Do You Really Want to be Doing this When You're 50?

I'm currently 24.

I do still love programming, and I'd like to think i'm pretty damn good at it. But do I want to be doing it as a job in 30 years time? I'm not so sure anymore.

I've been through one software job at the very loose-and-fast end of software development, but the pace (and a huge amount of overtime) burnt me out. I got to the stage where I couldn't get myself out of bed to go to work the next day. Over time I recovered somewhat, but I just wasn't enthusiastic about the work anymore.

My current job is at the complete opposite end of the spectrum. Medical software development is very slow, conservative, and methodical. To be honest I can see why most of the companies in this industry are at the thousands-to-tens-of-thousands scale; you literally need that critical mass in terms of staffing to deal with all of the overhead associated with a medical product. Reports, standards, committees, meetings, audits. And yet this company is doing it with less than 10 people.

It's really feel-good work, but it is really easy to get bogged down in the day-do-day drudgery and overhead, to the point where you completely miss the big picture of helping save peoples' lives. Do I want to be doing this when i'm 50? I don't think so.

In general in software development there's a couple of things that I've realized you have to work really hard at to have as a software developer. I've also discovered that both of these are much more important to me than I used to think:

-- Physical health and fitness: if you're sitting statically in a chair for 8-16 hours a day you have to really watch your diet and make continuous conscious efforts to exercise at every opportunity: it's going to catch up with you eventually (especially by the time you get to that 50 mark).

-- Varied and changing environments: both of my parents have "desk jobs", but both have extensive trips out of the office to visit customers or other sites. As a programmer I don't get this variety (the spice of life), so it's very easy to get bogged down and forget the big picture. I think this also leads to getting stuck in mental and emotional loops, due to a lack of external stimulus (kind of like what people who work from home report).

Nothing prepares you for actually being in a 9-5 programming job. At university it was obvious that there were people who were able to pass tests well enough, but would obviously struggle to code their way out of a paper bag. What about the people like myself, who are competent and practical, but are not prepared mentally to handle the rigors of 9-5 programming? Maybe that's why there is a shortage of labour in this sector: not only are we struggling to find people who are excited about programming and skilled at it, but we also struggle to find people who can handle working in these commercial scenarios?

There are also a number of companies that aren't like the examples above, especially in SV. But the problem with that is that not all of us are, or want to be, in Silicon Valley. Could I start my own company? Maybe, but that's not where my competencies or passions lie, at least currently.

Some deep thought is required about where exactly I will go next, given the time and effort I've invested up till this point into electronics, computers and programming.

They don't know what is happening behind the scenes like how code gets compiled, how inter machine, inter process communication happens. How browsers work, what is the work involved when someone requests a web page from a server. How to debug issues? Effective debugging requires great knowledge of the components involved and creative thinking and above everything else lot of patience.

Also I deeply feel the mental bubble that forms around me when i'm programming. It makes it scarily easy to just start withdrawing from other people and the world around me.