'm the entire IT department. It was a great way to get my mind back after burning out. I was counting physical stock at the end of each day for the first year. That downtime was a brilliant way to get some time to think. I felt productive every day, even if I was stuck on a technical problem. Now I get to pick the technology I work with and drive a lot of change. I really feel like I'm m…

Communication overhead kinda disappears when all the communication stays inside your own head :)

Re: Ask HN: Depressed, need to leave web development, what can I do?

#112

Post by Aeolun »

sli wrote: post #47
GregHolmes wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're suffering from some form of burn-out or are in a bad way mentally right now, going to a smaller company can make it a lot worse. Smaller companies tend to expect you to wear multiple hats, lots of context switching. It can worsen the situation for them.

Yep. OP's post sounds like I could have written it, and it's because small companies are absolute hell. You won't get benefits, you won't get health insurance, you won't get vacation days, your pay goes down below livable levels, and your proximity to clients shrinks dramatically. Investors have all the power and small dev shop owners worship them to the detriment of their employees. Switching to a small shop will ma…

Depends entirely on where you go to work. I've only ever worked in decent (actually fantastic) dev shops. Of course, pay was still not amazing, but it was full of smart and motivated people.

Re: Ask HN: Depressed, need to leave web development, what can I do?

#113

Post by hellweaver666 »

sssc wrote: post #71

If you really want to change jobs, ignore the '300 applicants per vacancy' situation. I bet 80-90% of these are thrown out after a quick screen. If you can put together a good package, you have a chance. You would be surprised with how many bonus points candidates get in my company just for being 'normal'. Age definitely not a minus. But first, take care of yourself! Best of luck

I'm a hiring manager (for design roles but still relevant I think). I get a significant number of people who are just outright unqualified, for example when looking for a Design Lead recently, I got applicants from people who were secretaries and had zero design experience. I easily say no to at least 50% at the CV screen stage and drop a good chunk more at the portfolio review.

Re: Ask HN: Depressed, need to leave web development, what can I do?

#114

Post by zeroc8 »

yrgulation wrote: post #45

Move in to management. The reason tech sucks is mainly due to non technical managers who think writing code is the same as laying bricks, constantly breathing on developer necks and nagging about progress. The world needs more tech experienced managers to replace the supervisor types that barely understand the words they use.

I have gone in that direction a couple weeks ago and so far I hate it. I have to constantly fight unrealistic expectations vs. what's actually possible. Both sides are angry (developers because of unclear requirements, management because of slow progress). I'm frustrated because I'm in the middle of this bullshit, I constantly have to pacify both sides. Also, I've come to realise that while I enjoy developing products, I'm really sick of collaborating with other developers. I fantasize about just going back to Delphi and solo developing something for the Winstore.

Re: Ask HN: Depressed, need to leave web development, what can I do?

#115

Post by torginus »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #98

If you are depressed then see a psychiatrist. I would seek help before making any career moves under this cloud. I'm an average software engineer with nothing impressive on the resume. Persistence pays off.

> If you are depressed then see a psychiatrist.

I'm not sure I'd agree with this advice. If the mental problems OP has originate from his circumstances, a psychiatrist is unlikely to be able to help him. But psychiatrists are usually in no hurry to admit that, so the experience is usually even more frustrating and demeaning than skipping the whole shebang.

Yes I am speaking from experience.

Re: Ask HN: Depressed, need to leave web development, what can I do?

#116

Post by meowtastic »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #90
jaitaiwan wrote: post #12

Seems like you’re experiencing burn-out and from what I’ve read and experienced, burn out is a function of emotional investment vs the emotional return. So I see that you have two options both of which shouldn’t happen before first taking a small break: 1. Continue to work in the industry and reduce your emotional investment. Hint: great places for that are big corporates. 2. Continue to work while upskilling in anot…

> PHP is pretty good despite the hate I suspect the "hate" is rather localized. I find the "Fishtank Graph"[0] to be a fairly good way to get my feet firmly planted back on the ground. That said, I don't like PHP, and avoid it, if possible. I use it for my backend work, and it does a great job, there. I just prefer writing apps in Swift. The "game-changer," for me, was retiring, and working on the stuff I want to wor…

Nice stats. Pretty surprising how Java's doing better than JS in overall market share, and growth.

