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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?

#41

Post by jzellis »

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 especially passionate about React - it seems like it's ridiculously hard to do very basic stuff in it and the workarounds all seem like they were designed by the criminally insane.

I'm a good coder but not a great one, and I'd love to just find a gig that pays the bills without having to deal with all the masochistic "work is life, I piss in a bottle so I don't have to get up so I can maximize my productivity" bullshit. I just want to write code and make a decent living. I don't even wanna be rich. I just want to not have to stress as much about taking care of my wife and myself.

Maybe we should all start our own consultancy - we don't charge you rock star rates but we get the job done. :-D

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

#43

Post by qprofyeh »

What if there’s no solution? What if you’re right and ageism is real and the industry is only going downhill from here? How does a Hacker accept that fact and change the situation?

I believe the successful hackers went on to start their own consultancy firms. Same job, totally different culture and treatment. Threshold is a major skill upgrade in self-marketing though.

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

#44

Post by ptr »

There are a lot of companies that don't primarily do web development, maybe look into that if you know or want to learn Java, C++? Telecom, automotive, finance, games, medicine, industry. These companies need a lot of developers and they're typically much nicer to work at. Better paid, much less stress.

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

#45

Post by yrgulation »

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.

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

#46

Post by fffobar »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #19
UKR_anon wrote: post #10

reading from your history, you seem to have a pretty defeatist attitude. Maybe change that first.

yes, you're right, i have some health issues recently, which compounded things a bit.

Defeatist attitude is completely expected if you're burned out/depressed. My suggestion is to treat the latter (lots of good advice in the thread) to get rid of the former, not the other way around. The other way around simply doesn't work.

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

#47

Post by sli »

GregHolmes wrote: post #22
daliusd wrote: post #11

You could try looking into small companies. They might be paying less, but there might be 0 interviews, low stress and fun. I don’t know which country you are from but here in Lithuania there are many options and we are country of less than 3 millions.

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 make the burnout exponentially worse.

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

#48

Post by tibbydudeza »

I felt the same way as you did in my Corporate SAP gig - writing the same type of report programs day in and day out - in hindsight it was soul sucking really.

SAP in the mean time did their third attempt at the cloud (BTP/Steampunk) and it seemed like the same old shit I was working on the classic ECC 6.0 buried in more layers of shit but now running in the "cloud".

Covid then came along and I got laid off which provided me with a financial cushion of a year to realize SAP is not what I wanted to do anymore , interviews to rebalance a binary tree - really ????.

Learned something new/went back to my old roots as a C developer.

Now doing Python with Pandas - less pay - less hours but far far happier.

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

#49

Post by xlii »

lvturner wrote: post #25
jamisteven wrote: post #13

1. Try to take 6m to a year off 2. Think of way to leverage your skillset to your advantage in a non 9-5 capacity 3. If its still repulsive, go on indeed and just start browsing with very little criteria to see what interests you and just start applying, you would be surprised how advantageous being a tech worker can be in other seemingly non-related industries. I know a guy who use to be a nurse, he is now a charter…

I really hate the advice "Take six months to a year off" Not everyone is in such a financially advantageous situation that they are able to do so at a minimum we should preface such advice with "Ideally" or "If you are able to" In fact, when I've faced burn out in the past, one of the major reasons for it was BECAUSE I wasn't in a situation to take such time off and my gosh do I wish it was advice I was able to actio…

And yet this is advice targeted towards developer with 15 years of experience.

If someone is in position of working in the field, having a lot of experience and still having issue with putting some cash aside to take few months off then it might hint that not the field but particular work place is root cause.

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

#50

Post by halflings »

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 someone force you to learn every new JS framework released in the past 10 years? React is the main framework people have been using since ~2015-2016, and other frameworks are either not super important (latest CSS framework someone came up with) or worth the cost of learning (Gatsby, Next). Continuous learning is an important skill in all jobs.

* "having the fundamental stuff I learned early on - objects are good, always separate presentation from logic - being totally flipped around": People realized that this is not the right approach for building web frontends. These best practices are not meant to be seen as dogma/ideology, they adapt to people's experience (and usually will only apply in some contexts)

So I think you can just relax, enjoy the parts you love, and be more open to things changing around you.

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