Tell HN: I love programming but am sick of the software industry

I have >20 years experience programming, at least 10 of those professionally. I've been programming since I was in grade school. It started with a spark of creativity, I loved making things come to life on the screen.

My early years freelancing were full of learning. It was challenging, there were difficult times, but it was almost always interesting. Then I went and got a full-time job. In just a few short years the professional software industry had burnt through just about every drop of passion I had.

Learning. I stopped learning at work. Few people are interested in anything that might make the job easier, if it means they have to learn something. Senior engineers especially are paranoid because of bad past experiences and afraid of anything they haven't seen before. Instead we spend months writing overly complicated AbstractBeanFactoryFactories because "that's the industry standard". Because its "easier to hire Java devs". I'm just shocked at how resistant people are to new technologies and ideas that could make things so much easier, especially more senior engineers. Because I love learning, I spend my spare time at home learning about functional programming, new languages, patterns, all sort of things just out of interest. I see how so many things we take as standard in the industry are incredibly slow, overcomplicated and inefficient, but when I try to introduce new ideas or patterns at work they're unfamiliar and therefore "too complex".

Code reviews.. (continued in comments below)

I absolutely get what you mean and it sucks. I too love learning (and arguing, which doesn't help you that much on the job...)

I think these practices grow themselves out, but it takes quite some time. On the other hand, I can be defensive too if people just want to rewrite software to change the implementation language. It always sounds fun at first until you grasp the complexity of the project again.

> Tickets, JIRA, daily standups, scrum masters, sprint planning, backlog grooming sessions. Why does nobody question any of this "best practice"?

In my experience these are use to give people outside of software (and some developers) an illusion of control. If you can identify that want and can supply it with different means, you may be allowed to just skip it. I hate scrum, I like coffee breaks with colleagues. Of course that might not scale for the largest companies, don't know.

> I know some of you may say I should go get checked out for depression

On the contrary, depression stifles compassion for the craft. Like JIRA and daily standups or other formalities. As I said, if you can reduce the fears of management, they tend to give you the freedom you want. If other devs don't like that, go to management and make them your minions.

> On the other hand, I can be defensive too if people just want to rewrite software to change the implementation language. It always sounds fun at first until you grasp the complexity of the project again.

Yep, I'd agree with you here, fun new things for fun new things sake is usually a mistake. The cases I'm talking about though are where a slightly less commonly used pattern could actually drastically simplify the problem, but the other party is so set in their own mindset and way of doing things that they're unwilling to do it differently.

> In my experience these are use to give people outside of software (and some developers) an illusion of control.

Yes, perhaps that's it. The challenge is that in the last few jobs I've been in, the team themselves have also been in favor of these processes. The teams I've worked with seem to love just picking off tickets, having someone chop up work, and sitting in backlog grooming etc.

As a personal recommendation, if you are in a job where you observe many overcomplicated practices, stale methodologies, and a lack of innovation the best thing you can do is to look for another position. You may be surprised but there are more people like you around there.