Re: Ask HN: Depressed, need to leave web development, what can I do?

#117

Post by jabajabadu »

If you are interested in gradually making a big career change, you could look into biotech. I’ve seen people start out as regular developers in small / mid-size biotech companies and then transition into other, more domain-specific roles. The pay is generally not as good, but (in my personal experience) there are more opportunities to steer your career towards the work you enjoy doing.

Re: Ask HN: Depressed, need to leave web development, what can I do?

#118

Post by indymike »

When I find myself depressed about work,there are three questions that help me a lot:

Do I like what I'm doing? (solving problems, making software)

Do I like who I'm working with?

Do I like the company I'm working for?

If you answer yes to the first question, an no to either of the next two questions, time to make a change. If you feel like your work isn't valued, go to work for a small company or a startup where everything you do, every line of code, every time you take out the trash is valued.

> Nearing my 40s, so my profile is less appealing to employers, this field is very oriented to young people.

Not really true. Entry level is oriented to young people. Often, front-end is seen as entry-level (it should not, but it is) because junior devs come knowing the latest-greatest (and not much else). Senior developers tend to get a little prickly about learning the latest javascript libraries and css techniques. At my company, I have a great mid-career front end dev who is making the jump to full stack, and is fantastic at it because he's highly aware of the impact of back-end design decisions on front-end performance and front-end developer experience. Our APIs get better every day because of him.

Re: Ask HN: Depressed, need to leave web development, what can I do?

#119

Post by koonsolo »

hsn915 wrote: post #8

Web development as practiced by the majority of the industry is truly insane and depressing. No one has any idea what they are doing. Here's what I'm aiming to do: learn systems programming on the side, accumulate enough savings to live off of for nearly a year, then go independent and continue learning systems programming "as I go". Build software products on my own and start selling them.

The problem is that "web-development" encompasses everything from a simple static website all the way to complex web applications.

And because of this generic term, I see people making stupid mistakes all the time.

React is great for web apps, but then you see the static pages being built by that, and you think WTF. Next thing some of these morons move back to server side rendering, discover how much better it is for SEO etc. But the problem is that the web-app folks read this, think they now all of a sudden have to move to SSR because big company X did this for their landing page.

It's truely stupid. So I think we should split the term "web development" into proper subsections, so it becomes clear what camp you are in.

If you're a website builder who does a bit of JS for some menu popups, good luck having a team of these guys writing the next google docs (no offense here, each their own specialization) But on the same ground, having a bunch of pro front-end coders build a simple website is also stupid, because they will choose technologies way too complex for that.

Re: Ask HN: Depressed, need to leave web development, what can I do?

#120

Post by idlehand »

halflings wrote: post #50
jzellis wrote: post #41

I'm in the same boat, but even older than you with 25 years in. I just hate everything except the actual coding - I hate devops, always have. I hate having to learn new frameworks every six months and having the fundamental stuff I learned early on - objects are good, always separate presentation from logic - being totally flipped around. I've managed to learn React and Next enough to build stuff in them, but I'm not…

Don't take it personally, but you seem to hate quite a lot of things that are outside of your control, or just objective truths that are there to stay: * DevOps: If people find value in releasing software in an organized manner to avoid breaking websites / "testing in production" and losing a lot of revenue, why do you strongly hate or care at all? You don't have to work on devops. * Learning new frameworks: Did some…

React is the same base frontend tech but the way you write React, with hooks and state management has changed quite a bit since its initial release.

That said I've never bothered to try to become an expert in any particular language or framework. I learn the general underlying concepts and end up googling for the syntax for the first few days when I start using a new library or framework.

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